The Presence of Corporations Is Bigger

When it comes to control people, “force” is considered as an efficient way in politics. However, it is difficult to use force in democratic society, the PR industry has emerged to influence people. In other words, corporation is getting the power to control the public more than governments. Chomsky says “Today it’s not so much government that exercises control, but corporations” and “Now private tyrannies –corporate systems- play the role of controlling opinions and attitudes” (Chomsky and Barsamian 2005: 22).

In the documentary film, ‘The Corporation’, Gibara also talks that the governments become less powerful than the corporations.

“Corporations have gone global and by going global, the governments have lost some control over corporations regardless of whether the corporation can be trusted or cannot be trusted, governments today do not have over the corporations the power that they had, and the leverage they had fifty or sixty years ago. And that’s a major change. So governments have become powerless compared to what they were before”.

Companies actually break the rules to pursue their own profit even though the government set the rule not to trade with certain countries because of the political reasons. For example, the United States announces the list of penalties which violates the regulation of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). According to OFAC’s information which was released in July 2006, “Chevy Chase Bank processed an unauthorised funds transfer with payment information referencing service of Iranian origin”.[1]

According to Bakan, General Electric has breached laws such as discrimination against employees, pollution, deceptive advertising and the like, and show how the company does not care the rules because of pursuit for their profit (2004: 75-79). The cost of penalty is less than the cost of compliance. Bakan quotes one shareholder activist comments that the violation of the rules is just a business decision (2004: 80).

2-2 The Role of Business/Financial Journalism

In the previous section, the nature of corporations was argued. They pursue profit and use the perception management which causes the gap between the reality and the perception of people for making profit. In addition, the presence is bigger than governments now, and they sometimes engage unlawful behaviour. The media tend to be used by corporation to make profit, because it has an influential power to the public. In this section, the role of journalism is discussed to examine how to build the relationship for the journalists with their news sources, corporations. At the beginning, the role of journalism in democratic society is argued as a basement of the discussion. Next, it specifically focuses on business/financial journalism, and lastly its problems are examined.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14