History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach

e280502 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 1 History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach Ramón Reig How to quote this article: “Reig, Ramón (2019). “History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the ‘traditional’ critical approach”. El profesional de la información, v. 28, n. 6, e280502. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2019.nov.02 Manuscript received on September, 07th 2019 Accepted on September, 22nd 2019 Abstract This article is not going to limit itself to presenting the traditional dualist view of good versus bad (the good is represented by average citizens manipulated by the bad, which is the capitalist media-driven society). Such views have their origin point in the Marxist or neo-Marxist school of thought, which was strictly adhered to by the (first generation) of the Frankfurt School, and it is known as critical thinking. This research supports the fundamentals of critical thinking, but additionally argues that “critical thinking” exists also to criticize itself, to overcome it, and to enter into what we call “Complex Structural Approach” (CSA). The Power is, to a large extent, the market in evolution and involution and acts today through the marginalization of universal historical memory and philosophy, among other knowledge, and is replaced by infoxication. The western citizen is not completely unaware of its dependency. The virtual-intelligent society of the 21th century connects with one of the innate characteristics of the individual: his selfishness, whether it is positive or destructive behavior, in various formats and in varying degrees. Keywords Power; Communication; Journalism; XXI century; History; Complexity; Structural approach; Structural theory; Media; Press; Business; Multinationals; Globalization; Political economy of information; Critical analysis; Critical thinking; Critical theory; Democracy; Artificial intelligence; Society; Control. Ramón Reig * http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2663-4223 Universidad de Sevilla Facultad de Comunicación Departamento de Periodismo II Américo Vespucio, s/n, Isla de La Cartuja 41092 Seville, Spain [email protected] 1. Introduction Interrelationships between power and communication may be the cinderella line of research in communication and journalism studies worldwide. There is evidence this has been going on for some time, at least in Spain (Almiron; Reig, 2007). In the JCR journals we find it crouched in other texts, but rarely “with the open face”. If we refer to systematized studies on the subject -better than limited articles on matters in this field that tend to appear somewhat outdated in the so-called source journalswe have the well-known works by Quirós (1998), Curran (2005), Castells (2009), Serrano (2009), Becerra and Mastrini (2009), Campos-Frei- re (2012) or Reig (2010; 2011), among others, such as works in the United States and the rest of the world by Herman and McChesney (2001; 2013), Labio (2006,) or Segovia-Alonso (2001), the latter focused more in recent years on communication policies, communication and culture, and digital writing. Nota: Este artículo se puede leer en español en: http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2019/nov/reig_es.pdf The interrelationships between power and communication may be the cinderella research line of communication and journalism studies worldwide Ramón Reig e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 2 We owe the most recent references in Spanish and English literature to Martínez-Vallvey and Núñez-Fernández (2016); García-Santamaría (2016); Reporteros Sin Fronteras (RSF) –Reporters Without Borders (RWB)– (2016); Mancinas-Chávez (2016); Serrano (2016); Birkinbine, Gómez and Wasco (2017); Reig and Labio (2017); Puentes-Rivera, Campos-Freire, and López-García (2018). The latter authors place journalism on the structural stage starred by the new technologies applied to the profession. López-García has completed his work with another publication: Toural-Bran and López-García (2019). We believe that the study of media structures should focus intensely on the digital native world and this work offers us a foundation for it. For its part, from the Anglosphere comes a new edition of the book by Hesmondhalgh (2019), the last part of which is especially useful for our field of work. We also receive news –or rather reoccurrences– about theories, and analysis of the supposed perverse effects of globalization, as well as a multitude of works on digital technologies and analysis of information or media treatment of certain groups, but the odd thing is that, according to what we have observed, much less work has been done relating to the Structural Approach (SA) and the Political Economy of Information, Communication, and Culture (PEICC) (CIC, 2006), which comprise the underpinnings of communication studies and power. PEICC is about researching what underlies the communication phenomenon, that is, what underlies the events, according to the structural theory (Muñoz, 2005). It is well known that the media influence the social way of thinking and that the most influential are in the hands of non-specific entrepreneurs in the communication and journalistic sector. But it is not enough to affirm this again and again: it must be proven in order to explain why a message is constructed in one way or another. The first conclusion is not difficult to draw: