Anyone know what the book "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" is about?

Question

"Rich Media, Poor Democracy" by Robert W. McChesney?
Particularly, the 'Conclusion' Chapter.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Some would interpret the book as providing a viewpoint that big media (through it's various mergers and takeovers) have reached a level of control that instead of being primarily focused on serving the public's interests (democracy) - these corporations may have become overly concerned with it's own commercialism (profits) and politically supporting and enacting public policies (laws passed) that serve to protect their turf. Rich Media may have become overly fixated about themselves to the extent that their commitment to the First Amendment may have weakened during the process, if so, then the public should organize politically to restructure the media in order to affirm their connection to democracy.

Answer 2

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... U.S. democracy is in a decrepit state - exemplified by a depoliticization that would make a tyrant envious, and the corporate commercial media system is an important factor though not the only or even the most important factor, in understanding how this sorry state came to be. The corporate media cement a system whereby the wealthy and powerful few make the most important decisions with virtually no informed public participation. Crucial political issues are barely covered by the corporate media, or else are warped to fit the confines of elite debate, stripping ordinary citizens of the tools they need to be informed, active participants in a democracy. Moreover, the media system is not only closely linked to the ideological dictates of the business-run society, it is also an integral element of the economy. Hence, for those who regard inequality and untrammeled commercialism as undermining the requirements of a democratic society, media reform must be on the political agenda.
At present, however, and for generations, the control and structure of the media industries has been decidedly off-limits as a subject in U.S. political debate. So long as that holds true, it is difficult to imagine any permanent qualitative change for the better in the U.S. media system. And without media reform, the prospects for making the United States a more egalitarian, self-governing, and humane society seem dim to the point of nonexistence.
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... the only hope for significant media reform in the United States and elsewhere will be the emergence of a strong left political movement that puts media reform on the political agenda... this is an argument aimed at those concerned with the antidemocratic tendencies of the U.S. media system, urging them to see media reform as part of a broader political project. And it is an argument aimed at those on the political left, stressing that it is imperative that the left incorporate media reform into its platform. This has been, and remains, a weak spot in much US. left organizing... the left needs to do this because the vast, unbridled power of the media is central to the antidemocratic nature of U.S. society and to the dominant role of corporations and combinations of wealth. In addition ... there exists considerable dissatisfaction with the U.S. media system, and that this could become an organizing tool for an aggressive left. ... this dissatisfaction cuts across many of the left constituencies that are sometimes at odds with each other and reaches many people who would not regard themselves as being anywhere near the political left. In short, media reform is an issue with the potential to help galvanize a movement to democratize U.S. society.
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To some it may not seem politically astute to connect the movement for democratic media to the fortunes of the political left. In the United States, the term "left" is now largely in disrepute, deemed the failed ideology of inefficient and arrogant state bureaucracies, even political dictatorships. For many who propose democratic reform, the wisest move is to seek new terminology, avoiding terms like "the left" with its undesirable baggage altogether. In my view, the only course that makes sense in the long run is to reclaim "left" and recharge it with its historic meaning. "If 'left' means anything anymore," Joel Rogers writes, "it means 'democracy.' As applied to organizing our lives together, it means greater popular control over the terms and conditions of that life, and greater social justice inscribed in those terms." The purpose of the left, then, is to struggle for conditions that make genuine democracy, genuine self-government, possible. Because democracy works best with as much political equality as possible, it works best when there is as little social inequality as possible. The political left has been and is the primary social agency against social inequality, and it has acted thus through popular mobilization that gives meaning to the term democracy. The left's "singular contribution" to history, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward observe, "has been to bring working-class people fully into history, not simply as victims but as actors."
Being on the left does not necessarily make one a proponent of socialism as much as it makes one a proponent of the principle that it is proper that a society determine the type of economy it prefers through informed debate in which everyone has a legitimate opportunity to participate. The core principle is that the economy should be subservient to democracy, to the will of the people. In this sense, the "left" position is the organic product of the best elements of the liberal democratic tradition. The point of the left, then, is to struggle to establish the conditions under which such democratic debate can take place, and then the organization of the economy should result from that debate. In my view, the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that when the conditions of democracy are fruitful, there will be considerable pressure to reduce economic inequality and insecurity and to rein in the market, if not necessarily to establish a flat-out socialist economy where private investment and the profit motive are drastically curtailed... Wealthy interests in the United States ... work resolutely to limit the capacity for informed self-government, through, among other things, maintaining corrupt campaign finance and lobbying systems, elite-dominated economic policy making, distorted electoral systems, weakened educational systems, and commercial media.
This tension between the democratic interests of the many and antidemocratic interests of the wealthy few has existed since the dawn of civilization. There has always been conflict between class societies and democracy. Prior to the late eighteenth century, in Europe and North America, democracy often was considered synonymous with classless or one-class societies, because it was assumed that if there were universal adult suffrage, no people would agree to their continued economic subjugation. James Madison wrote that if British elections "were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure." Even in ancient Greece this was a central concern. In his Politics, Aristotle not only characterized democracy as "rule of the poor" but also added that would always be democracy's nature and raison d'etre even if the poor comprised a minority of the citizenry. It was also widely accepted that if a person had to work for another person, that person could never be a political equal. This was a primary justification for limiting suffrage to property owners and the middle and upper classes prior to the nineteenth century. Liberal democracy, as C. B. Macpherson so eloquently put it, is the modern and unprecedented marriage of the most sophisticated form of class society-capitalism-with some semblance of formal democracy; it is the combination of egalitarian politics with inegalitarian economics. This idea that democratic polities would invariably dispense with class societies persisted into the twentieth century. When Edgar Snow traveled with the Chinese communists in the 1930s, he recounted the Chinese peasants' shock that much of the United States had universal adult suffrage yet somehow the nation was not socialist. We know well now that universal suffrage does not guarantee the rule of the many in capitalist societies; control over the economy is a significant, often the dominant, source of power generally outside of parliamentary or direct popular control.
