Fox and its friends: Global commodification and the new cold war

Cinema Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 97-102

  Broe, Dennis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949618517     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2004.0027     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. That the trend toward centralization of media ownership is increasing can be seen in the fact that while I was writing this article the number of media outlets was reduced from ten to nine as Vivendi (and Universal Studios) was absorbed by GE. For a description of the holdings of each conglomerate, see Dean Alger, Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 29-95
2. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 99
3. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998)
4. Janet Wasko, "The Political Economy of Film," in Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds., A Companion to Film Theory (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 221-33
5. and Douglas Kellner, "Culture Industries," in Miller and Stam, A Companion to Film Theory, 202-20
6. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 189. Jameson sees Theodor Adorno as one of the few aestheticians who have incorporated Karl Marx's concept of economic production in their reading of the form and content of an aesthetic work
7. Alger, Megamedia, 48
8. James Curran, Media and Power (London: Routledge, 2002), 229
9. Edward Wasserman, "Deal Makes Murdoch the Mightiest Media Mogul," Washington Post, November 23, 2003, E3
10. Harris, Media and Power, 13
11. The equivalent in publishing is the News Corporations purchase of HarperCollins whereby sales are facilitated by its ownership of Barnes & Noble, since what creates a best-seller is the book's display in what has now been reduced to a few select bookstores that distribute nationally
12. This drive for global control projected over space in the News Corporation ("We don't see ourselves as a large corporation, we see ourselves as tiny compared to the worldwide opportunities for media") is also projected over time since Murdoch sees the corporation in "multigenerational" terms, having installed in 2003 his then-thirty-year-old son James as chief executive of BSKYB, to the consternation of the shareholders. Murdoch, quoted in McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 96. One is reminded of Noah Cross's answer to the detective in Chinatown as to why, since he is already a wealthy man, he has organized a water swindle: "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future."
13. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the architects of the Iraq invasion, have begun implementing these policies. For the most complete description of the goals and objectives of the project, see its "Statement of Principles," June 3, 1997, www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.html
14. R. W. McChesney, "The Left-Wing Media?" Monthly Review, June 2003, 1-16
15. "David D. Kirkpatrick, "Mr. Murdoch's War," New York Times, April 7, 2003, C7
16. For the history of the resistant figure of the film noir fugitive outsider and the collaborationist figure of the vigilante cop, see Dennis Broe, "Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the Anti-authoritarian Tradition," Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order 30, no. 1 (2003): 22-41
17. For a description of the post-9/11 militarization of the space of the one-hour television drama, see Broe, "Genre Regression and the New Cold War: The Return of the Police Procedural," Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 45, no. 2, forthcoming
18. Theodor Adorno, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1944)