research in communication and journalism usually swims on the surface, at most a few meters below; research does not usually investigate the foundations of the iceberg nor the base on which the power of the network is founded. It is this power that determines the work of journalists and, subsequently, the behavior of humankind in general. In our research, we are not going to limit ourselves to presenting the typical dualistic vision good/bad extracted from the simplistic Marxist or neo-Marxist approaches, inherited in turn by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in what we know as critical thinking. This work is part of critical thinking, but estimates that critical thinking also exists to criticize critical thinking itself, overcome it, and get into what we now call Complex Structural Approach (CSA) (Reig; Mancinas-Chávez; Nogales-Bocio, 2017). 2. Theoretical-methodological foundations We have no doubt that the Structural Approach (SA) and the PEICC assume that throughout History human beings have created power structures and, within them, communicational power structures that have been necessary to project messages –strategies of information in our times– in order to try to preserve power through mental modeling, even in the current prosumer time. In this sense, the PEICC and the CDA (Critical discourse analysis) go hand in hand. But we must go further, and although this is not an adequate article to delve into the subject, we will take a look at it, because for many years the critical approach has been causing us considerable weariness by continuously harping on the same discourse and not going beyond a mental-movie where corporations are entities that destroy everything and citizens are poor victims. It’s time to move beyond this dualistic rhetoric. Above all, what sustains this article is a branch with its own personality derived from the stem-matrix Structural approach (SA). We call that branch Simple structural approach (SSA), intimately related to the historical perspective, which is based on these words (Cardoso; Pérez-Brignoli, 1976) referring to the historical dynamics of conjuncture-structure: “By conjuncture we understand first of all movement: increases and decreases in production, fluctuations in the volume of exchanges, price variations ... [...]. Let us now observe an important fact: the conjuncture, the movement of economic life, is characterized by repetition, recurrence. Upward movements are followed by downward movements, then return to the upward, etc. This usually means that economic fluctuations are considered cyclical, and more commonly spoken of economic cycles. Thus, “conjuncture, as a repeated phenomenon, is therefore a structural phenomenon” [Ernest Labrousse]. In this way, the movement does not appear as anarchic or random, but rather presenting in the background a series of regularities, of repetitions that make possible to study it. Now, we can say with legitimacy that the movement is cyclical, by comparison to something stable: it is this permanence that we call structure. We define the structure as “a set of majority relations” (in other words, a “constellation of solidary dominants”), the solidarity and proportion existing among a set of components, the interdependence between the whole and the parts”. The media influence the social way of thinking and the most influential are in the hands of non-specific entrepreneurs in the communication and journalistic sector Above all what sustains this article is a branch with its own personality derived from the stem-matrix Structural approach (SA). We call that branch Simple structural approach (SSA), intimately related to the historical perspective History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 3 From the SSA branch another one emerges, the Political Economy (PE) and, in turn, in our field the PE is completed with the Political Economy of Communication (PEC). Mosco (2006) addresses the meanings of PE and PEC. For this author, in a strict sense, political economy is the study of social relations, particularly power relations, which mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources. The PE consequently places, in the foreground, the objective of understanding social change and historical transformation, which involves the empirical investigation of the market’s behavior beyond a functional vision to result in its effects on society and the individuals. The PEC –of undoubted Marxist origin, says Mosco– “has stood out for its emphasis on describing and examining the meaning of institutions, especially companies and governments, responsible for the production, distribution, and exchanges of communication goods and for the regulation of the communication market.” For our part, in other works (Reig, 2010) we have established that it is more correct to talk about PEICC (Political economy of information, communication, and culture) in order to link it with the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which links the communication message to the property and systemic interests attached to the media, especially to the most ubiquitous in the commercial space. The CDA is focused “in social problems, and especially in the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of power abuse or dominance” (Van-Dijk, 1998). It is evident that we are under a market system that not only gives us benefits but also a component of clear domination and control, although in this work we are not going to address the drama that