So capitalism and democracy are not synonymous, nor have they ever been. Capitalism requires that commercial activities be granted considerable freedom, and this has at times opened the door to broader civil liberties; but even under the best of circumstances, capitalism is innately in conflict with the core tenets of democracy. The core reason is that capitalism is invariably a class society where a very small percentage of the population has most of the society's wealth and a disproportionate share of its income. This permits the wealthy few a distinct advantage in pursuing their own political interests, and it also permits them to undermine the efforts of the many to strive for a more egalitarian society. Hence, the logical type of democracy that accords to a capitalist society is one where the poorer one is, the less possible it is to influence political outcomes and the more rational it is to become apathetic and depoliticized. Accordingly, for those who believe in democracy, it is imperative to reduce social and economic inequality. Democracy also works best when there exists a democratic spirit, a notion that an individual's welfare is directly and closely attached to the welfare of the community, however broadly community may be defined. Capitalism, with its incessant pressure to think only of Number One regardless of the implications for the balance of the community, is hardly conducive to building a caring, democratic culture.
This does not mean that capitalism cannot coexist with some version of democracy, merely that the two are in unavoidable tension. One need not be a socialist to be a democrat, but I think it fair to say that to be a democrat one must possess an awareness of the problems of class inequality and a strong skepticism toward the unfettered market. "A moral condemnation of great wealth must inform any defense of the free market" in a democracy, Christopher Lasch observed, "and that moral condemnation must be backed up by effective political action." In these neoliberal times, this critical notion of the market-once not uncommon among a certain breed of liberal and conservative-has become heretical. It is worth noting that capitalist societies have been made vastly more democratic and humane when left movements and parties have been able to organize significant economic and political power. Democracy has never been handed down from elites to those beneath them in the social pecking order. Democracy must be proclaimed, organized around, fought for, and won.'...
In the era of universal adult suffrage, however, the cold fist of class arrogance, hubris, and power was replaced by many new ideological developments, not the least of which was the art and science of "public relations." Public relations, Alex Carey observed, is all about protecting the wealthy and their corporations from the wrath of universal suffrage. It was and is about using surreptitious ideological warfare to discredit antibusiness ideas, to disrupt the possibility of informed public debate, and to glorify the market and the status quo. As Carey so aptly put it, PR is about helping to "tak[e] the risk out of democracy" for the wealthy few in societies with universal adult suffrage. "Our society has grossly overbuilt its expectations of what can be achieved and provided," Philip Lesly, a leading U.S. PR figure wrote in I 974. "This is a consequence of the extremism of 'democracy'-never foreseen by the most visionary founders of our democratic society-that seeks to give a voice and power to everyone on every issue, regardless of his merit in serving society or ability.'' As PR historian Stuart Ewen observed, Lesly argued "the task of public relations must be to curtail Americans' democratic expectations." In fact, the idea of using disinformation techniques to undermine the ability of the great mass of people to effectively govern their lives first occurred to upper-class French thinkers in I793, the very year that France became the first nation in history to grant -albeit briefly-universal adult male suffrage. As the notorious conservative Tosenh de Maistre put it then. "Man's cradle must be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason awakens, he must find all his opinions already made, at least those concerning his social behavior."
Unlike their predecessors, contemporary upper classes and business loudly swear their allegiance to democracy-even to the idea of popular sovereignty-but in private do whatever they can to limit its actual viability. As Noam Chomsky has noted with considerable irony, when the mass of people became politically active in the I960s in the United States and worldwide, some among the governing elite solemnly characterized this as posing a "crisis of democracy."
So where do media fit into this struggle over what constitutes democracy, and to the relationship of social inequality to self-government? Smack dab in the middle. If democracy is genuinely committed to letting citizens have equal influence over political affairs, it is crucial that all citizens have access to a wide range of well-formulated political positions on the core issues of the day, as well as a rigorous accounting of the activities of the political and economic powers that be and the powers that want to be. Unless communication and information are biased toward equality, they tend to enhance social inequality, whether the society happens to be democratic or otherwise. In densely populated and complex societies, this means-if the governing process is predicated upon having an informed citizenry-that the media perform a crucial function. While growing from the merest of existences in democratic Athens to a vital role in the era of democratic revolutions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is only in the twentieth century that media have assumed an absolutely central role in the political and cultural realms. Whereas the media were rightly understood as a "dependent" variable in classical political theory and analysis in the past, today the media seem a force to be reckoned with in their own right. Moreover, if the emergence of universal adult suffrage has demanded more subtle forms of public opinion management, the media are also the central institutions in that regard. In sum, the media have become an increasingly important battleground for political debate and culture.
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The Left and Media Heretofore
Historically, labor and the left have understood the importance of having their own media to communicate with members and potential members. There was not a great deal written on the role of media, nor were there major debates on the matter; it was generally taken for granted as a key area of development for labor and the left. Indeed, one can almost date the origins of any specific organized left party or labor organization to when it developed the wherewithal to produce its own media. Some of the more successful and aggressive unions and political parties had extensive media outlets. In the early I900s, Socialist party members and supporters published some 325 English and foreign language daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers and magazines. Most of these were privately owned or were the publications of one or another of the five thousand Socialist party locals. They reached a total of more than two million subscribers. Similarly, from the late nineteenth century on, just about every labor union had its own newspaper. (Even as recently as the I 940S, there were eight hundred U.S. labor newspapers reaching twenty to thirty million people per week.) It was the aim of many of these movements to provide a near complete working-class civil society, replete with media, a political platform, and cultural and educational services. This sentiment continued into the twentieth century, to varying degrees around the world, but of late it has diminished as a result of an increasingly powerful, pervasive, and commercialized media and culture.
