Rich Media,Poor Democracy

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Rich Media,
Poor Democracy

Robert W. McChesney / The New Press 2000

Preface to the New Press Paperback Edition ISBN 1-56584-634-6

Rich Media, Poor Democracy is about the democratic crisis in the United States and the rest of the world, and how the corporate media system is undermining the necessary conditions for effective democratic governance. A media system set up to serve the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue cannot and does not serve the needs of the preponderance of the population. I approach the subject on numerous fronts, taking detailed looks at the concentration of media ownership, the hypercommercialization of culture, the decline of journalism, the globalization of the corporate media system and its relationship to the neoliberal global economy, the corrupt nature of U.S. media policy making, the collapse of public service broadcasting, and the tragic evolution of the First Amendment into a tool for the protection of corporate privilege. I devote a long chapter to debunking the notion that the Internet "will set us free," showing instead that the Internet, despite its virtues, is largely being incorporated into the dominant commercial media and communication system. The point of Rich Media, Poor Democracy is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it: the last chapter deals with how media can be reformed as part of a broader program of democratic renewal.

I have been overwhelmed by the response to this book since its fall 1999 publication by the University, of Illinois Press. It has become one of the best-selling hardcover books in the history of the press. When André Schiffrin and the New Press acquired the paperback rights I was delighted, for I knew of Schiffrin's commitment to publishing serious nonfiction -the sort of nonfiction that big publishing houses, almost all of them subsidiaries of the largest media conglomerates, have increasingly come to neglect. And books that question the legitimacy and desirability of the corporate media system for a self-governing society are hardly sought out by these conglomerate-owned houses.

The media system is in the midst of turbulent change. In this preface to the paperback edition I would like to update some of the key elements of Rich Media, Poor Democracy to take into account recent developments. In some respects what follows may best be thought of as an afterword as much as a preface, so read it now or at the end. I will look at five areas of particular importance: media ownership, journalism, the Internet, policy making, and the movement for media reform. Although the new evidence supports the arguments in the book, the rise of a pro-democratic, anti-corporate political movement in the United States has led to a dramatic improvement in the prospects for media reform. Perhaps the caution I employ in the conclusion to Rich Media, Poor Democracy will appear overstated in the years to come.

There have been numerous massive media deals in the eighteen months since I completed the book in January 1999. Assuming they all gain federal approval (as is likely), these include Viacom swallowing up CBS to create the third largest media conglomerate in the world; AOL wolfing down Time Warner in the largest merger in history (valued at around $160 billion); Time Warner merging its music operations with EMI, leaving four conglomerates with nearly 90 percent of the U.S. music market; and the Tribune Company buying Times Mirror, so that every major newspaper chain is now part of a larger media conglomerate.

It is also clear that many more mergers will take place in the years to come, especially as the few remaining federal restrictions on media ownership are relaxed. It was the FCC's 1999 decision allowing firms to own more than one TV station in a market, for example, that paved the way for the CBS-Viacom deal. When the federal prohibitions are lifted on owning a daily newspaper and a TV station or a cable system and a TV station in the same market, look for a wave of colossal deals, as the first-tier media conglomerates grow even fatter.

Not only is media ownership becoming concentrated into ever fewer extremely large conglomerates, the denigration of journalism continues unabated. By journalism I mean both the product of the commercial news media as well as the journalism of NPR and PBS. After two decades of conservative criticism and corporate inroads, the public system is now fully within the same ideological confines that come naturally to a profit-driven, advertising-supported system (as I discuss in chapter 5). There were also several case studies in 1999 and 2000 on the shortcomings of corporate-controlled journalism for a democratic society.

Some of the problems today come from the inherent limitations of journalism as conducted 'by self-interested, profit-motivated companies. Others are due to faults in the professional practice of journalism, faults which date to the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, the professional reliance upon official sources and the need for a news peg, or event, to justify coverage of a story plays directly into the hands of those who benefit from the status quo. But many problems result from the enhanced corporate pressure to make journalism a source of huge profits; this leads to easy-to-cover trivial stories and an emphasis on the type of news that will have appeal to the upper and upper-middle classes. The combination of all three of these factors leads to the woeful state of U.S. journalism in the early twenty-first century.

A long-term problem of local commercial media - notably daily newspapers and television broadcasters - is their consistent reluctance to provide critical investigations of the most important and powerful local commercial interests. Professional standards notwithstanding, there has been a kind of "Eleventh Commandment" in the commercial news media: Thou Shalt Not Cover Big Local Companies and Billionaires' Critically. This makes very good economic sense, as the local powers are often major advertisers. It makes sense politically and socially too, as the media owners and managers run in the same circles as the major shareholders and executives of the local corporate powerhouses. They are not the sort of people or institutions that smart businesses wish to antagonize - and the media are businesses no less than any other profit-maximizing firms. This is truer than ever in an era when investigative journalism of any sort is generally frowned upon as too expensive and bad for profits.

Along these lines the Boston Herald, owned until a few years ago by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, suspended its consumer affairs columnist, Robin Washington, in the spring of 2000. He had written a series of articles about FleetBoston Financial Corporation, the nation's eighth largest bank, which not only advertised in the Herald but also had outstanding loans to the Herald. The bank contacted the Herald's publisher at least twice to complain about the coverage, which emphasized how customers had been getting a higher fee structure since BankBoston and Fleet Financial merged in 1999. The bank did not aim its fire at the accuracy of the findings, only Washington's methods, specifically that he had arranged for a friend to pose as a customer at the bank. Washington's case drew public protest and his suspension was eventually lifted, largely because he was one of only four African American journalists on an editorial staff of 235.¹

The lesson to other reporters was one that should have been understood already: the evidentiary and methodological standards for doing critical work on local corporate powerhouses are vastly higher than they are for other institutions. Smart journalists who want successful careers will avoid them, and happy smart journalists will do as others before them: internalize the view that such stories are not really very good journalism anyway.