the so-called critical thinking uses. The PEICC implies five concepts –Politics, Economy, Information, Communication, and Culture– nothing difficult to relate to each other. Without going any further, the famous revolving doors or transfer of the politicians to the big companies and vice versa, are a clear example of the intersection between Economy-Business and Politics. This power structure will require some Information strategies to preserve itself, strategies that will develop through the media where it is both a shareholder and advertising client. The aforementioned strategies are vehicles that lead to the creation or consolidation of Cultures while the reactions of the recipients –currently prosumers– would be examples of Communication as interactivity, often foreseen by the Power itself. From the point of view of media domination, Benito (1982) made it clear that media are used as resistance to change and to prevent the renewal of structures. Even, according to Martínez-Albertos, cited by Benito, when media influence the change it is because the new mentality has made its way to the new leaders of the system and enjoys sufficient credit; therefore, the change is completed in a way that is controlled. Media are used by the leaders. They exercise the role of controllers of the established state of affairs rather than the role of agents of subversion or unexpected change and lack of control. Despite the current interactive digital society, this analysis continues to be valid, in our opinion, because of what we will demonstrate later in relation to the behavior of the prosumer and new control strategies by the Power. So far, our research has been limited to describing theoretical-methodological foundations based on a Simple structural approach (SSA), which is what we usually find, in scarce amounts, in our field of study, as we mentioned. When we ask ourselves why has become as it is the society in which the SSA operates, we enter the Complex structural approach (CSA) because we are forced to go to the deepest transdisciplinary level. Barberousse (2008) collects some essential words from Edgar Morin: “I never could, throughout my whole life, resign myself to the parceled knowledge, I never could isolate an object of study from its context, from its background, from its future. I have always aspired to multidimensional thinking. I have never been able to eliminate the inner contradiction. I have always felt that the deep truths, antagonistic of each other, were supplementary to me, while remaining antagonistic. I have never wanted to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity by force”. Therefore, if we include the PE and the PEC in the PEICC our general working method is represented as follows: It is more correct to talk about PEICC (Political economy of information, communication, and culture) to link in this way with the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that links the communicational message to property and systemic interests The moment we ask ourselves why has become as it is the society in which the Simple Structural Approach (SSA) is developed, we enter the Complex Structural Approach (CSA) because we are forced to go to the deepest transdisciplinarity Ramón Reig e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 4 The Structural Approach (SA) is no longer exactly the epidermal method we have always known as Structuralism, not even the Poststructuralism, but it is not subjected to eternal intellectual discussions or abstruse disquisitions. It is simply common sense that tells us that it is complicated to understand something or someone if we isolate it from all the elements that make up that something or someone. The EE is the evidence that the name of a media and a media group doesn’t give us any academic information without the elements that make that possible and their meanings, but that are hidden from our conscious, nor it is useful to know the name of a person or institution if we do not learn what underlies such names. The CSA takes us to deep places. If the SSA applied to communication and journalism is sparsely cultivated worldwide, we can affirm that, so far, the CSA has a squalid presence. But this is not the place to deal with this issue or where to fully implement the CSA, although as we mentioned some of its bases will be used here. 3. The eternal cry of critics Although it is an unnecessary question and perhaps a bit senseless in the academic field, we believe that we must ask ourselves this question: What is Power? Power and power. The first –Power– is the essential one, the Being of Parmenides, the one that is over time and although it changes it does not mutate in its essence; the second –power– is the conjuncture of Heraclitus. The White House goes for presidents, Wall Street, its essence and becoming, remain; Trump will no longer be president and he will return to focus on the Power he comes from, Warren Buffet, no, both united, in addition to the new and young tycoons of the Silicon Valley and the heirs of capitalism (China, Russia, India, Vietnam ...). Trump and Buffet will die physically but not so easily what they both meant. Thompson (1998) claims that power has the capacity to influence and persuade, to exercise social control because, according to the author, it displays four types of behavioral projections: economic, political, coercive, and symbolic. The four types are interrelated with each other, these cannot be understood or exercised in isolation. Thompson