Today, working-class people get the lion's share of their news and entertainment from the commercial media, and labor and left media are generally at the margins.
So it was in the twentieth century that issues of media control and ownership became truly political matters in the fullest sense. The response from labor and the left to the commercialization of media and the marginalization of labor or pro-working-class media has taken many forms. In the first two decades of this century, progressives and socialists worked to establish municipally owned newspapers and telephone systems. In Hollywood, there was a strong socialist and pro-working-class component prior to the I920s that only fell after a drawn-out fight with the emerging studio system. Labor and the left were also active in the unsuccessful campaign in the I930s to establish a public service broadcasting system, and to keep radio and television from falling into unaccountable corporate hands with support generated through advertising. And aside from organized political activism, at an intellectual level, left critics have tended to regard the rise of the corporate media system as quite detrimental to the interests of the dispossessed and the prospects for participatory democracy. But with the demise of organized reform campaigns, this criticism has declined.
Some of the most aggressive left and labor movements have had aggressive media platforms, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) highlighted an explicit hostility to capitalist media in the I930s and I940s. It made the creation of labor and public service media a high priority, explaining that the labor movement could not thrive if the press remained in the hands of capital. Even the more conservative American Federation of Labor's (AFL) Chicago chapter established a radio station explicitly to have a radical pro-working-class broadcasting network. In a broader sense, media organizing was part and parcel of establishing a viable popular "cultural front," as Michael Denning terms the surge in pro-working-class and democratic culture in the I930s and I940s. What is crucial to understand is that labor and the left did not abandon organizing around structural media issues because they became newly satisfied with the status quo and came to regard the matter as unimportant. To the contrary, labor and the left media activities were crushed in the I930s by corporate interests, making the notion of challenging them any further seem in the I940s, organized labor's interest in battling commercial and corporate media interests collapsed altogether, and the corporate media power became ever more entrenched. The "cultural front" was crushed as well, together with a left alternative vision for democratizing the United States.
In sum, the decline of labor's interest in media activism in the postwar years can be traced to the following: the conservatism of labor; the decline of the left with a broad social democratic notion of democracy; and the sheer economic, political, and ideological power of the corporate media, which made their dominance seemingly unchallengeable and acceptance of the commercial media system seem politically neutral, relatively benign, and not a necessary hindrance to labor. (The latter is predicated on the idea that "professionalism" would protect the public from the class bias of owners and advertisers.) Finally, labor has dismissed the media as unimportant in any meaningful sense-meaning that the "real action" for labor and social change in general lay elsewhere. By this reasoning, if labor got its act together elsewhere, media would fall in line; if it did not, that would be no big deal. As a result, in the United States at least, media reform became the province of do-gooder middle-class liberals who lacked any popular support and had no ambition to generate it. Accordingly, it has gone nowhere and accomplished next to nothing...
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There remains considerable disinterest in (or opposition to) the idea of organizing for structural media reform across the democratic left in the United States. Two of the three new left electoral parties- the Labor Party, and the New Party-avoid any mention of media in their core platforms. Some chapters of the Green Party have made an issue of media ownership and control, perhaps influenced by Ralph Nader's persistent call for stricter control over the publicly owned airwaves; but these are token gestures at best. The Progressive caucus of the U.S. Congress has shown slight interest in the matter; its most outspoken advocate seems to be Representative Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vt.). "This is an issue that is absolutely vital to democracy, and that only the left can address. The New Party, the Green Party, the Labor Party, progressive Democrats should be all over this issue," says Sanders. "But, for most of the left, it's not even on the agenda." Sanders, arguably the U.S. socialist with the greatest success at winning statewide elections in fifty years, is unequivocal about the importance of media reform: "The challenge of our time is to make media relevant for a vibrant democracy. This issue is absolutely vital to rebuilding democracy in America and to reasserting the voice of democracy on a global scale."
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...when one sees how labor and progressive social movements have fared in the U.S. media over the past fifty years, the importance of media reform becomes less abstract. In the 1930s and I940s, for example, nearly every medium-to-large circulation daily newspaper had at least one full-time labor editor or beat reporter. When the Flint sitdown strikes established the UAW as a major trade union in the late I 930s, it was a front-page story across the nation. The coverage often was unsympathetic, but at least it was there. At the outer limits of what mainstream journalism could produce, consider the New York I 940s daily newspaper PM, which ran extensive coverage of strike activities (and civil rights activities) with careful presentations of the workers' positions. But then, PM did not accept advertising, which explains its content and, regrettably, perhaps its demise. In the I990s there are fewer than ten labor reporters on daily newspapers in the entire nation. (Conversely, there are seemingly thousands and thousands of business writers who daily fill the nation's papers with their stories.) In I989, when the largest sitdown strike since Flint took place in Pittston, Virginia, the episode went virtually unreported in the U.S. media. When several leading U.S. trade unions formed a new Labor political party in I996, that, too, was likewise almost completely unreported in the commercial media. Labor coverage has been reduced to rare coverage of strikes-usually in the context of how the strikers are threatening violence or creating a burden for the people in their communities. If one read only the commercial media, it would be difficult to determine what on earth good was served by having labor unions at all.
... The corporate media system has a strong internal bias toward reflecting elite opinion; hence the so-called dominant "liberal" voices in the United States- the New York Times and the Washington Post-are stridently procapitalist and were among the leading media to favor passage of GATT and NAFTA. When, in I997, labor led the fight to defeat the law before Congress that would permit the "fast-tracking" of trade deliberation, the Times and the Post-along with virtually the entirety of the corporate media-barely concealed their contempt for labor's intrusion into the policy-making process. And these are the media that, in mainstream mythology, are supposed to be the most sympathetic to the interests of working people.