Another long-term problem of the system is the commercial media's willingness to provide favorable coverage of politicians who provide them with favorable subsidies and regulations. This violates every canon of ethical or professional journalism too, and its practice is rarely noted. Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover how major newspaper chains effectively promised Richard Nixon editorial support in his 1972 reelection campaign if he supported the Newspaper Preservation Act. The deal led to newspaper monopolies in many American cities and made shareholders in newspaper corporations far wealthier than they would have been otherwise. One can only speculate, but perhaps a newspaper industry less involved with the Nixon reelection campaign might have pursued the Watergate story with a modicum of gusto in the five months preceding the 1972 election, possibly sparing the nation a great crisis.²

Of course, the tacit quid pro quo of favorable coverage for favorable legislation and regulation rarely draws comment, so it is unusual to find the sort of smoking gun that Bagdikian located. When important legislation affecting media arises on Capitol Hill, for example, the corporations sometimes have the managers of their local stations or the publishers of their local papers call on their representatives in Congress to ask them to support the corporation's position on the bill. No threat or promise about news coverage has to be made. It is much like the situation in The Godfather II when mobster Frank Pentangeli is planning to provide evidence against the Corleone family, but decides not to do so in court, when he sees that the Corleones have brought his peasant brother from Sicily to the trial. No explicit threat has to be made; the message is loud and clear.

The corruption of journalistic integrity is always bad, but it becomes obscene under conditions of extreme media concentration, as now exist. This is a primary reason why antitrust needs to be applied to the media industry. This spring in San Francisco a textbook example of the problem arose. Under deposition, it was revealed that a top executive of the Hearst Corporation, owner of the ,San Francisco Examiner, offered favorable editorial coverage to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown - then up for reelection - if Brown would give official blessing to Hearst's purchase of the ,Sara Francisco Chronicle, the other daily in town. The records show emails and other communications among top Hearst executives approving the offer. Mayor Brown says he made no promises. But in his 1999 reelection campaign against insurgent Tom Ammiano, the Examiner portrayed Ammiano harshly, while tending to view Brown with rose-tinted glasses. A Bay Area reporter summed up the situation: ". . . Hearst, like all big media chains these days, sees journalism first and foremost as a business, a way to make money. And when it comes to the bottom line, all ethical rules are off."³

Another way to measure the limitations of the contemporary corporate news media is to look at which sorts of stories receive elaborate attention and which receive less coverage or virtually no coverage at all. In the summer of 1999 the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and her sister were treated by the cable news channels and the media writ large as a story approaching the magnitude of the return of the messiah or the discovery of intelligent life on Mars. Television sets were turned into virtual aquariums for hours as cameras scanned the Atlantic in search of Kennedy's aircraft. The news was the fates of three private citizens made famous by their lineage, wealth, beauty, and . . . media decision making.

Four months later the news media were presented with another story, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Reporters had long claimed that they could not coyer the social and political implications of the global economy because there was no news peg to justify coverage. If they pursued the story it would look as if they were pushing an agenda. Then the WTO meeting and the massive demonstrations that shut it down gave journalists their news peg. But here journalists came into direct conflict with the modern corporate ethos. For one, media corporations are among the largest beneficiaries of the global capitalist economy since they use groups like the WTO and liberalized trade to increase their sales and activities outside the United States. (I chronicle the stunning growth of these overseas activities in chapter 2.) And media's main advertisers tend to be among the largest firms eager to expand their markets across the planet.

Meanwhile, mainstream news and "business news" have effectively morphed over the past two decades as the news is increasingly pitched to the richest one-half or one-third of the population. The affairs of Wall Street, the pursuit of profitable investments, and the joys of capitalism are now often taken to be the interests of the general population. As I discuss in this book, the affairs of working-class people have virtually disappeared from the news. Now journalists rely on business or business-oriented think tanks as sources when covering economics stories. These factors place strong pressure on journalists to write favorably about the globalization of capitalism, and to regard the WTO protestors as dubious, if not purely fraudulent.

Compared to reporting on the JFK, Jr., plane crash, coverage of the WTO meeting and demonstrations was sparse. There was no week of primetime special reports on the cable news channels, despite the fact that what was transpiring touched on the most central political and social issues of our age. Indeed, Seattle was not given anywhere near the attention that Elián, Monica, O.J., or JonBenet got. News coverage of the demonstrations tended to emphasize property damage and violence and, even there, it downplayed the activities of the police. There were, to be fair, some outstanding pieces produced by the corporate media, but those were the exceptions to the rule. More of the same took place in April 2000 during the IMF-World Bank meetings and protests in Washington, D.C. The handful of good reports that did appear were lost in the continuous stream of pro-capitalist pieces. The sad truth is that the closer a story gets to corporate power and corporate domination of our society, the less reliable the corporate news media is.⁴

What types of important stories get almost no coverage in the commercial news media? The historical standard is that there is no coverage when the political and economic elites are in agreement. As I discuss in chapter 1, military spending is a classic example. The United States spends a fortune on the military for no publicly debated or accepted reason. But it serves several important purposes to our economic elite, not the least of which is as a lucrative form of corporate welfare. Since no element of the economic elite is harmed by military spending, and nearly all of them benefit by having an empire to protect profit making worldwide, it rarely gets criticized - unlike federal spending on education or health care or environmental improvements. If a reporter pursued the story of why we are spending $300 billion on the military, he or she would appear to have an axe to grind and therefore to be unprofessional, since top official sources are not critical of the spending.