classifies the media in the category of symbolic power. Before we continue our presentation, we think it has been necessary to clarify the above premises starting –above all– with the Power and the participant empirical observation in which we have been and continue to be immersed by our position as communication professional, researcher, and university professor. Power is Power, whatever and wherever you are: clans, tribes, early civilizations, medieval, modern or contemporary absolutism, theocracy, fascism, Nazism, communism, liberalism, neoliberalism, democracy, religion ... We can add the nuances that we want to each of the manifestations of Power, –emotionally, culturally, and scientifically– but in all of these there is a constant: the desire to preserve self –which is the obligation of all Power– it justifies the means to achieve the objective. And among those means we find Communication as a persuasive factor (Roiz-Célix, 2002), which does not require direct physical force -it does generate indirect violenceit is a soft but chronic power, which acts gradually on many occasions with effects of doubtful mental, psychic, and cognitive positivity (Reig; Mancinas-Chávez, 2013). Communication is one of the Siamese twins of Power. By becoming chronic its power transmutes from soft to hard, and dangerous for democratic coexistence and preservation of the species when it acquires clearly indoctrinating characteristics in the bad sense of the concept, in the alienating sense. From the viewpoint of cultural ethics that we have described, the above may seem aberrant or logical, but that is how we believe that the subject of Power works. The so-called critical approach, which, in its most immediate origin, comes Communication is one of the Siamese twins of Power. By becoming chronic its power transmutes from soft to hard and dangerous for democratic coexistence History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 5 from Marx and the School of Frankfurt, is incomplete, it should apply itself to its own structural approach and abandon the Manichean simplification that it leads to: the perfidious capitalism, formerly industrial, now technologized and globalized, against the defenseless, manipulated, watched, controlled citizen (Faulkner, 2018). This is so, but really it is not, basic elements are missing to start completing the puzzle: transdisciplinarity and compared epistemology (Lorenz, 1980). It seems that the thinking movement called critical is only interested in being the conscience of the evil neoliberal system, it appears as if it did not aspire to overcome it, to replace it, to face reality and work not only from offices and systemic studies but from the reality that, when one lives and suffers in person, as a rule, it forces him to gradually abandon his intellectual, political, ideological, and preacher points of views to take steps backwards that end up doing more harm than good to the critical methodology and its followers –those that have and those that might have– both in university and on the street. But, is it never going to seriously and universally consider why this happens? Has the critical thinking become a religion, necessary –like all– for the psychic and even material survival of some? Does the popular saying, “I wanted to change the world and it was the world that changed me,” still not tell you anything nuclear or scientific? On the Internet we found this paragraph, entitled Now I realized, as we read from Anonymous (n.d.): “When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world”. The issue is also: do not tell me so many times the problem that we already know, do not talk so often about the need to be aware as we are already aware. Now, what is the next step? Or is it necessary to continue living on in the neo-whiny job of the 21st century that, ultimately, serves to reinforce the Power that is questioned, but that ultimately legitimizes it? Later we will return to these questions, but for now let’s have a look at the historical development of the issue. 4. Power has always been there and has operated, essentially, in the same way We could extend this study through time, but it is well known that Power has been a constant throughout the history of human beings. In a book on Complex Structural Approach (CSA) that we are finishing to write now –summer of 2019–, we affirm that, as Álvarez and Caballero (1997) mentioned years ago, if the anthropologist, the sociologist, or the journalist want to study a tribe, someone or some will become the spokesperson or spokespeople for that group. It is a small power structure that proves its condition through symbolic distinctions –special clothing, totems, signs– that give that person/people a prominent rank. These distinctions are also a means of communication that sends persuasive messages. This micro-structure of socio-economic-media power will establish what is positive and negative and monitors its own safety, its conservation, observing its subjects-recipients. Place all the temporal distances you wish, all the nuances, all the appropriate changes, but the fact, in its essence, remains to this day. No matter how much interactivity occurs among the members of the species or precisely because of that. Hyperabundance of communicational activity produces a probable paralysis of knowledge, what we can call an apparent activism or the expression we used about fifteen years ago: “hibernation effect” (Reig, 1995). We have studied the phenomenon of the