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... the left needs to accept the necessity of media reform and move forward.
Moreover, making media reform a component of the left agenda has many positive benefits. It is an area that can generate much popular support, and from people who are not necessarily identified with the left. Social conservatives are concerned about the commerical carpetbombing of our culture, and some free market conservatives may see media as an area where the market is producing disastrous "externalities." Although the issue receives scant attention in the media, there is evidence of growing public dissatisfaction with the hypercommercialized media system. In few areas are the conflicts between corporate rule and the needs of a democracy more apparent. The left can use media as an educational tool to explain the flaws in the existing social order and to present its vision of what a more democratic society would look like. And labor and the left can use media reform as an issue that can unite elements of the citizenry, like labor, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights activists, journalists, artists, educators, librarians, parents, and many others who would benefit from major media reform. Nor is this really much of an option. If labor and the left do not step forward with a vision and program for media reform, the dissident critique of media will be provided solely by the far right with its bogus analysis and censorial solutions. Under no circumstances is that an acceptable situation.
Struggle for Democratic Media
So what should the left do to address the commercial media system? First and foremost, it has to put media reform on its agenda, devote resources to the matter, and work to get media reform on the broader political agenda. The core principle is that control over communication has to be taken away from Wall Street and Madison Avenue and put in the hands of citizens, journalists, and others whose concerns are not limited to the bottom line...

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Structural Media Reform
... the most important area of political activity ultimately is to organize to change government media policies. The core problem with the U.S. media system relates to how it is owned, its profit motivation, and its reliance upon advertising. Moreover, the media system is the direct result of explicit government subsidies and policies, though that point is rarely acknowledged. Any attempt to affect U.S. media that does not address structural issues directly through government policies will prove inconsequential in the long run. Corporate media power must be confronted directly, and reduced.
... But providing real solutions is no simple matter. There are many ways to reach the objective of a more diverse and competitive commercial system with a significant-preferably a dominant-nonprofit and noncommercial sector. Many left media critics present superb analyses of the weaknesses of the status quo but are reticent about providing concrete solutions; these will develop, they argue, over the course of political struggle and debate. But by the end of the I990s we have reached the point where, in order to proceed, media reformers have to provide concrete examples of an alternative; otherwise, many people will not have any idea of what, exactly, they are fighting for. I therefore offer forthwith four general proposals for media reform. These are by no means explicit blueprints; they are meant to open discussion in a fruitful manner, not close it off. If and when a significant element of U.S. society began to engage with the idea of recasting the media system, these ideas probably would be readily improved upon.
I. Building nonprofit and noncommercial media.
The starting point for media reform is to build up a viable nonprofit, noncommercial media sector. Such a sector currently exists in the United States, and produces much of value, but it is woefully small and underfunded... it can be developed independent of changes in laws and regulations. For example, foundations and organized labor could and should contribute far more to nonprofit media. Sympathetic government policies could also help foster a nonprofit media sector, and media reform must work to this end. Government subsidies and policies have played a key role in establishing lucrative commercial media. Since the nineteenth century, for example, the United States has permitted publications to have quality, high-speed mailing at relatively low rates. We could extend this principle to lower mailing costs for a wider range of nonprofit media, and/or for media that have little or no advertising. Likewise we could permit all sorts of tax deductions or write-offs for contributions to nonprofit media. Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute has developed a plan for permitting taxpayers to take up to $150 off of their federal tax bill, if they donate the money to a nonprofit news medium. This would permit almost all Americans to contribute to nonprofit media-not just those with significant disposable incomes-and help create an alternative to the dominant Wall Street/Madison Avenue system.
2. Public broadcasting.
Establishing a strong nonprofit sector to complement the commercial giants is not enough. The costs of creating a more democratic media system simply are too high. Therefore, it is important to establish and maintain a noncommercial, nonproft, public radio and television system. The system should include national networks, local stations, public access television, and independent community radio stations. Every community should also have a stratum of low-power television and micropower radio stations.
... the marked limitations of U.S. public broadcasting, historically and to this day. It is really a system of nonprofit commercial broadcasting, serving a sliver of the population. What we need is a system of real public broadcasting, with no advertising, that accepts no grants from corporations or private bodies and that serves the entire population, not merely those who are disaffected from the dominant commercial system and have disposable income to contribute during pledge drives. Two hurdles stand in the way of such a system. The first is organizational: How can public broadcasting be structured to make the system accountable and prevent a bureaucracy impervious to popular tastes and wishes, but to give the public broadcasters enough institutional strength to prevent implicit and explicit attempts at censorship by political authorities? The second is fiscal: Where will the funds come from to pay for a viable public broadcasting service? At present, the federal government provides $260 million annually. The public system I envision-which would put per capita U.S. spending in a league with, for example, Britain and Japan-may well cost $5-I0 billion annually.
There is no one way to resolve the organizational problem, and perhaps an ideal solution can never be found. But there are better ways, as any comparative survey indicates. One key element in preventing bureaucratic ossification or government meddling will be to establish a pluralistic system, with national networks, local stations, community and public access stations, all controlled independently. In some cases direct election of officers by the public and also by public broadcasting employees may be appropriate, whereas in other cases appointment by elected political bodies may be preferable.
