Mao & Murdoch, Lies and Videotape

Before there were Flipcams…

“Power”, Chairman Mao wrote in the Little Red Book, “flows from the barrel of a gun”.

Mao was a product of an earlier era.

It turns out that increasingly, power flows from the lens of a camera.

This is something dictators discovered at the birth of the TV era.

In an article in today’s NY Times, Lies and Videotape, Christopher Walker and Robert Orttung offer an analysis of how regimes around the world have used television news to prop up and maintain their grip on power.

This was easy to do when both creating and broadcasting TV news was complex and expensive.  Their State Broadcasters could find little competition, and that competition that arose from time to time was simple enough to squash down.

In the US we never had a State Broadcaster, but we had (and continue to have) Corporate Broadcasters, who also control what appears on the news and what we see. The most eggregious offender here might be Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, but in all honesty NBC, ABC and CBS are no better in their own way.  All decide what we will see, what gets covered, and more significantly, what we won’t get to see.

The interests of places like NBC (and apparently The BBC) are more comercially driven than poliitcally, but the narrowness of the information given and the warp in the view of the world remain the same.

While Walken and Orttung understand the inherent potential of video, they are, I think, too much the products of Corporate TV to believe much can change fast.

They write:

Transforming politically dominated television and radio networks into more transparent and democratic institutions is a long and difficult process, and the vast majority of citizens in authoritarian states across the world — from Libya and Syria to Russia and China — continue to consume a twisted version of reality through the looking glass of state television.

This, I think, is not true.

I think it is now far easier to change the nature of news and television than anyone believes.  The transformative elements are access to the means of production by millions of people and platforms for distribution of that video globally and free.  These are the basic game changers.

In fact, the whole notion of a vast and expensive infrastructure for the creation and transmission of content is a remnant of another era – one that increasingly no longer even exists.  The web is going to change everything and video married to the web means a lot more than Hulu showing old reruns of House.

A lot more.

Up until now we have, all of us, lived in a time of what we might best call Electronic Serfdom.  A few nobles, whether they were Hosni Mubarak or James Murdock controlled what everyone else got to see.

The best we could do was enjoy the Bread and Circus of American Idol, tug at our forelocks and say ‘thank you m’Lord’.

And whether the TV networks were broadcasting The Hosni Mubarak President for Life Show or Entertainment Insider made, frankly, little difference.

The relationship remained the same.

As Howard Beale says, “I am sick and tired of it and I am not going to take it any more” no longer need be yelled up and down Sixth Avenue from open windows.  Now, you and the people in the streets in Tunis, can take control of what you see and hear.

Mao would have dropped dead.