In recent years, the increased focus by the commercial news media on the more affluent part of the population has reinforced and extended the class bias in the selection and tenor of material. Stories of great importance to tens of millions of Americans will fall through the cracks because those are not the "right" Americans, according to the standards of the corporate news media. Consider, for example, the widening gulf between the richest 10 percent of Americans and the poorest 60 percent of Americans that has taken place over the past two decades. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s real income declined or was stagnant for the lower 60 percent, while wealth and income for the rich skyrocketed.⁵

By 1998, discounting home ownership, the top 10 percent of the population claimed 76 percent of the nation's net worth, and more than half of that is accounted for by the richest 1 percent.⁶ The bottom 60 percent has virtually no wealth, aside from some home ownership; by any standard the lowest 60 percent is economically insecure, as it is weighed down by very high levels of personal debt.⁷ As Lester Thurow notes, this peacetime rise in class inequality may well be historically unprecedented and is one of the main developments of our age.⁸ It has tremendously negative implications for our politics, culture, and social fabric, yet it is barely noted in our journalism except for rare mentions when the occasional economic report points to it. One could say that this can be explained by the lack of a news peg that would justify coverage, but that is hardly tenable when one considers the cacophony of news media reports on the economic boom of the past decade. In the crescendo of news media praise for the genius of contemporary capitalism, it is almost unthinkable to criticize the economy as deeply flawed. To do so would seemingly reveal one as a candidate for an honorary position in the Flat-Earth Society-. The Washington Port has gone so far as to describe ours as a nearly "perfect economy."⁹ And it does, indeed, appear more and more perfect the higher one goes up the socioeconomic ladder, which points to the exact vantage point of the corporate news media.

For a related and more striking example, consider one of the most astonishing trends lately, one that receives little more coverage than Kato Kaelin's attempts to land a job or a girlfriend: the rise of the prison-industrial complex and the incarceration of huge numbers of people. The rate of incarceration has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and the United States now has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western Europe. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Moreover, nearly 90 percent of prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the so-called drug war. And the United States is number one with a bullet, as the rate of increase in the number of prisoners is perhaps the highest in the world. We are rapidly approaching rates of incarceration associated with the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

The sheer quantity of prisoners is not the half of it. Recent research suggests that a significant minority of those behind bars may well be innocent. Consider the state of Illinois, where more convicted prisoners on death row have been found innocent of murder in the past two decades than have been executed. Or consider the recent published work of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to get scores of murder and rape convictions overturned.¹⁰ In addition, the conditions inside the prisons themselves tend far too often to be reprehensible and grotesque, in a manner that violates any civilized notion of legitimate incarceration.¹¹

It should be highly disturbing and the source of public debate for a free society to have so many people stripped of their rights. Revolutions have been fought, governments have been overthrown, for smaller affronts to the liberties of so many citizens.¹² Instead, to the extent that this is a political issue, it is a debate among Democrats and Republicans over who can be "tougher" on crime, hire more police, and build more prisons. It is similar to the mainstream debate on who can raise the military budget the most.¹³ Almost overnight the prison-industrial complex has become a big business and a powerful lobby for public funds.¹⁴

This is an important story, one thick with drama and excitement, corruption and intrigue. In the past two years several scholars, attorneys, prisoners, and freelance reporters have provided devastating accounts of the scandalous nature of the criminal justice system, mostly in books published by small, struggling presses. Yet this story is hardly known to Americans who can name half the men Princess Diana had sex with, or the richest Internet entrepreneurs. Why is that? Well, consider that the vast majority of prisoners come from the bottom quarter of the population in economic terms. It is not just that the poor commit more crimes; the criminal justice system is also stacked against them. "Blue collar" crimes generate harsh sentences while "white collar" crime almost always for vastly greater amounts of money gets kid gloves treatment by comparison. In 2000, for example, a Texas man received sixteen years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar, while, at the same time, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. were found guilty of conspiring to suppress and eliminate competition in the vitamin industry, in what the justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal antitrust conspiracy in history. The cost to consumers and public health is nearly immeasurable. The four executives were fined anywhere from $75,000 to $350,000 and they received prison terms ranging from three months all the way up to . . . four months.¹⁵

Hence, the portion of the population that ends up in jail has little political clout, is least likely to vote, and is of less business interest to the owners and advertisers of the commercial news media. It is also a disproportionately non-white portion of the population, and this is where class and race intersect and form their especially noxious American brew. Some 50 percent of U.S. prisoners are African American.¹⁶ In other words, these are the sort of people that media owners, advertisers, journalists, and desired upscale consumers do everything they can to avoid, and the news coverage reflects that sentiment. As Barbara Ehrenreich has observed, the poor have vanished from the view of the affluent; they have all but disappeared from the media.¹⁷ And in those rare cases where poor people are covered, studies show that the news media reinforce racist stereotypes, playing into the social myopia of the middle and upper classes.¹⁸

To be fair, there is ample coverage of crime in the news media, but it is used to provide inexpensive, graphic, and socially trivial filler. The coverage is almost always divorced from any, social context or public policy concerns and, if anything, it serves to enhance popular paranoia about crime waves and prod political support for tough-talking "three strikes and you're out" programs.

Imagine, for one moment, that instead of being from the bottom quarter, nearly all the prisoners were from the richest quarter of the population. Imagine that the students attending Yale or the University of Illinois, for example, had half of their friends behind bars or dead from a confrontation with police, and that they had been hassled by the police for being "suspects" in some crime. Imagine, too, that their parents had the same experiences, and that they knew that many of those friends in prison were innocent. Imagine the donations the ACLU would receive! Would this be a news story then? Of course it would, but this is hypothetical, because the problem would have been eliminated long before it could have reached that point, and it would have been eliminated because it would have been the biggest political and news story of our era.