As for funding, I have no qualms about drawing the funds for fully public radio and television from general revenues. We subsidize education, but the government now subsidizes media only on behalf of owners. Bona fide nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting should be a cornerstone of a modern democracy. This is a crucial point: all current discussion of U.S. public broadcasting is premised on the notion that any proposal must come up with the explicit source of any additional public funds that go to the public system. Such a demand is politically loaded to derail the possibility of real public broadcasting; why is this demand never made when federal moneys go to military spending, corporate bailouts, or to the IMF? We should seek to have a stable source of funding that cannot be subject to political manipulation by politicians with little direct interest in the integrity of the system.
A powerful public radio and television system could have a profound effect on our entire media culture. It could lead the way in providing the type of public service journalism that commercialism is now killing off. This might in turn give commercial journalists the impetus they need to pursue the hard stories they now avoid. It could have a similar effect upon our entertainment culture. A viable public TV system could support a legion of small independent filmmakers. It could do wonders for reducing the reliance of our political campaigns upon expensive commercial advertising. It is essential to ensuring the diversity and deliberation that lie at the heart of a democratic public sphere.
3. Regulation.
A third main plank is to increase regulation of commercial broadcasting in the public interest. Media reformers have long been active in this arena, if only because the public ownership of the airwaves gives the public, through the FCC, a clear legal right to negotiate terms with the chosen few who get broadcast licenses. Still, even this form of media activism has been negligible, and broadcast regulation has been largely toothless, with the desires of powerful corporations and advertisers rarely challenged.
Experience in the United States and abroad indicates that if commercial broadcasters are not held to high public service standards, they will generate the easiest profits by resorting to the crassest commercialism and overwhelm the balance of the media culture. Moreover, standard-setting will not work if commercial broadcasters are permitted to "buy" their way out of public service obligations; the record shows that they will eventually find a way to reduce or eliminate these payments. (It is worth noting that most current proposals to maintain federal funding for public broadcasting-usually not much above the current ridiculously low amounts-include provisions to let the commercial broadcasters buy their way out of public service programming, passing these duties on to the public broadcasters.) Hence the most successful mixed system of commercial and public broadcasting in the world was found in Britain from the I950s to the I 980s. It was successful because the commercial broadcasters were held to public service standards comparable to those employed by the BBC; some scholars even argue that the commercial system sometimes outperformed the BBC as a public service broadcaster. The British scheme worked because commercial broadcasters were threatened with loss of their licenses if they did not meet public service standards. (Regrettably, Thatcherism, with its mantra that the market can do no wrong, has undermined the integrity of the British broadcasting system.)
The U.S. experience also makes clear one other point: the commercial broadcasters will do everything in their power to avoid public interest obligations if they in any way detract from the bottom line; that is, if they in any way might be effective. To make the commercial broadcasters comply with public service obligations would require little short of a permanent war with one of the strongest lobbies in Washington, D.C., hardly a desirable proposition. The solution is clear: commercial broadcasters should receive their licenses for only eighteen to twenty hours per day. The remaining four to six hours should be taken out of their control and dedicated to public service. Some might complain that it would be unfair to reduce the time of the commercial broadcasters in such a manner, as they have purchased these stations thinking that they would get access to the full day. In my view, that reasoning is wrong. This is public property, and the public has the right to set the terms of its use. Firms that purchased TV and radio stations were assuming that the broadcast lobby would be able to continue to run roughshod over Congress and the FCC. That was the risk they were taking when they made these investments; there was never any formal agreement that these broadcast licenses were to be theirs permanently on terms of their choosing.
The four to six hours of "liberated" time on the broadcast stations should be applied to two specific areas: children's programming and news/public affairs shows. In each case, we must devise systems so that control over these time blocks is in the hands of artists and educators for children's programs, and in the hands of journalists for news and public affairs. This will not be an easy task, but if we study the matter we can certainly devise adequate systems. At any rate, the result would have to be far superior to the commercial carpetbombing of children and the junk news that currently dominates the airwaves. A core problem with this recommendation is that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasters and not to cable channels. Insofar as cable television increasingly provides much of what is aimed at children and an increasing portion of the national news, regulating commercial broadcasting in these areas might not have the full effect desired. We will need to think creatively about ways to get public service commitments from the cable channels. But short of that, there will still be value in having a solid block of ad-free children's and news programming in the heart of the schedule. In particular, local TV news remains almost entirely on over-the-air channels, so putting this on noncommercial terms would definitely improve news coverage in local communities. In view of the pathetic state of local commercial television news at present, that, alone, makes this a worthwhile proposition.
As for funding this public service programming, I subscribe to the principle that it should be subsidized by the beneficiaries of commercialized communication. This principle might be applied in several ways. We could charge commercial broadcasters rent on the electromagnetic spectrum they use to broadcast. Or we could charge them a tax whenever they sell the stations for a profit. In combination these mechanisms could generate well over a billion dollars annually. Or we could tax advertising. Some $212 billion will be spent to advertise in the United States in I999. A very small sales tax on this or even only on that portion that goes to radio and television could generate several billion dollars. It might also have the salutary effect of slowing down the commercial onslaught on American social life. And it does not seem like too much to ask of advertisers who are permitted otherwise to marinate most of the publicly owned spectrum in commercialism.
In November I998 the FCC provided a creative idea for solving this problem fairly, albeit unwittingly. It decided to levy a 5 percent fee on all commercial revenues broadcasters generate from the use of their licensed frequencies aside from traditional broadcasting. (In the digital era, broadcasters have located many new revenue-generating uses of their spectrum.) Such charges are justified by the FCC because these are purely commercial activities, unlike traditional broadcasting, and therefore the public has a right to expect cash compensation. ... the thinking goes that broadcasters do not have to pay for the spectrum they use for broadcasting because they compensate the public by doing all sorts of public interest broadcasting, that is, broadcasting material that would make no sense if they were strictly out to maximize profit. The absurdity of this rationale for broadcasters getting the spectrum for free is self-evident. In view of complete and utter lack of any semblance of public interest programming on commercial stations, it seems logical to extend this fee to all commercial broadcasting revenues. If we were to raise it to the I0 percent level recommended by the public advocacy group the Media Access Project, this would provide billions of dollars to subsidize noncommercial children's and news programming.
