Much is being said currently about last night’s Oscars and the It’s Hard to be a Pimp performance.  People are calling for discussion and analyses. Emails are flying.  There is a post-Oscar buzz.  This flurry and the fact that this event took place on a Disney-owned ABC network makes me think that this moment is prime for a brief look at agenda-setting media.  Agenda-setting is by no means a new or unknown theory in media studies (though at times overlooked).  It simply means that those most popular media are able to, if not tell us what to think, tell us what to think about.  This is no joke as an issue either and Disney has been doing it for years.  Given the streams of emails I am seeing from around the globe it would appear as though they are still atop the game.

As Dr. John Henrik Clarke used to say, “I am going to talk around the subject to talk about the subject.”  First, we must always remember that the term “media” is most often described narrowly and  inaccurately by their technologies or methods of conveyance.  Media are not merely “television, radio, film, books, internet, etc.”  These are the technologies that make media available.  Such a definition discourages a proper understanding of media as societal symbols, definitions, norms and ideology all intimately linked to questions of who will hold power and how will that power be maintained.  Media are today the number one mechanism of maintaining power and hip-hop the most popular cultural _expression in the world propelled by that same media.  This is not a good thing.  There are many examples from which I could draw to make plain the point about media as power.  I will select a most recent one.   As reported on the February 26, 2006 edition of Media Matters, “Defense” Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that, “In this War [against terror] some of the most critical battles may not be fought in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad but in the newsrooms in places like New York and London and Cairo and elsewhere.”  He called for an increase in the number of stories planted in media outlets around the world by the Pentagon.  Similarly, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just called for $75 million more to fund propaganda targeting Iran.  This is why in fighting this “war” – invasion - there is currently more money being spent on media weaponry than the traditional military variety.

Media are weapons.  This is why way back in 1975 The Trilateral Commission (a group consisting of bankers and industrialists from The United States, Western Europe and Japan) promoted the “oligarchic integration” and “greater press controls” in order to protect the elite against “the excesses of democracy” (Mazzocco, 1994, p.4).  And this is simply an extension of what the mass enslaver James Madison called for way back in his Federalist Paper #10, a protection against the “disease” of democracy whereby a majority of the poor might seek to engage in the “wicked projects” of equally distributing land and abolishing debt.  And where do we Black folk fit in this?  Well, as economist Claud Anderson has said, using the game of monopoly as example, there are two places for those without property or wealth, “bankruptcy and jail.”  Just this past weekend his most honorable Mr. Harry Belafonte made it just as plain when saying that “the rich cannot be the rich and be defined as such if there is not a poor.  And they have long ago decided that the poor will be us.  Not just ‘us’ as Black Americans, but ‘us’ as in Hispanic Americans, ‘us’ as Asian Americans, ‘us’ as poor Americans and the Indigenous.”   Disney has been a major part of the arsenal of the elite for decades.

I remember an unfortunate incident involving the flooding of the home of my favorite professor, Dr. James Turner of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.  He had brought a table full of books to the center, a collection of which he felt a need to let go as he re-assessed the overall damage caused.  I scanned the table and laughingly picked up a classic 1971 book from Dorfman and Mattelart called How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.    Though initially amused and intrigued by the title I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the analysis.  It is a strong Marxist critique of the imbedded messages of White supremacy, patriarchal dominance and capitalistic splendor contained in such comics and their impact around the globe.  Quoting just one of many comic-strip examples, forming their “Duckology,” is one cited from 1964 where Donald Duck, talking to an African “Witch Doctor” says, “I see you’re an up to date nation! Have you got a telephone?” The response, “Have we gottee telephones! … All colors, all shapes… only trouble is only one has wires.  It’s a hot line to the world loan bank.” 

By now Disney is a massive media/entertainment conglomerate involved in nearly every aspect of popular media and whose annual revenues are somewhere around $30 billion.  So as I watched the Oscar performance by Three 6 Mafia (via web link, no way I saw it live) I thought of what they represented as  Disney’s new – temporary – Donald Duck.  Dorfman and Mattelart explained:

Children’s comics are devised by adults, whose work is determined and justified by their idea of what a child is or should be.  Often, they even cite “scientific” source or ancient traditions (“it is popular wisdom, dating from time immemorial”) in order to explain the nature of the public’s needs.  In reality, however, these adults are not about to tell stories which would jeopardize the future they  are planning for their children (p. 30).

For instance, Disney is certainly not going to want us to think about the fact that one of Disney’s board members, Aylwin B. Lewis, is also on the board of directors of Halliburton.  And we certainly wouldn’t want to know that while victims, survivors, “refugees,” of the broken levees in New Orleans are currently being evicted into the streets of New York City, Washington, DC and elsewhere Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root was just awarded a $385 million contract not to build homes for these homeless but to build “detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency.” King Alfred anyone?  So while we watch and debate the Oscars provided by Disney their business colleagues are developing the housing pens we will inhabit once the homes we lose cause us to become the masses of homeless who  are then determined, as "refugees," an “immigration emergency.”  This is again no original or new development.  Former head of FEMA (1981-1985), General Louis Giuffrida, wrote his Army War College thesis on the “Legal Aspects of Managing Disorders” in which he called for the detention of “black militants” in “assembly centers or relocation camps.” I am by no means the first to make the point that we were brought here to work and now that our labor is no longer needed and we become “surplus” we either go, again as said by Anderson, into “bankruptcy or jail.”  

We must truly renew our ability to grapple with the painful reality described by Marx that capitalism’s “original sin” is commodity-formation, that Greg Tate is right when he says that the United States’ original commodity was “African people” and Charles Husband and John Downing are right when saying that racism is this country’s “conceptual original sin.”  We are absolutely more powerless today over our image than at any other point in world history.  Media, as the generators of societal norms, definitions and symbols have inextricably linked “Blackness” to our placement as the “permanent underclass” discussed by Belafonte.  Dominant media will forever reflect the will of the dominant.  We must match our efforts at reform with efforts at the development of an underground mass media/press or forever be at the mercy of this media warfare described once by Fanon as “psychic violence.”  Our agenda is currently being set by media owners who occupy the top 99.99 percentile of the population with an income well over $6 million annually.  They reign over even the 99.9 percentile group whose yearly earnings are a mere $1, 672, 726.  If we ever expect that our interests can be served by this group’s dominant media we are foolishly naïve.  Their media are simply performing their tasks plugging “us” in where needed. 

We need more media that will set our agenda to increase the quantity and quality of our discussions on White supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, poverty, mass incarceration, drug addiction and health care.  This cannot happen in a media environment designed specifically to use one hand to encourage our discussions of Oscars and the famous while the other is planning our poverty, uselessness and subsequent “housing.”

Jared Ball, Ph.D. is a professor of African American and Media Studies at the University of Maryland and Frostburg State University.  Ball is the founder of FreeMix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show  whose history and details, along with his other work and media efforts, can be found at voxunion.com.   Ball is also the managing editor for the nation’s first academic hip-hop journal which is part of the larger non-profit work of Words, Beats and Life, Inc.