Moving on from journalism, the most striking media and communication development since January 1999 has been the rapid commercialization and expansion of the Internet. It is ironic that the media giants use the rise of the Internet and the prospect of new competition to justify their megamergers because, if anything, the Internet is spurring more concentration in media ownership, as well as other corporate sectors. I argue here that the Internet will not launch a wave of commercially viable challengers to the existing media giants. Merely being able to launch a website is not sufficient to contend with the enormous market advantages of the media giants as they colonize the Internet. Recent evidence has borne that out in spades. Indeed, when AOL announced its deal with Time Warner, that pretty much hammered the nail in the coffin that the Internet would launch a new wave of media competition and drive the traditional media giants into extinction. For what AOL is paying for Time Warner, it could duplicate Time Warner's physical assets many times over. But what it needed was Time Warner's semi-monopolistic market position, which is nearly priceless.

As all communication switches to digital format, what seems most likely is that the corporate media giants will increasingly merge and partner with the few remaining corporate computer and telecommunication-giants. In a decade or so we may have a global communication oligopoly of ten to twelve unbelievably huge firms, rather than a media oligopoly of six to eight believably huge ones.

A major theme of Rich Media, Poor Democracy is that the U.S. media system is not the result of the "free market" or of natural law. On the contrary, it is the result of explicit governmental laws, regulations, and subsidies that have created the giants that rule the roost. But the policies that put the system in place in our name and with our monies have been made in secret, without our informed consent.

The corrupt nature of U.S. communication policy making continues on course. Vital decisions are made all the time concerning the future of our media system, but they are made behind closed doors to serve powerful special interests, with nonexistent public involvement and minuscule press coverage. In these pages I chronicle the manner in which the commercial broadcasters have effectively stolen control of digital television from the American people, with the support of their well-paid politicians. The one sop thrown to the public, the Gore Commission, which was to recommend suitable public-interest requirements for commercial broadcasters in return for the free gift of some $50-100 billion of public property, was a farce.

In 2000 the FCC, under pressure from the broadcasters and their congressional allies, continued with the quiet development of plans for the transition from analog to digital radio broadcasting. This is business as usual. It would be possible to add numerous channels in every community while maintaining the present stations and converting them to digital. It would be an easy and effective way to bring localism and diversity to our homogenized and commercially saturated airwaves. Instead, the FCC is likely to adopt a plan that will keep the system as it is, and merely convert the status quo to digital. Hence the FCC will generate a policy that protects the market power and massive profits of the semi-monopolists that dominate U.S. radio broadcasting, and does nothing for the majority of the population.

But the bankruptcy of communication policy making is most apparent where it is the most important: with the rise of the Internet and digital communication systems. The shadowy history of how the Internet went from being a public-sector creation to being the province of Wall Street needs to be written, but this much is known: both political parties are thoroughly in the pay of the firms and sectors that benefit by the expansion of the commercialized Internet. The explicit policy of both parties is to fan the flames of this expansion as much as possible, all with the aim of making the Internet ubiquitous as quickly as possible. Soon it will be virtually impossible even to raise the issue of how the Internet should develop because its course will have been set in stone, or at least in code, and will be protected by powerful lobbies. Even more important, there will no longer be any option about whether one wishes to participate in the "e-society" It will be all but mandatory, if one is to participate in American life. All along the way we will be told of the great advantages we will enjoy by being online most of the time, of the unimaginable power and control over our lives it will give us. The commercialized Internet will soon appear as natural to us as our system of roads.

The analogy to automobiles is intentional, as the Internet in many ways is coming to play the same role in the twenty-first-century economy and social structure that cars have over the past seventy-five years or so. When automobiles were introduced - and especially after their prices came down they provided revolutionary mobility for people. Who could not want to have a car? Soon networks of roads were built with public funds and the suburban sprawl that has engulfed so much of our countryside began in earnest. It became impossible to survive in the United States, except in a handful of locations, without having an automobile. Not one car per family either, but one per adult. Cars became as American as apple pie. And then, slowly, by the final third of the twentieth century it became clear that the toll automobiles were taking on American life was enormous. Air pollution, atomized suburban living conditions, the decline of the cities, traffic congestion, and a myriad of other social problems related to the automobile began to draw attention.¹⁹ Yet the problems were difficult to address because the automobile had become such an ingrained part of the society. One could speculate that, had the American people democratically considered all the pros and cons of the automobile back before, say, the 1940s, they might have opted to emphasize mass transit and downplay the usage of cars. But that was a debate that powerful interests made certain we never had.

Could the same be true of the Internet? Is the "Damn the Torpedoes" Internet policy a bit like driving at night on a strange mountain road at a hundred miles an hour with the headlights off? Might there be a dark side to the commercial cyberworld? Already there are concerns about Internet privacy, that the ability to expand commerce necessarily also means the ability= of corporations and governments to keep much closer tabs on individuals. Some foresee a panoptic society where traditional notions of personal privacy will be virtually eliminated.²⁰ There are concerns, as well, that the new digital system will make it possible for poor people to be entirely written out of the world experienced by the middle and upper classes, making political democracy that much more fragile. Similarly, scholarly research is beginning to show that those who spend the most time online risk becoming more antisocial and increasingly unhappy. In short, there are serious questions that have been pushed aside in the mad dash to commercialize the Internet. They will only get taken up, I suspect, years from now when they will be written as laments.