What would be fair compensation for commercial broadcasters to pay for their use of the public spectrum? At a I998 Gore Commission meeting, the National Association of Broadcasters asserted that commercial broadcasters provided $6.85 billion in public service annually... the NAB claimed that this amount was sufficient to satisfy the broadcasters' public service obligations. Being conciliatory by nature, I am willing to accept the NAB's benchmark for public service. I think it is clear, however, that the NAB, if its figures are to be trusted, is not getting much bang for its public service dollar, based on the state of U.S. broadcasting in I999. (Let's hope they use their money with greater effect in their other ventures.) Henceforth, let us set a fee structure on commercial broadcasters (through any of the ideas mentioned above) that will generate $6.85 billion annually in revenues in I998 dollars. Then, in addition to four to six hours daily of ad-free time set aside for children's and news programming, this amount of money would provide, without question, resources to have the most extraordinary children's and news programming imaginable. This would be real public service, the likes of which Americans have never seen. And with this public interest program in place, the commercial broadcasters could cut out any pretense of caring about the public interest and use the other eighteen to twenty hours every day to do what they do best: make money.
Even if these changes cannot be made in U.S. broadcasting, there are two other measures that could be taken that would provide immediate value: require free time set aside for all candidates to discuss issues and prohibit all paid television political advertising... the exorbitant cost of these ads (not to mention their lame content) has virtually destroyed the integrity of electoral democracy here. Short of banning them, then perhaps a provision should be made that if a candidate purchases a TV ad, his or her opponents will all be entitled to free ads of the same length on the same station immediately following the paid ad. This would prevent rich candidates from buying elections. I suspect it would pretty much eliminate the practice altogether.
4. Antitrust
The fourth strategy for creating a more democratic media system is to break up the largest firms and establish more competitive markets, thus shifting some control from corporate suppliers to citizen consumers. Antitrust action was once applied with some frequency by the government, even enjoying a "golden age" of sorts from I945 to the early I970s. But the Reagan-Bush era targeted antitrust as something to be reduced, as part of its campaign to "get government off our backs." As a result, one expert observed in I998 that "antitrust is sick and has been in retreat for over two decades." Antitrust has enjoyed a very minor resurgence in the late I 990S, but even the best that antitrust enforcement can hope for today is to make monopolies into duopolies, or make duopolies into oligopolies of three or four firms. And that is quite rare indeed. And, it is important to note, antitrust has yet to be employed to stop a major media deal. Indeed, the government has basically stood by as radio has concentrated almost overnight ... To some extent, intervention on specific deals at this point would be impossible, even unfair. Why prevent current dealmakers from doing that which their competitors have already done?
It is ironic that applying antitrust effectively to media and communications would not require that we abandon the spirit and principles that led to its rise a century ago. On the contrary, it would mean that we return to them. Antitrust, as Eben Moglen has brilliantly written, grew out of a Jacksonian concern that concentrated wealth would lead to private power destroying democratic government. "The connection between antitrust and the defense of democracy is intimate and long-standing, but largely ignored. Our failure to remember the history has been convenient for magnates and multinationals," Moglen writes. "Contemporary academic writing about antitrust tends to ignore this aspect of our history, pretending that 'consumer welfare'-defined almost exclusively in terms of product price and quality-is the primary goal competition serves. The effect is to make antitrust law an administrative system for dealing with minor market failures, by preventing supermarket chains, toy megastores or office-supply retailers from gaining local leverage over prices. Thus reined in, antitrust is a subject for technicians. The public loses interest" in antitrust as a policy, quite unlike earlier years when it was a populist rallying issue. Moglen observes that the newfangled, technocratic notion of antitrust leads clearly to the conclusion that "antitrust has no appropriate application to the question of who owns our media of broadcast communication." In fact, as Moglen concludes, the corporate media system richly deserves antitrust attention if we hold to the spirit in which antitrust statutes were drafted and passed into law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The political power implied in the consolidation of media into a handful of corporate behemoths rivals that of the great trusts of the Gilded Age.
What is needed, then, is a new media antitrust statute, similar in tone to the seminal Clayton and Sherman Acts, that lays out the general values to be enforced by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. It would put an emphasis on valuing the importance of ideological diversity and noncommercial editorial content. The objective should be to break up such media conglomerates as Time Warner, News Corporation, and Disney, so that their book publishing, magazine publishing, TV show production, movie production, TV stations, TV networks, amusement parks, retail store chains, cable TV channels, cable TV systems, and so on all become independent firms. With reduced barriers to entry in these specific markets, new firms could join in. It could lead to the radical reconfiguration, for example, of radio broadcasting, to the point where stations might be locally owned and not part of massive chains.
The media giants claim that their market power and conglomeration make them more efficient and therefore able to provide a better product at lower prices to the consumer. There is not much evidence for these claims, though it is clear that market power and conglomeration make these firms vastly more profitable. Moreover, even if one accepts that antitrust would lead to a less efficient economic model, perhaps we should pay that price to establish a more open and competitive marketplace. In view of media's importance for democratic politics and culture, they should not be judged by purely commercial criteria.
Antitrust is the wild card in the media reform platform. It has tremendous appeal across the population and is usually the first idea citizens suggest when they are confronted with the current media scene. But it is unclear how antitrust legislation could be effectively implemented. What is necessary are genuine congressional hearings on the matter, fueled by the democratic impulse that spawned antitrust one hundred years ago. But even if antitrust can be made to work, the system would remain commercial, albeit more competitive. Such legislation would not, in other words, reduce the need for the first three proposals.
