Gup Shup

The mainstream press has been paying a lot of attention recently to the many problems with conventional media. The Associated Press reported yesterday on Al Gore’s  recent attack on corporate controlled media. He told an audience at the Edinburgh International Television Festival that “democracy is under attack.” He added, picturesquely, that “democracy is a conversation, and [that] the most important role of the media is to facilitate that conversation of democracy. Now the conversation is more controlled, it is more centralized.” His own efforts with Current TV aim to reverse this trend by exploiting the public control of the internet to allow for user-generated content to fill communication channels.

The trend toward online news media has got the big news corporations frantically searching for answers to their profit woes. Sunday’s New York Times and the current edition of The Economist both ran pieces on how the internet is quickly becoming people’s first, and increasingly only, choice for accessing news and other information of interest. This is leading to a sharp decline in print, which translates into loss of profit, since print is still the main profit source for news companies.

Furthermore, online readers are not the income generators that print readers are. The president of the World Association of Newspapers, Gavin O’Reilly, remarks that print readers are more valuable than online readers. This is not because they tend to be better informed, or more careful readers, or anything of the sort, but rather because they can be forced to see more ads. Online readers, he says, tend to use newspaper websites in more “haphazard or fragmented ways,” or, in other words, they dictate what they do and do not see, something like the way they would in a real free market where they were consumers of information. Instead, since they are commodities being sold to advertisers for profit, that commodity that can be force fed more ads is that much more valuable. Thus, people’s capacity to resist commodification and gain agency is a real problem, because the gains in democracy are offset by the loss of advertising revenue. To put numbers to the lost “value,” a British newspaper asserts that “one print reader is worth ten online.” With newspapers making up 36% of total global advertising, the loss is evidently quite substantial.

The Economist suggests that newspapers deal with this “crisis” by taking a “more businesslike approach or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.” The Philadelphia Inquirer is reacting to the crisis by having an advertising agent redesign the paper, a role traditionally reserved strictly for editorial. Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates (a research firm specializing in American newspapers) suggests that newspapers concentrate on telling people how to get richer, what to do in the evening, etc. rather than producing long pieces about foreign affairs.

It has been known for sometime that a free press is a basic prerequisite to a properly functioning democracy. Noam Chomsky notes that the mid-19th century was probably the time when the media was most free — it was widely read, reflected public concerns, etc. But high stamp duties, the reliance on advertising and the concentration of  capital eliminated that free flowing structure. It seems that the popularity of the internet and its resistance to corporate control seem to be swinging us back to a freer form of information sharing like what existed in the mid-19th century, giving people without large concentrations of capital the capacity to reach and hear the masses. Democracy may yet still have a chance, a frightening thought to the powerful sectors of society, who must now seek solutions to this “crisis” of media democratization.

Yesterday I attended the 16th International AIDS Conference, held this year at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. This was the biggest AIDS event ever held anywhere. The conference lasted from Monday 14 August until Friday 18 August. Over 26,000 delegates from around the globe were here in Toronto. Scientists, activists, youth, politicians, citizens of all stripes, artists, film makers, and many others paid witness to the horrors of the disease. The Double Bills, Clinton and Gates, were but two of the high profile participants. With the world here in Toronto, with the world’s eyes on Toronto, with the gravity of the current state of HIV/AIDS on our planet, with this unique opportunity to take the bull by the horn and make real progress, where was Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper? He was off defending Canadian “sovereignty” in the Arctic, an issue of no immediate concern to anyone. In one fell swoop, Harper managed to insult the thousands who travelled so far to be here, to demontrate that he’s either an incompetent leader or a severe imbecile, and to bring shame on the Canadian public. To top it all off, the government decided to not make their promised announcement of a new aid package devoted to combating HIV/AIDS.

This of course is merely the most recent phase in Canada’s inability to deal with HIV/AIDS. The passing of Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime in 2004 was hailed as a law that would allow generics to make their way into the market, particularly Africa. Two years later, not a single pill has made its way to Africa. Not a single one. The main reason seems to be the cumbersome restrictions imposed by the WTO trade rules. The additional aspects of the Canadian legislation were furthermore designed to protect the interests of patent holders, essentially ruling out any hope of putting the health of victims over the profits of big pharmaceuticals, as predicted at the time.

In the 1960s, the rising cost of prescription drugs led the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau to pass a bill that authorized compulsory licensing. Compulsory licensing allowed qualified manufacturers to copy patented drugs and sell them at lower prices upon paying a set royalty to the patent holder. To some degree, this scheme helped put people over profit and, as such, had to be eliminated. Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government did just that in 1993. The 2004 Access to Medicines Regime was meant to counter the elimination of compulsory licensing, but with the rules designed to favour the big pharm interests, the result is that no pills have made their way to Africa.

An underlying assumption in the current trade rules favouring profit over health is that inventors should be the sole beneficiaries of their research efforts. Let us put aside arguments against the soundness of the assumption. Assuming it, the restrictions imposed by the trade rules nonetheless cannot be justifiably maintained. The given assumption presupposes that the research efforts were made solely by the pharmaceutical companies, that they were the only ones who risked, and hence that they and they alone should be the ones who gain. But that’s false. Most of the risky research, here as elsewhere, tends to be funded by the public. The production of drugs is a shared enterprise with most of the risk taken by the tax payer. Once knowledge reaches a point where profit can be made, the companies take over and reap all the benefits of publically funded research efforts. This is not to deny that there is risk and research in private companies, of course. Rather, the issue is one of the scale of risk/research versus profit/gain.

Take research on microbicides, for example. More than 95% of the research going into this preventive technology is taking place in non-profit and academic institutions, funded by charitable foundations and government grants. Large phramaceuticals are staying away since microbicides are public health goods, i.e. goods that would benefit society but provide little incentive for private investment. It is a near-certainty that once more is known about the capacity of microbicides to reduce transmission of sexually transmitted infections we will see the big pharmaceuticals lining up to reap the benefts of the public investment into research on these capacities.  The whole edifice rests on falsehoods, and these falsehoods are preventing people from gaining access to medical care that is rightfully theirs. 

Again, this is assuming that all the rewards should go to those who invent, a highly controversial idea, at best. Canada’s continued involvment in such trading methods is a direct cause of the continuing successful proliferation of HIV/AIDS in the world, particularly the third world. Canada must reverse course immediately by passing legislation that would make it easier to get much needed generics into Africa and elsewhere for reasonable prices. Trudeau’s 1969 bill showed one way this can be done. This week, many new concrete suggestions were offered outlining positive steps that could be taken to get drugs to those who need them quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. The UN, the World Bank, drug companies big and small, citizens and leaders of nations rich and poor all pitched in with ideas and proposals. All the while the Canadian Prime Minister was off defending Canada against invisible enemies off in the Arctic somewhere, physically too far to have heard the message, and mentally too far to realize the damage his government is causing.