As with the automobile, the primary justification for this Internet commercialism is economic. As the automobile provided the basis for the expansion of twentieth-century industrial capitalism, so, we are told, the Internet and digital technology will provide the basis for economic growth in twenty-first-century capitalism. This is not debated so much as it is reiterated. Some of the claims about the Internet and the economy are clearly false, such as the popular cry that the Internet would smash up traditional giant corporations and create an economy dominated by small, hungry, lean and mean, Internet-based entrepreneurial firms operating in competitive markets. A more important claim is that the Internet will provide the basis for sustained investment and economic growth that will raise living standards and the quality of life for generations, much as the automobile did. It is probably too early to pass judgment on that issue, but one 2000 study finds little evidence that the Internet will stimulate massive investment and economic growth.²¹

Even if one accepts that the Internet is to some extent the foundation of our current and future economic success, the important social questions remain: Who in the economy truly benefits? How much do the benefits spread to the bulk of the population - and at what social cost? So far the benefits are passing to a relatively small sector of the population, and there is little reason at present to anticipate the type of job creation associated with the auto industry with all of its related industries like oil, steel, rubber, glass, and construction. Only in a political and media culture where the affairs of Wall Street investors are presumed to be the same as the interests of the average person can these issues be ignored.

But the news on the policy front during these last eighteen months has not been all bad. In the case of radio, for example, the FCC proposed a cautious program in 2000 for the introduction of low-power, noncommercial, community FM radio broadcasting across the nation. After being pushed around by the commercial broadcasting lobby at every turn, the FCC thought it could use the remarkable development of microradio to offer some diversity on the dial. For only a few hundred dollars, someone could transmit a microradio signal of high quality to a large portion of a metropolitan area. To some extent the FCC did not have a choice, because microradio was so easy to do that even if illegal there would be many willing to send pirate signals into the open slots on the FM dial. The commercial broadcasters were incensed because they did not want any new competition for "their" listeners. Their stations were worth hundreds of millions, not because the cost of transmitting a signal was high, but because they had a semi-monopoly over the industry. So the radio lobby went to work and got the House of Representatives to pass a bill overturning the FCC plan in April 2000. Right now the matter is before the Senate: if the program is overturned there, President Clinton could veto the bill, thus saving microradio. The battle will probably be over by the time you read these words.

Perhaps the most encouraging development in 1999-2000 was the government's prosecution and victory, for the time being, of its case against Microsoft. The Microsoft case provided a welcome change from the benign neglect that has overtaken antitrust for the past few decades to the delight of Wall Street and wealthy campaign contributors. The question now is whether the case will reinvigorate the notion of antitrust in our political culture and return it to its original populist purpose of breaking up concentrated wealth as a cancer to democratic governance. Among leading academic and scholarly antitrust experts like Eben Moglen and Robert H. Lande, there is a growing sense that the media industry has precisely the type of concentrated power that antitrust was meant to address.²² Although none of the top seven media conglomerates is a monopoly in any one national market, à la Microsoft or Standard Oil, theirs are closed markets for all intents and purposes. It is not merely the economic power of these firms, nor even their cultural power that causes concern. It is their political power. They have gotten so large that they, are close to being untamable by government. The way, media corporations treat politicians like playthings is evidence of this power.

It is somewhat ironic that even media executives grasp the situation at hand. Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin stated in January 2000 that the media is "fast becoming the predominant business of the twenty-first century, and we're in a new economic age, and what may happen, assuming that's true, is it's more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and nonprofits." Levin went on to observe that "we're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service."²³

At present, however, regulators in Washington are sticking to the recent orthodoxy that holds antitrust should only be deployed when a firm has close to a monopoly in a specific market. In May 2000 the justice Department approved Viacom's purchase of CBS, meaning that all the TV networks, all the top film studios, all the major music companies, most cable TV channels, and much, much more are under the control of just seven media conglomerates. "We don't think big is per se bad," said Joel Klein, the assistant U.S. attorney general who spearheaded the case against Microsoft. The New York Times noted in May 2000 that "with a few exceptions, regulators during the Clinton years have signed off on big mergers, many of which would have been unthinkable a generation ago." As one law professor put it, "In merger law, the Clinton administration has a great deal in common with the Reagan and Bush years.²⁴ Indeed, the main force that encourages antitrust action in the current environment is not concern for the public, but, on the contrary, pressure on antitrust regulators from firms asking them to intervene and help them vis-?-vis a competitor: This practice has limits, as these same firms wish to be involved in mergers themselves.²⁵

But there is momentum in the application of antitrust to media beyond the writings of antitrust scholars. On Capitol Hill progressive legislators like Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) have announced their support for applying antitrust to the existing media system. "There's no question that we have to start talking in a serious way about media, about media mergers and monopolies, about the balance between public and commercial television, about how we can encourage more diversity in ownership and in content," says Wellstone. "There's no question that we ought to be talking about the role that media plays in a democracy where most people don't vote. There's no question of any of this.²⁶

Nor is this an issue with appeal only for those on the left. When Time Warner removed Disney's ABC from its cable offerings in New York City (and elsewhere) on May 1, 2000, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told reporters: "This is an example of what happens when you allow monopolies to get too big and they become too predatory and then the consumer is hurt. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the justice Department has spent so much time on Microsoft and so little on this industry.²⁷ Similarly, William Safire implored his fellow conservatives to rally to the cause of applying "vigorous antitrust prevention and enforcement" to the giant firms that rule the existing media system. "Concentration of power over what we see in the news," Safire concluded, "is a danger to democracy."²⁸

Microradio and antitrust are just the tip of the iceberg. Across the United States there is growing interest in media reform, ranging from local media literacy campaigns in schools to campaigns for revamping public television and radio at the national level. The objective, in the end, is to reduce the power of Wall Street and Madison Avenue and increase the power of everyone else. Antitrust is crucial, but it is not sufficient. Even more competitive media markets would leave too much power in the hands of owners and advertisers; that is why we need a viable, heterogenous nonprofit and noncommercial sector. I discuss much of this media reform activity in the conclusion, and it has grown since that was written. Moreover, as the Safire comments indicate, this issue is not just the province of the political left. Indeed, political conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly have worked with progressive media reform groups like Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert to challenge advertising and commercialism in public schools, an issue closely related to media reform. A May 1999 national survey sponsored by the Project on Media Ownership concluded that a majority of Americans from all backgrounds supported the sort of structural media reform that is off-limits to debate in mainstream political circles.²⁹ (No wonder the media giants do not want this to become a public issue!)

