09-25-2013, 04:59 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-25-2013, 05:43 PM by FireIceTalon.)
(09-25-2013, 07:14 AM)LennyLen Wrote:Quote:While Rupert Murdoch is certainly no friend of mine, or of the working class in general, it is a great oversimplification to blame the problems of the media on a single individual.
Here in Australia, Rupert Murdoch IS the media. Which is why you have front page articles in national newspapers that are [his] opinion pieces.
Perhaps so, but it still doesn't make sense to blame him for the media, in general, being the way it is. The media is an institution within capitalist society to promote, well, capitalist ideals and values. RM's neoliberal ideology is simply the expression of those interests, and he happens to be in a position of power to make sure his ideas (or the ruling class ideas in general) remain on the table as the dominant idea(s) of society. But if it weren't him, it would be someone else (with the same values and ideology) - guaranteed. In some places, there maybe some quantitative differences in ideological expression through the media (like in the US, MSNBC vs. Fox News), but there is no qualitative difference: the agenda, is the same - the maintaining of the prevailing social order/status-quo.
I do not make it a point to agree very often with the likes of Herbert Spencer, who was an avid Social Darwinist. But if there was one thing he was right about, it was his critique of the Great Man Theory being a "hopelessly, childish, and unscientific view" of history and society. All persons, weak or powerful, are products of their social environment and are thus constrained by it.
I'm not defending Mr. Murdoch in any way, as I think he is a part of the problem, but he is not the fundamental problem. By default, his views will be the ruling views within society - because they have to be for the existing social order to continue. And these ideas are expressed through the ideological state apparatus of the capitalist system (media, education system, etc). Even if you look at this from a "rationalist, individual" level, given his objective class position, there would be no reason for him to promote ideas that are counter to his class interests. "The ruling ideas of every epoch in history are the ideas of the ruling class" (Marx, The German Ideology 1845).
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"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)