/32/ - Psychopolitics

This article contains highlights from an interview with MTV Chairman and CEO, Bill Roedy to Al Jazeera television, broadcast April 5, 2008. Throughout the film, he reveals the political nature of MTV, which reaches youth in 162 countries in 32 languages. Roedy is a former army ranger, involved in overseeing nuclear bases.
‘I joined in Late 88 or 89 and there was tremendous sea change of political events happening in Eastern Europe culminating with the wall coming down in East Berlin. …We were actually distributing in Eastern Europe [as] these changes were happening… I was invited to give a speech in East Berlin about East meets West and it just happened to be the same week the wall came down and we were going to a reception with the politburo attending and great celebration and they didn’t attend. They all resigned and that was 24 hours of when we hooked up MTV and we had this great picture of East German soldiers on the wall with an MTV umbrella.‘
You were a NATO soldier but you ended up standing on the wall while it was being torn down.
(Little smile) ‘Yes there’s tremendous irony in that…I’ve had these privileges of being in Eastern Europe with NATO at one point and then fast-forward twenty years later with television.’
When asked why he was attracted to television Bill again makes no mention of business motives.
What made you gravitate towards MTV which was a very young channel at the time? It was disruptive technology, …what made you think you had a career there?
‘Well, I always loved television. The power of television, the power to reach mass groups of people and then if you do it right, connect.’
What is this power? He gives us the answer when explaining how music is vital in the creation of a global culture,
‘Music can be a unifying force, it can be a vehicle for cultural exchange, it brings people together and it also elicits an emotional response that sometimes is stronger than political leadership, even religious leadership.’
The natural target is the young, who once mesmerised and programmed by the music permanently change their culture. Bill is asked if the music he promotes is harmful,
‘I think music by definition because it relates so strongly to young people is a little bit irreverent and therefore adults feel often unsettled with it. But I think the interesting thing about Rock ‘N’ Roll when it started it was very much that and people said ‘O my gosh!’ and obviously it seems very tame by today’s standards, but the young people growing up then have kept music in their lives more than that generation.’
MTV changes indigenous cultures by localizing their channels. During the interview he repeatedly stresses the importance of localization: ‘The defining characteristic I believe of our culture at MTV Networks is to respect other cultures… 2 billion people worldwide tune into the channel and we have this vertical connection with them, we’re seen as a trusted voice.’
An example is MTV Indonesia: ‘…we’re very visible in the Islamic world now, we’ve been in Indonesia now for many years, we have call of prayer on the channel in Indonesia 5 times a day and we do a portrayal of Ramadan in a youthful way so we have fun with it but we respect it of course.’
And when you’ve created a gateway into some exotic land, what do you do? You start modifying the behaviour of the audience to suit political ends, say by promoting the perils of…

‘Climate change has the potential to affect the entire world. It’s reached a tipping point more quickly than aids, it took years it seemed for it to be even covered by the media but the public seems to be ahead of the politicians and institutions on climate change… but behavioural change is a challenge, I always say small pieces, with a network like MTV with almost 2 billion people small behavioural change on a large group of people equals a big thing, so if everyone turns their lights out it’s equal to a big thing, so we can have an influence.’
From the sex and violence in MTV videos, there is also an agenda to make traditional values obsolete.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/the-vietnam-vet-who-thinks-mtv-can-make-the-world-a-better-place-1821543.html

>>658
Bill Roedy is the international statesman who never got voted out of office. To step into his London office is to enter a museum filled with artefacts featuring the global leaders, world-changing events, natural disasters and cultural icons that have characterised the past two decades. Every photograph, painting and ornament relates to the media career of this tough-looking Vietnam veteran, the chairman and chief executive of MTV Networks International.
“That’s Shanghai, Sarajevo, there’s Bono, that’s our trip to Cuba where we had a couple of meetings with Fidel,” he says pointing to a large photo of the Cuban leader with Ernest Hemingway, actually autographed by Castro. “I’ve met Shimon Peres a few times over the years. There are the Rolling Stones. Warren Buffett, who gave me poker tips. There’s the Dalai Lama…”
Roedy, who oversees MTV’s output in 162 countries and 33 languages, resists the suggestion that he has the role of a globe-trotting ambassador – “I don’t know if I would take it that seriously” – but then says: “I have met over 30 heads of state and seven or eight Nobel prize winners.”
Another photograph shows him on a recent trip to Afghanistan, holding aloft his BlackBerry alongside an Afghan solider posing with an AK47. Trained at the elite West Point military academy, Roedy is a former airborne Ranger who later specialised in deactivating nuclear missile bases. The soldier’s life is behind him now, but he still has battles on his hands.
Michael Jackson’s death was a reminder of the role Jacko played in perfecting music video and the growth of MTV. It showed how influential the Viacom-owned network was to a generation that has now grown up. But does it have the same resonance with today’s teenagers, who get their music fixes online? Roedy’s response is well-illustrated by the television screen beside him, where the X Factor winner Alexandra Burke is singing on MTV’s new British channel, Viva, launched last month. Viva is also a key element of the British website mtv.co.uk – a broad offering that includes comedy and children’s content and seems to have a female skew. “I think we have 160 analogue channels and we’re still launching them,” he says. “But we have over 300 digital products – mobile phone channels, websites – we’ve worked really hard to create a footprint and integrate the digital with the analogue. The thing we’ve done is morphed into multi-platform distribution.”
Gaming has become a key part of Viacom’s multi-platform business, especially the newly-launched The Beatles: Rock Band game. There are MTV games for mobiles, games for kids on the Nickelodeon channel’s website and hundreds more ways to fritter away time on the AddictingGames site, an acquisition which now forms part of the MTV Online Network. “Add it all together and we are the number two destination worldwide for casual games on the internet,” says Roedy.