I would go so far as to say that media reform is not an issue that is best cast along left-right lines. It is better thought of as elementary to democracy. To the extent people not on the left support rudimentary democracy, they can and should support media reform as providing the basic groundwork for a democratic political culture. It is a canon of liberal democracy, not socialist theory (though Marx himself had rather enlightened views on the subject), that a democracy cannot exist without a press system that provides a rigorous accounting of people in power and the presentation of a wide range of informed opinions on the important issues of the day and age.³⁰ Without such a media system, the promise of democracy becomes very hollow very quickly.

Although media reform has potentially wide support, I argue in this book that it is the political left that must provide leadership on this issue. In my view, the reason is simple. The leaders, intellectuals, and pundits of traditional liberalism and conservatism in the United States have proven to be either morally bankrupt and corrupt or cowardly. They are incapable of making a stand on principle for democracy that would require their antagonizing entrenched moneyed interests. As much as regular folks who regard themselves as liberals or conservatives might support media reform (or other democratic measures), their "leaders" be they elected or self-appointed - will not take any initiative in this matter.

To elaborate, let's first consider those who are called liberals in the United States, and who in some other parts of the world might be called social democrats. C. B. Macpherson has provided the best context for understanding liberalism in capitalist societies.³¹ At its best, overlooking the elitist aspects, liberalism in the John Stuart Mill/John Dewey vein has been devoted to the idea that everyone is capable of maximizing their talents and their happiness in a free and fair society. The government can and must be a progressive force. In this liberal worldview, it is the ultimate right of the people to determine whatever property system best serves society's aims. In this sense, liberals share with radicals a belief in the primacy of popular will over property rights. Unlike radicals, however, liberals do not regard capitalism as a fundamental barrier to liberal values, but only as an ambiguous source of tension which education and enlightened public policy can overcome.

As Macpherson brilliantly wrote, modern corporate capitalism has continually undermined the best of the liberal tradition, especially in these pro-corporate times, leaving liberals with a moment of truth to face: their choice is to defend core liberal values by becoming explicitly anti-capitalist, or declare capitalism off-limits to fundamental change (and become decidedly less liberal and democratic). Regrettably, liberalism in the United States, with only a handful of exceptions, has opted for the latter course, and so it has lost its backbone, and much hope of generating enthusiastic support.

It is in this sense that one thinks of the Carters, Clintons, and Gores, those political animals who have built their careers upon service to the corporate powers-that-be. But the problem is far deeper, afflicting much of the "best and the brightest" of the liberal intelligentsia. Consider, for example, Lawrence Lessig, the law professor who has written some of the most insightful work about the Internet. Indeed, Lessig is noteworthy because his work to see public service values and democratic governance preserved on the Internet has been exemplary. In an age of opportunism and greed, he has veered in the opposite direction. As a liberal, Lessig acknowledges that it is the right of the people to determine whatever property system best suits their needs, and in his work he explains in some detail the marked problems associated with an Internet that is to be dominated by corporate interests and commercial values. Yet Lessig is unwilling to take his argument to its logical conclusion; he fails to champion an Internet structure (or a broader social structure) that would better preserve and expand the liberal and democratic values he cherishes. Instead he concludes his Internet analysis on a despondent note, simply saying that "we" all seem to dislike interventionist government policy so it is not worth envisaging any alternative to a corporate-driven Internet. There is no effort to explain who exactly "we" are, or what conditions led "us" to this belief, or, if the problem is as severe as Lessig shows that it is, what a principled person can and should do to change "our" mind.³² That type of thinking is only rarely found in the contented liberalism of our times.

Contemporary conservatism is even worse. Allowing for generalization, in the United States today there seem to be two kinds of conservatism. The main variant is the proponent of property rights über Alles, or, in more concrete terms, the right of corporations to rule the world without popular interference. It is dressed up as "freemarket" conservatism. Its commitment to democracy is paper thin and quickly abandoned if property rights are threatened. In reality, if not rhetoric, this brand of conservatism supports a large state, but a state that works primarily on behalf of the rich. The other variant is the cultural conservatism of the religious type. This brand has far less concern with protecting the rich than with having the state enforce particular moral codes on individuals. It is anti-liberal and not especially democratic. Leaders like Ralph Reed work assiduously to link evangelical Christians to the pro-corporate agenda of the free-market right.