omnipresence of power. Human power has tended to be prone, at various times, towards what we now call globalization. There is a historical period in which this tendency can be seen more clearly, what is nowadays globalization has its immediate roots in the Modern Age, with the creation of the Nation Estates and the beginning of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie. See the case of Figure 1. This is a detail of a Gothic stained-glass window in the Cathedral of Saint Michael and Sainte Gudule (Brussels): “Charles V being crowned by Charlemagne.” Indeed, a 16th century image shows the modern roots of what we now call globalization. Charles I of Spain and V of Germany. The discourse of religious power promoted the political, military, and economic power represented by this king-emperor. In this image, the globe with the cross on top symbolized that the king was the vicar of God on earth; the sword, the justice. The world should revolve around a single hegemonic discourse symbolized by the cross that culminates the sphere. Dissidence would have to face the sword. It seems that the thinking movement called critical is only interested in being the conscience of the evil neoliberal system The so-called critical approach is incomplete, it should apply itself to its own structural approach and abandon the Manichean simplification at once that it leads to: the perfidious capitalism against the defenseless, manipulated, watched, controlled citizen Ramón Reig e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 6 At present, the hegemonic discourse is marked by the Market called Wall Street, for example. We could call the sword NATO. In the Modern Age this message was conveyed through a stained-glass window, a type of “screen”, in a wider context the cathedral, and was simultaneously articulated by an even wider Power system. Today the message is predominantly the same, and is observed on multiple screens. The interaction is greater, but mind control techniques are also much more sophisticated. One of the techniques is the theft of knowledge –through the marginalization of universal historical memory and philosophy, among other kinds of knowledge– which is replaced by infoxication, infobesity, or hyperinformation, as well as by the incentive to egocentricity between the species through artificial praise of innate selfishness to the human being (Reig; Mancinas-Chávez, 2018). Current communication also abusively uses fantasy and metaphor in its evasion messages as an element that increases the meaning of the image. In the window it is specified that Charlemagne is the one who crowns Charles V, two characters that are from separate centuries, but, nevertheless, the one serves to increase the charism of the other. 5. Current situation: remembering -again- the problem In a chronological leap that we consider logical in a work of these characteristics, we reach the current socio-economic-media world, using the Structural Approach as a methodological guide. So far -and with the permission of the emerging powerswe consider the United States as the quintessential media and colonizing power. Thus Delgado (2016) developed some information that appeared in El país newspaper: “The US concentrates the top 10 largest listed companies in the world. The rise of technology in addition to the collapse of oil and turbulence in China lead the United States to monopolize the most valuable companies on the stock market”. And he accompanied those with the table shown in Figure 2. These are 2015 data published in 2016. In the last year, obviously, the trend had not changed, except for a significant detail. This is how Bloomberg saw it (Figure 3). More recently, this significant variation continued and increased (Figure 4). Figure 2. The giants of the world economy in 2015. Main companies listed on the stock market on December 31st, in millions of euros. Cristina Delgado, El país, 2/1/2016. https://elpais.com/economia/2016/01/01/actualidad/1451681862_633046.html Figure 3. The 5 most valuable companies on the stock market in 2011 and 2016. Capitalization in billions of US$, Bloomberg. http://www.bez.es/104009798/Los-lideres-tecnologicos-conquistan-la-cima-economica- mundial-.html Figure 1. Cathedral of Saint Michael and Sainte Gudule (Brussels): Charles V being crowned by Charlemagne. Source: http://www.fuenterrebollo.com/Pirineos/tarazona1.html History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 7 Indeed, China has broken into the global financial and multicorporate scene. According to the economic newspaper Cinco días: The big league of companies by value on the stock market is played on American soil. And the top positions are not held by banks or oil companies: the technology companies consolidate their control at the top of the table of the (listed) companies with the highest capitalization in the world. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google occupy, in that order, the top four places in the ranking, while Facebook sneaks in sixth place. In the following top positions, three others ones are American (Berkshire Hathaway, Johnson & Johnson and JP Morgan Chase). And only two Chinese, also technological: Tencent and Alibaba. “Only two Chinese”, nothing more and nothing less, we would mention to the newspaper. And they are on top of the list, from the technology sector. Is this perhaps of little importance? Where is Europe in the ranking? The technology companies have arrived and, of course, are here to stay. Scarpellini (2019), from the El mundo newspaper, highlighted these data by limiting it to one of the most well-known companies in the sector: – Only Facebook in 2018 had benefits of 22,112 million dollars (about 19,265 million euros). – The social network increased its profits by 39% in 2018 and by 9% the number of daily active users worldwide. – More than 1,520 million users. – Had a turnover of 55,838 million dollars (about 48,650 million euros), 37% more than the 39,942 million of 2017 (about 34,800 million euros), which helps to keep at bay -at least for nowthe swirling rumors about the social network decline due to the departure of the youngest people mainly caused by data leaks between Facebook and Cambridge Analytics in 2018. – The business owner –Mark Zuckerberg– has insisted on his bet for ‘Stories’, an option that he believes will become something bigger than the traditional Facebook wall where users publish their photos and stories. Between Instagram and WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, more than 1,000 billion of these digital stories are shared daily. – This and the emphasis on advertising through mobile phones, which represented a chilling 93% of the total advertising revenue in the last quarter of 2018, exceeding 89% for the same period of 2017. Here is the Power. But it is incomplete. In recent years we estimate that a competition is taking place, and at the same time also collaboration, between the generations that are the protagonists of Power. The younger generation –the one of Silicon Valley, to name it more or less adequately– is proving to be more aggressive and competitive than their “teachers” and ancestors. They are not limited to technology, in the traditional sense, but are applying this technology to the financial world and the daily world of monetary circulation. And of course, they are investing in communication and allying with the old owners of this and other sectors of production. Let us add to this that their components are authentic engineers of “tax savings”, everything –or almost everything– within the law, of course, despite the fact the EU and specific countries have sometimes imposed sanctions on them. Remember what we affirm: Power has the obligation to preserve itself and then the end justifies the means of doing so: “The large global technology companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple, have found in Europe a market where they can comfortably place their high added value products and, through relatively sophisticated tax practices, save the payment of taxes that it would correspond to the income they get. The latest known calculations, referring to the year 2017, indicate that while in that period they obtained net benefits greater than 11% compared to the previous year in Spain, they paid 8% less; and that the income statements, made up by corporate tax avoidance structures, are three to four times lower than the real ones in Spanish territory” (El país, 2019). Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are owner partners of the holding company headed by Buffet: Berkshire Hathaway, an investment firm that owns shares, among many others, of Coca Cola, Comcast (owner of NBC), Gannet (media group), General Electric , Moodys, Procter & Gamble, The Washington Post and lately also of Amazon (Martínez-Bernal, 2019). The youth and talent of Gates (63 years old) and Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (35 years old), together with Buffet’s seniority (89 years old) and of his right hand, Charlie Munger (95 years old) who’s succession has already been prepared. Here is a paradigm of the new Power of the 21st century. Figure 4. Ranking of companies by value in the stock market in 2019. Capitalization in 1,000 billion of euros. Belén Trincado, Cinco días, 2/1/2019. https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2018/12/28/companias/1546023529_428376.html Ramón Reig e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 8 At the same time as is well known, these large companies are allied with the great world bank: “The tech giant Amazon, the ‘investor arm’ of the billionaire Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway, and the American bank JP Morgan have signed an association agreement under which they will create an independent health care company that aims to reduce the costs of medical care and improve the services offered to its employees in the United States” (Europa Press, 2018). Except for Amancio Ortega, the rest of the names that appear in Figure 5 have properties in the world of communication, but not exclusively in this sector but in all those in which they consider that their money can yield positively. It is clear that the “acclaimed” The New York Times and The Washington Post are not anti-power, they are not against the Power, but are part of it, although the official discourse of the market and journalism will always affirm that they are free. The experts that have been cooks before friars (journalists before professors) will not deceive us, but they will mislead a wide layer of population, university people or not. The discourse, from the self-conservative obligation of Power, is not misguided. However, a magnificent documentary called Shadows of liberty (2012), focused on the US communication world, where Professor McChesney played a leading role, warned us: – Five large groups control 90% of the US media. – This concentration of media is jeopardizing press freedom. – Several experts -journalists and