>>659
When MTV launched in New Jersey in 1981, its first clip was, famously, The Buggles’ hit Video Killed The Radio Star, produced by Trevor Horn whose latest work is the new Robbie Williams album Reality Killed The Video Star. Again, there’s that sense of the end of an era.
But MTV would argue that it has a major stake in reality television too, having made a strategic switch at the turn of the millennium, most successfully with The Osbournes, which launched in 2002. Current British-based series include the car show Pimp My Ride, hosted by Radio 1’s hip-hop presenter Tim Westwood, and My Super Sweet 16, about teenagers preparing for their all-important birthdays. A new show, Slips, Roedy describes as “kind of Top Gear meets Pimp My Ride: there’s a race-off between artists”.
The English model and party girl Alexa Chung has been given her own New York-based talk show, It’s On With Alexa Chung. Then there’s the late-night offering Pants Off, Dance Off, which is basically a show about stripping. “It’s a funny type thing, dancing to current music and … I know it sounds weird … but disrobing,” says Roedy, somewhat awkwardly. “It’s not that edgy.”
I’m beginning to see why he doesn’t always take his role too seriously. But then he was at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin a few days ago to meet Mikhail Gorbachev and to see U2 and Jay-Z perform at the MTV European Music Awards, a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. MTV found itself criticised after building its own wall around the concert to keep it exclusive to the 10,000 people with tickets. Roedy say the awards, like the rest of the MTV output, are about celebrating the present rather than dwelling on the past. “Our audience doesn’t know who Gorbachev is. It’s all about experiencing MTV in its many forms on many different platforms in a holistic 360-degree way.”
But Roedy happened to be in Berlin that week in November 1989, when the infamous barrier was hauled down, and in his office he keeps a lump of wall as a memento of a moment that was pivotal in the advance across the continent of MTV’s fledgling European operation. It was at that moment that MTV found itself a symbol of the benefits of capitalism, with eastern European viewers dazzled by western television commercials.
But not everyone thought MTV was a good thing, even in Britain, where the network arrived in 1987 and was seen as a cultural threat. “People didn’t wish us well, there were a lot of obstacles. Now it seems like a slam dunk, a no brainer, but at the time it was very iffy whether this would actually work,” says Roedy. In Britain, he was told: “We have the BBC and the three channels and that’s all we need.”
In the early years of MTV “Anglo-American music dominated the world”, but that is no longer the case. The network was criticised for not playing enough black music and learned a lot from Michael Jackson’s success. “The whole music scene has changed remarkably. It’s much more diversified,” says Roedy. “We like to think we played a role in exposing audiences to music they otherwise wouldn’t have heard.”
He talks of an “epiphany” when he first heard German techno being played in South Korea. In 2005, he launched – with Will Smith and Nelson Mandela – MTV Africa. Roedy is convinced that Indian pop music is about to produce global stars. MTV has a 24-hour branded show across the Pearl River Delta in China, has done eight years of video awards in Beijing and is expanding in the vast Chinese mobile market. “We have a fashion show in Shanghai on 3 December which I’m going to,” he adds. As he travels, he collects local music with Pakistani and Mexican groups being among his current favourites. “I drive my wife crazy by still playing this Mongolian group that I got from my China trip.”
Roedy, 59, who has four children under 13, has lived in England for 21 years and has British citizenship. Sir Winston Churchill is his hero and he has recently bought a London flat overlooking Westminster Cathedral where Winny lived and wrote his “Wilderness Years” speeches.
Later the same day, Roedy is due to meet 15 young people from as far afield as Azerbaijan and Zambia, who have been given grants to work on MTV’s Staying Alive campaign to combat HIV and Aids, which will be heavily covered on the network’s channels around World Aids Day on 1 December. “It’s part of the DNA of the corporate culture and the channel,” he says. “We’ll have Wyclef yelling at you to wear a condom or Beyoncé telling you to just say no.”
Other MTV international campaigns he oversees include Switch (addressing climate change) and Exit (highlighting human trafficking in its many forms). But Roedy says he is “definitely not a politician”. “We have been blessed and privileged by being part of history, and we want to reflect the amazing diversity of the world musically and culturally … and lift the spirit.”

from https://seeker401.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/bill-roedy-the-boss-of-mtv/