What has been lost in the past two generations is a brand of American conservatism that, whatever its limitations, was far more humane and sympathetic to liberal values, individual rights, and democracy. In the 1930s, for example, a group of American conservatives published an alternative vision for the United States to be contrasted with the liberal New Deal. This was conservatism with a neo Jeffersonian vision of a decentralized America, where concentrated corporate power was a threat to the individual and to communities, as were large central governments.³³ How unthinkable such notions are to today's conservative leaders, who fawn before mammon and are incapable of imagining the world from the vantage point of the dispossessed. Or consider that at one time, prior to the 1940s, many conservatives were in principle opposed to having a massive military and a large secret police and intelligence apparatus. Today those subjects are off-limits in most conservative (and liberal) criticism, as the military is indispensable to the buttressing of corporate power economically and politically. When the conservative historian Chalmers Johnson published his reasoned denunciation of modern U.S. imperialism in 2000, what was most striking was how out-of-step his views were from the establishment's.³⁴

This is why the left must play a central role in media reform. It alone can be defined by its hostility to concentrated private power and its commitment to social justice. Although the left has a dark side to its legacy, which I discuss in the conclusion, it remains indeed, is now, perhaps more than ever - the main agency for democratic rights in the world today. While the U.S. left's obituary was pretty much written generations ago, the truth is that a left will always loom on the horizon as long as the inequality and poverty produced by a capitalist society remain and as long as a capitalist society undermines the promise of democracy.

In the United States, we are told, people do not care about politics, especially left politics. One of the main arguments in this book is that the corporate media system, in conjunction with the broader trappings of a modern capitalist society, necessarily generate a depoliticized society, one where the vast majority of people logically put little time or interest into social or political affairs.³⁵ By this reasoning, the prospects for the political left, which depend upon an involved citizenry, are reduced to the point of elimination. The capitalist utopia, much celebrated by Francis Fukuyama as the "end of history," becomes the democrat's or the socialist's dystopia. Some on the left, too, have accepted this "neoliberal" logic as virtually irreversible, and have written off the prospects of a viable left for the foreseeable future and beyond.³⁶

One way to consider the status of the left in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century is to recall the conservative critique, made most notably by Jeane Kirkpatrick, that social change from within the old communist regimes was impossible because these were totalitarian societies that made it virtually impossible for domestic resistance to develop and organize successfully. (This argument justified U.S. support, during the Cold War, for capitalist police states around the world that, the Kirkpatrick argument went, were far more benign than the hated communist states because they were open to internal social change. The real distinction, of course, was that police states were quite alright as long as the dominance of private investment and capitalism was secure.) The pronouncements about communist totalitarianism were taken quite seriously, though their absurd and ahistorical nature became evident within a decade, as peoples across Eastern Europe rose up to end the era of the one-party state.

The point which should not be forgotten is that the depoliticized state of U.S. society, ultimately, is no more tenable than the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe were. It is true that Western capitalist societies have proven vastly more effective at depoliticizing human beings over the long haul, but the systems have huge fault lines of discontent, ranging from social inequality to the bankruptcy of social life in the hypercommercial, "you are what you own" world. Although the forces of depoliticization can be effective at stifling social opposition, they cannot eliminate it, and it will invariably return to the fore. In the end, we are social beings and the nature of our lives is strongly shaped by social and political factors.

In the past eighteen months there have been indications that we are entering an era of renewed politicization. On college campuses, for example, the 1999-2000 year saw an explosion of student organizing against sweatshops on some two hundred campuses. What has been striking to me, as a speaker at two dozen colleges during the past two years, is the growth in interest in anti-capitalist political organizing at a rate unprecedented for a quarter of a century. Also apparent, and so very refreshing, is that political organizing, while very serious, is also fun for the first time for students in a very long time. "With a joie de vivre that the American economic left has probably lacked since before WWI," an observer wrote, "college students are increasingly engaged in well-organized, thoughtful and morally outraged resistance to corporate power."³⁷ This new political culture provides a marked contrast to the wet blanket of the phony corporate world pitched at the "youth market" today, with commercially sponsored "alternative" music events and contrived MTV hipness, all aimed at turning young people upside down and shaking the money out of their pockets. An alternative political culture is emerging along with a movement, much in evidence at the astonishing demonstrations in Seattle for the WTO meeting in late 1999 and in Washington, D.C., for the IMF-World Bank meetings in April 2000. A big part of this movement is the importance of alternative media, and the explicit critique of the limitations of corporate media. The new movement "appears to have legs," one business writer informed his readers. "The world's financial and corporate elites would do well to listen up."³⁸

Nor are campuses the only site of activism. Movements against the death penalty and against police brutality are growing across the nation, especially in communities of color. The labor movement is in the midst of a renaissance of sorts, as more union shops get organized, especially among low-paid minority and women workers. Environmental activism, too, is going on all around the nation. The most exciting moments are when these various concerns -- about class exploitation, about the environment, about racism -- converge and draw people together. Such is the case with the anti-sweatshop movement, the environmental racism movement, the anti-WTO/IMF-World Bank movement, and the movements to organize low-wage workers. If a new and powerful left is going to emerge in the United States, this is where the embryo will be found.

Almost all of this is taking place beneath the radar of the corporate news media, with their reliance on official sources and their close ties to those at the top of the social pecking order. Indeed, it is the lack of attention to these issues in the media, or the distorted nature of the coverage when there is attention, that underlines the importance of media activism to the new generation of activists. Similarly, the national electoral system is largely immune to these developments; awash in massive campaign contributions from billionaires and multimillionaires, the Democrats and Republicans spend a fortune on manipulative and insulting advertisements aimed at the dwindling numbers that take them seriously. The corporate media rake in this money for TV ads, highlight only the activities of politicians who support their agenda, and then pretend that this charade has something to do with democracy.

Over the past year I have asked several political scientists and electoral campaign veterans what percentage of the vote the Democrats and Republicans would get in five or ten years if there were proportional representation for party votes in Congress (as opposed to winner-take-all for each seat) and if there were publicly financed campaigns for all parties. In other words, how much support would the two parties get if their duopoly, protected by the electoral system and massive campaign contributions, did not exist? The answers have ranged from 25 to 40 percent for both parties combined. It is worth noting that that is pretty much the range that the old communist parties of Eastern Europe have received in the open elections since the collapse of communism. Although there are crucial differences, I think it is fair to say that our parties are about as responsive to the needs of the people as were the old communist parties of the one-party-state era.