So how does the rise of the Internet alter my proposals for structural media reform? Very little. There are, of course, some specific policy reforms we should seek for the Internet: for example, guaranteeing universal public access at low rates, perhaps for free. But in general terms, we might do better to regard the Internet as the corporate media giants regard it: as part of the emerging media landscape, not its entirety. So when we create more and smaller media firms, when we create public and community radio and television networks and stations, when we create a strong public service component to commercial news and children's programming, when we use government policies to spawn a nonprofit media sector, all these efforts will have a tremendous effect on the Internet's development as a mass medium. Why? Because websites will not be worth much if they do not have the resources to provide a quality product. And all the new media that result from media reform will have websites as a mandatory aspect of their operations, much like the commercial media. By creating a vibrant and more democratic "traditional" media culture, we will go a long way toward creating a democratic cyberspace.
In addition, media activists and the left need to press for the repeal of the Telecommunications Act of I996 and its replacement with a law that reflects not just the interests of Washington's corporate lobbying superstars but the informed consent of the bulk of the citizenry. We need to press for full and open public hearings on the future of electronic communication and the Internet. Digital communication presents many new and complex issues of unimaginable magnitude; society is best off if these decisions are made by as many people as possible in the light of day, not by commercial interests "self-regulating" themselves in near complete secrecy with a wink and a nod from the politicians they bankroll.
The aim of these combined measures is not to produce a media system that propagandizes for the left in the manner that the corporate media is biased toward capital and commercialism. The aim is to produce a media system that is fair and accurate, that scrupulously examines the activities of the powerful-including the left and the labor movement-and that provides a legitimate accounting of the diverse views and interests of society. It will be a system that will limit the capacity of the wealthy and powerful few to have high-quality information so they may rule the world while the bulk of the population is fed a diet of schlock. It will provide a culture based on artists' interactions with people and ideas, not based on their obeying orders from Madison Avenue. The only stated bias is a fervent commitment to democracy. There is no evidence that a corporate commercial system, even at its best, is capable of such a journalism and culture. And, it is worth noting, that even if all four of these proposals were enacted, the vast majority of media and entertainment would be provided by private firms in pursuit of profit with no more regulation of their editorial activities than they currently experience.
Lessons from Abroad
Some sense of how an emerging democratic left can employ media reform can be seen by looking abroad.(As mentioned in chapter z) many of the world's nations have seen their media systems reconfigured in the past decade, with the pronounced tendency toward integration into the global commercial media market. In many such nations, as in the United States, there are nascent grassroots media activist organizations struggling to promote noncommercial and nonprofit media. These are usually movements self-identified as being on the democratic left. Media workers, too, are organizing for media reform. A strike of BBC workers in I998, for example, listed "no privatization of resources" and "public service instead of commercialism" as two of its six demands. But, most important, democratic left electoral parties are increasingly making the breakup of the corporate commercial media system and the establishment of a viable nonprofit media sector a main part of their platforms The key is to present media reform as part of a broader package of democratic reforms addressing electoral systems, taxation, employment, education, health care, civil rights, and the environment. As important as media reform may seem, it is not a strong enough issue to build a mass movement around. But it has a necessary and fruitful role as part of a broad left agenda. And without a broad base of support, media reform cannot succeed.
In Canada, for example, labor has drawn together consumers and other citizens groups to oppose the plans of the corporate telecommunication giants. Perhaps more striking, the New Democratic party more than doubled its number of parliamentary seats in that country's May I 997, elections. The NDP platform included calls for breaking up the Canadian corporate media chains and for expanding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's public service broadcaster. NDP managers considered the message so vital to the party's efforts to distinguish itself from other parties that, on the eve of a key debate, party leader Alexa McDonough took time from her preparations to participate in a demonstration protesting cutbacks at the CBC. In the words of NDP member of parliament Svend Robinson, who has made media issues a prime focus in his campaigns, "This is an issue that's emerging all over the world. It's a huge concern. People are genuinely alarmed that at the same time we're witnessing growing concentration of ownership of media we're also seeing massive cuts in publicly owned media. It's a double whammy," Robinson stated in a I997 interview. "This neoliberal, right-wing takeover of the media is something that people are aware of, and they don't like it. But the old-line parties aren't willing to address the issue. This is what is going to distinguish new-line parties all over the world-a willingness to talk frankly about issues of media control and to propose an alternative to what's happening. It's inevitable. After you've had somebody say to you for the thousandth time, 'How come we never hear about these issues in the media,' you start to realize that the media itself is an issue."
In Sweden, the national labor federation has led a national boycott of a TV station that refused to honor Swedish law and not air commercials to children. In Sweden, also, the Left party, a socialist grouping that has filled the void created by the Swedish Social Democrats' move to the right, is sounding even more radical themes. The platform on which the Left party has emerged as one of Scandinavia's fastest growing political movements calls for abolishing all advertising on radio and television and for an aggressive program of subsidies to maintain a diverse range of viewpoints in the print media. Media reform is at the heart of the party's program, characterized in its preamble as being necessary to "strengthen and intensify democracy." In Sweden's I998 national elections, the Left party doubled its vote from the preceding election, to I2 percent of the total.
