Agenda-setting in the Media by Corporations Instead of Journalists, and the Yes Men Solution

 

Journalists are involved in deciding what the public thinks about and looks at and how they look at those things. They essentially tell us what we should care about. One of the issues with this lies in the fact that these agenda-setters are corporate-owned media, where it isn’t always journalists who are deciding what is news and what isn’t news; this is, more often than I think the public realizes, at the discretion of the corporations who own the publications. Take NBC, for example. NBC is owned by General Electric. If a potential news story comes out that could possibly harm GE and its many assets in any way, or that didn’t line up with the aspirations and “values” of GE, do you really think NBC would choose to, or even be allowed to, broadcast it? Absolutely not. And it’s not just NBC that’s run like this. It’s all of the major news outlets that people read/watch/listen to on a daily basis that are run by corporations such as Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., and Viacom.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a point about the power the media have in deciding what people think about:

“Where journalism has by far the greatest impact isn’t in persuading people … but in helping put issues on the agenda.” 

Where does that leave us if journalists are being told the agenda by corporations who have only business in mind? GE and these other corporations that own the media don’t have any care about shining light on problems that “are not illuminated, that no one is thinking of,” as Kristof continues to say in the interview.

There are many solutions to this problem, I’m sure. I won’t pretend to be an expert on solutions to media consolidation, but I know there are several articles out there by people who are. My favorite people focusing on this issue, however, are somewhat unorthodox problem solvers, and they aren’t exactly journalists.

The Yes Men use “humor and disruptive action” to bring attention to the overlooked evils of corporations and their disregard for real human issues in the name of profit, profit, profit. The description they give of themselves on their website reads,

“Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues.”

Essentially, this team of what I like to call “peaceful anarchists” create fake websites impersonating big and powerful companies and wait patiently to be contacted by someone who invites them to an event representing the company they’re impersonating. Of course, the people who invite these two men, who go by the aliases of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, have no idea that they are impersonators about to pull a prank of “identity correction” in order to help shed light on how these entities so often act in dehumanizing ways.

The Yes Men have successfully impersonated companies such as McDonalds, the World Trade Organization, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The point of such pranks (which are often quite humorous, especially in how blindly the audience follows and applauds the often ludicrous claims and ideas the duo presents) is to bring public attention to events or issues these companies have caused that have not received ample media attention.

My favorite stunt of theirs is when they went live on BBC World Television posing as Dow Chemical accepting responsibility for the first time for the Bhopal disaster in 1984 in which a gas leak at the Dow Chemical-owned Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, India caused more than 3,000 deaths (although estimates vary considerably, and some say upwards of 8,000 deaths were a direct result of the leak and methyl isocyanate contact.) Twenty years later, thousands of people in the surrounding shanty towns continue to be affected by the incident, including a rising percentage of people with diseases and deformities related to the chemical.

Jacques Servin, or Andy Bichlbaum, went on live television as “Jude Finisterra,” claiming to be a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, and proclaiming that the company had a new $12 billion plan to fully compensate the victims of the Bhopal disaster.

Some people question the point of providing momentary false hope to the victims before it was (rather quickly) discovered that it was a hoax, and of putting a company in this kind of position. To me, and to the Yes Men, the answer to that seems obvious. The point is to give the media a reason to talk about something they should have been talking about in the first place and to continue to hold accountable one of the largest chemical companies in the world that didn’t take responsibility for its actions and cost thousands of people their health and their lives. The prank brought attention back to something that slipped away from the public’s eye because the media stopped covering it.

After talking about this event in a class, a fellow college student asked me how I, as a journalism major, wasn’t mad at how the Yes Men had duped BBC and “made them look stupid.” First of all, just because I’m a journalist doesn’t mean I have blind love and devotion for every organization that people look to for news. Second, just because I’m an aspiring journalist also doesn’t mean I don’t see the negative sides of the media industry. In fact, it makes me even more interested in fixing the issues that the Yes Men brought to light. Not only were they holding Dow Chemical to account, but they were holding the media to account for its negligence in reporting about this incident. I could be imagining things, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the media wasn’t reporting heavily or at all on the fact that thousands of people in India continued to be very directly and negatively impacted by the incident, a story which could be harmful to a corporation that makes billions in profits every year.