It is with this new progressive movement that the fate of media reform resides. Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement. If progressive forces can just get media reform on the agenda, merely make it part of legitimate debate, they will find that it has considerable support from outside the ranks of the left. (It may even encourage people to take a closer and more sympathetic look at the left.) This has been the pattern abroad: where left parties have gotten media issues into debate, the mainstream parties could no longer blindly serve the corporate media masters. And this point is well understood by the media giants, which do everything within their considerable power to see that there be not even the beginnings of public discussion of media policy.

We are in precipitous times. The corporate media system is consolidating into the hands of fewer and fewer enormous firms at a rapid rate, providing a hypercommercialized fare suited to wealthy shareholders and advertisers, not citizens. At the same time, there is a budding movement for media reform which is part and parcel of a broader anti-corporate movement. At present the smart money says that the big guys will win and the wise move is to accept the inevitable and abandon any hope of social change. But the same smart money once said communism was going to last forever unless overthrown from without, and that South African apartheid could never be removed peacefully so it was best to work with the status quo white regime. Smart money is often more interested in protecting money than in being smart. Nobody can predict the future, especially in turbulent times like these. All we can do is attempt to understand how the world works so we can try to protect and expand those values we deem important. And if enough people come together to protect and expand democratic values - as it is in their interest to do - anything can happen.

Robert W McChesney
www.robertmcchesney.com
Urbana, Illinois
June 2000

I want to thank Mark Crispin Miller, Jeff Cohen, and Inger Stole, who gave this preface a thorough read on short notice, and suggested numerous changes, nearly all of which I accepted. To the extent this preface is readable or coherent, they get the credit.

1 Neil MacFarquhar, "Protests Follow Suspension of Boston Journalist Who Reported on Bank Fees," New York Times, May 5, 2000, p. A16.

2 Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

3 Tim Redmond, "Tim White Takes the Fall," sfbg.com, May 3, 2000.

4 See William S. Solomon, "More Form Than Substance: Press Coverage of the WTO Protests in Seattle," Monthly *,Review, May 2000, pp. 12-20; "FAIR Alert: New York Times Op-Ed Page Shuts Out IMF/World Bank Critics," fair.org, April 20, 2000.

5 Laura Dresser, Scott Mangum, and Joel Rogers, The State of Working Wisconsin (Madison: Center on Wisconsin Strategy, 1998).

6 Doug Henwood, "Wealth News," Left Business Observer, No. 94 (May 2000): 3.

7 The Editors, "Working-Class Households and the Burden of Debt," Monthly Review, May 2000, pp. 1-11.

8 Lester Thurow, "Falling Wages, Failing Policy," Dollars & Sense, September-October 1996.

9 "Economy Near Perfect," Washington Post, April 30, 1998, first business page.

10 Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, Actual Innocence (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

11 Daniel Burton-Rose with Dan Pens and Paul Wright, The Celling of America (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1998).

12 David McGowan, Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don't Want You to See (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000).

13 Alexander Cockburn, "He Should Remember His Sister," The Nation, May 22, 2000, p. 8.

14 Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000).

15 Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, "Sixteen Years for a Snickers Bar," ZNet Commentary, May 15, 2000.

16 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 1999).

17 Barbara Ehrenreich, "The Vison-Impaired Rich," The Progressive, May 2000, pp. 18-19.

18 Martin Gilen, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

19 See Paul M. Sweezy "Cars and Cities," Monthly Review, April 2000, pp. 19-34. (Reprinted from Monthly Review, April 1972.)

20 See Reg Whitaker, The End of Privacy.- How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality (New York: New Press, 1999).

21 Robert J. Gordon, "Does the `New Economy' Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" May 1, 2000, draft of a paper for the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

22 Robert H. Lande, "Antitrust and the Media-II," The Nation, May 22, 2000, pp. 5-6.

23 Comment made on "Millennium 2000: Media in the New Century" program, hosted by Jeff Greenfield, CNN, January 2, 2000.

24 Stephen Labaton, "Federal Regulators Give Approval to Viacom's Buyout of CBS," New York Times, May 4, 2000, pp. C1, C2.

25 Allen R. Myerson, "Divided Against Each Other; United Against the Government," New York Times, May 15, 2000, p. C4.

26 John Nichols and Robert W McChesney, It's the Media, Stupid! (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000).

27 David Bauder, "FCC Reviews ABC-Time Warner Dispute," Associated Press, May 2, 2000.

28 William Safire, "`Th-Th-That's All, Folks,"' New York Times, May 4, 2000, p. A27.

29 "Findings from a National Survey," sponsored by the Project on Media Ownership and People for Better TV and conducted by Lake Snell Perry & Associates, May 1999.

30 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx.- A Life (New York: W W Norton, 2000).

31 C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

32 Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). For an example of a similarly despondent liberal critique that offers a rather muscular explanation of the issues Lessig avoids, see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

33 See Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (Wilmington, Del.: ISO Books, 1999, originally published in 1936).

34 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).

35 See Carl Boggs, The End of Politics.- Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000).

36 See, for example, Perry Anderson, "Renewals," New Left Review, January-February 2000, pp. 5-24.

37 Liza Featherstone, "The New Student Movement," The Nation, May 15, 2000.

38 Jerry Useem, "There's Something Happening Here," Fortune, May 15, 2000, p. 234.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Rich-Media-Poor-Democracy.htm