In New Zealand, Pam Corkery left her job as one of that nation's top broadcast journalists and won election to the parliament in I 996 on the ticket of the Alliance, a newly formed left-wing grouping that surprised observers with the strength of its showing. Corkery's issue, and a central theme in the Alliance's platform, was a call to roll back corporate control of the media and to beef up nonprofit, noncommercial broadcasting. After her election, she declared that the battle to reassert popular control over the media is, "at the very least, a human rights issue." The Alliance party has focused national attention on the demise of journalistic competition that followed the sale in I 99 5 of a publicly owned network of commercial radio stations to Tony O'Reilly, a former Heinz soup company executive who is rapidly building an international media conglomerate. O'Reilly already owns the largest newspaper in New Zealand, the Auckland Herald, and after he purchased the privatized stations he quickly moved to buy up the remaining major radio stations in key New Zealand markets. That move was followed by decisions to lay off staff, weaken competition between media outlets, and give notice that the O'Reilly stations were unlikely to continue purchasing news from Radio New Zealand. The Alliance has used its parliamentary position to spark a national debate about O'Reilly's actions in particular and about the wisdom of privatization in general. Working inside of parliament, the Alliance has raised fundamental questions about the danger of one man's controlling so much of a nation's media, and it has dogged O'Reilly's every move with calls for hearings, debates, and investigations. Outside parliament, the coalition has turned anger at O'Reilly's actions and at cuts in public broadcasting expenditures into an organizing tool, working with labor unions, native groups, environmentalists, and community activists to build a broad coalition of media-conscious activists.
In so doing, the coalition has raised profound questions about the wisdom of privatization of Television New Zealand, which remains publicly owned. So successful has the Alliance's campaign been, in fact, that the New Zealand Labour party, which for years had supported privatization, has indicated that it will oppose any further media privatization. But the Alliance is not satisfied; according to John Pagani, its media director, the Labour party "appears very reluctant to move on regulation of media organizations-particularly the issue of limiting foreign ownership or imposing cross-media ownership restrictions." The Alliance has no such reluctance. And, Pagani expects, the willingness of the coalition to raise issues of media monopoly and battle for a reversal of privatizations will continue to distinguish it from more cautious players-a distinction that, some political observers in New Zealand say, could eventually win it a defining role in the governance of the nation. As Pagani says, "Media issues, privatization issues, this is where you start to see real distinctions between the Alliance and other parties, and that distinction is what people are looking for."
These are not isolated developments. Although the new parties of the left are not reading off the same page as regards issues of media control and direction, there are remarkable parallels from country to country. In general, the key issues most everywhere for the left are similar to the proposals made above. They include:
* To protect and expand traditional public-service broadcasting, making it fully noncommercial and democratically accountable;
* To develop a distinct community and public access radio and television system that is thoroughly decentralized;
* To strengthen journalists' and media workers' trade unions, giving the members of these trade unions a greater role in determining editorial content;
* To hold commercial broadcasters to strict standards, such as prohibiting advertising directed at children;
* To limit the concentration of media ownership as much as possible;
* To reduce the sheer amount of advertising, through regulation and taxation;
* To subsidize film and cultural production eschewed by the market;
* To subsidize the existence of multiple newspapers and magazines to provide a diversity of opinion.
The focus varies from nation to nation. The Australian Democratic party has worked closely with media unions in that country in mounting a massive grass-roots campaign against cuts in government funding for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; the Brazilian Workers party has organized mass protests outside the headquarters of broadcast companies that fail to devote serious attention to the political process; the Canadian NDP is developing legislation that would limit the percentage of newspapers in any region that can be controlled by a single company.
When put together in this manner, these global activities give the appearance of a stunning movement with tremendous momentum. In fact, this is misleading. Were one to visit any of these nations the overall mood on the democratic left is mostly one of despair; neoliberalism remains in the driver's seat. What is important-and unprecedented-is that media reform has emerged as a core political issue in so many places, and that these parties are thinking along similar lines. What is missing at present, and may be critical for ultimate success, is for these parties to work together across national lines. This is especially true with regard to media policy. In the end, the goal should be not merely to have a series of national media systems with dominant public service components but to have a global public sphere as well, where people can communicate with each other without having the communication filtered and censored by corporate and commercial interests.
Conclusion
Media reform will not, cannot, be won in isolation from broader democratic reform. The only way to wrestle some control over media and communication from the giant firms that presently dominate the held will be to mobilize some semblance of a popular movement. As Saul Alinsky noted, the only way to beat organized money is with organized people. And while media reform is a necessary component-even a cornerstone-for any democratic movement, it is not enough. Although it can attract the enthusiastic support of many people-including many people not formerly politically active -it is insufficient on its own to capture the imagination of enough people to establish a mass movement. But when combined with electoral reform, workers' rights, civil rights, environmental protection, health care, tax reform, and education, it can be part of a movement that can reshape our society, putting power in the hands of the many.
Put another way, the crisis in communication facing the United States and, to varying degrees, the entire world, is one aspect of the broader crisis emanating from the tension of combining a highly concentrated corporate-driven economy that generates significant social inequality and insecurity with an ostensibly free and democratic society. Regrettably our existing institutions-governmental, educational, and commercial-are ill-equipped to address these crises with solutions that point toward democracy. They are either dominated by powerful interests that oppose reform or they are weighed down by dubious ideologies that assume the beneficence and dominance of the market. In short, we are handcuffed by these myths as we attempt to reform our institutions to resolve the problems before us. And we are blindfolded by a media system that suits, first and foremost, those who benefit not by reform but by the preservation of the status quo.
The truth is, media reform will not be an easy area in which to gain victories. The media giants are unusually canny and powerful political adversaries; few mainstream politicians wish to tangle with them. But it is also an area with unusual promise for the left as it can draw together people who might otherwise work independently of each other. And there is little evidence that people are captivated by commercial media fare to the extent the media giants' PR declares. Unless the left does something significant concerning media, it is difficult to imagine the labor movement and the left in general escaping their long-term downward trajectory. The fate of media reform and the U.S. left are inexorably intertwined, and in their fortunes reside perhaps the last, best hope of the United States to become a democracy ruled by the many rather than the few.