other communication professionals, high-level professors and other specialistsde- nounced the situation. – There exist censorship and cover-up practices. The documentary –very well known in our field of work– included other very interesting information, but we take only the above four facts. If, as a didactic method, we deviate a bit from the socio-economic context and enter fully into the field of communication dynamics, we have can develop a series of examples that offer a quick overview of current trends. Let’s have a look at a ranking of the main communication groups in the world (Table 1). There is interesting news: for the first time in the communication history two Chinese brands are among the world’s largest media groups: CCTV (TV) and Baidu (the Google of China, because in China Google is blocked by censors). NTV is a Russian television corporation and Sanoma is a media group from the Nordic countries of Europe, while Yomiuri and Asahi are “veterans” from Japan. There is only one Latin American mega group, O Globo (Brazil). The rest of the names of the list consist of technology and other US firms, plus some European ones. The US control is evident, but, as in other areas of pro- Figure 5. These eight millionaires have the same wealth as 3,600 million people, the poorest half in the world. Source: BBC (January 16, 2017) and own elaboration. http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-38632955 Rank Company Rank Company 1Google 16 Asahi Shimbun Company 2Walt Disney Co. 17 Grupo O Globo 3Comcast 18 Yahoo! 421st Century Fox 19 Full Media Holdings 5CBS Corporation 20 CCTV 6Bertelsmann 21 Microsoft 7Viacom 22 Hearst Corporation 8Time Warner 23 JC Decaux 9News Corporation 24 Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings 10 Facebook 25 Mediaset 11 Advance Publications 26 Axel Springer 12 IHeartMedia 27 ITV plc 13 Discovery 28 ProSiebenSat.1 14 Baidu 29 NTV 15 Gannett 30 Sanoma Table 1. Top 30 media companies. Source: The Daily Television,13/5/2015. http://thedailytelevision.com/articulo/research/zenithoptimedia-google-mayor-dueno-de- medios-del-mundo-por-lejos History, power, communication, journalism: Beyond the “traditional” critical approach e280602 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 6. eISSN: 1699-2407 9 duction and human work, the “empire” is no longer the only one in this domain, aggressive competitors of similar weight have come out, something that will only continue to increase in the future. If we have a look at other places on the planet, for example, the Islamic-Arab world, we obser- ve an imitation of the West, limited by some cultural peculiarities of that area. The media groups concentrate enormous power and connections with sectors other than communication, with governments and with Western groups. As Ortega-Pérez (2019) has written in his doctoral thesis, if we take the case of Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) we find one of the few Saudi companies that does not have the Saudi government as a shareholder, unlike other companies in the kingdom, such as Sabic (70% owned by the government) or Saudi Electricity Company (74%). KHC is the business core of a Saudi magnate, Alwaleed bin Talal. On the 2016 Forbes list of the world’s largest companies, this conglomerate of Saudi origin was ranked number 1,779, with an estimated capital of US $ 12.2 thousand million. Alwaleed bin Talal has invested in Apple, Twitter, GM, Citygroup, 21st Century Fox, etc. In 2018, he talked about his investment interest in Netflix and Amazon. Through KHC, with 95% ownership, bin Talal has positioned himself as an investor in almost all sectors, including financial services, real estate, hotels, petrochemicals, telecommunications, aviation, commerce, and media. The remaining 5% of the conglomerate is distributed among various Saudi and Western shareholders. Those known are, or have been (given the lack of transparency in this type of data) La Française Asset Management SAS (0.81%), Talal bin Ibrahim Al-Maiman (0.15%), Mellon Investments Corp. (0.0003 %), Caisse des Dépôts (0.8074%), Shadi Sadeek Sanbar (0.1424%), and Saleh Ali Saud Al-Sagri (0.0482%). All these companies -from here and thereare obliged to get on with each other much more in the future, like those in other sectors that they are linked to. It is, in a few words, the announcement of a world government where good journalism faces a complicated future, among other factors because entertainment and great alliances have arrived (Figure 7 and Table 2) to launch millions of messages to receivers for evasion and much of journalism is entering this trend. Table 2. Audiovisual platforms, 2018-2019 Name Country Alliances Netflix EUA Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone HBO EUA Time Warner Prime Video EUA Amazon Premium EUA YouTube Huawei Video China Atresmedia, RTVE, Entertainment One (eOne), Zoomin, Inverleigh, Daluqiao, Thema (part of the French group Canal+ for content) Sky/Disney Video EUA ABC, Disney, News Corporation In a few lines we have described Power, for good, for evil and all the gray tones in the middle. We do not have space to comment on the data and images, but we believe that those are quite enlightening. However, the question is not over yet, how will Power be in the next years of this 21st century? Figure 6. Detail of the structure of the KHC conglomerate. In the center, the magnate Alwaleed bin Talal (Ortega-Pérez, 2019). Figure 7. 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