Media

On the Media. Give a peek to this conference and series of articles from The Center for American Progress. The conference, seen in video segments linked at the bottom of the page, was held before a screening of Outfoxed, and includes deliveries from Eric Alterman, Paul Star, John Nichols, Arianna Huffington, and Nicholas Lemann.
Take note of the series of articles on media consolodation, found in the box to the right of the screen. Robert McChesney is included amongst the writers, and I'll submit this clip:

Our press system is failing in the United States, and we must be clear about why it is failing. The problem is not with poorly trained or unethical journalists; in fact, I suspect this may well be as talented and ethical as any generation of journalists in memory. Nor is the problem nefarious or corrupt owners.

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Let's begin with the obvious question: where does our media system come from? In mythology, it is the result of competition between entrepreneurs duking it out in the free market. In reality, our media system is the result of a wide range of explicit government policies, regulations, and subsidies. Each of the 20 or so giant media firms that dominate the entirety of our media system is the recipient of massive government largesse -- what could be regarded as corporate welfare. They receive (for free) one or more of: scarce monopoly licenses to radio and television channels, monopoly franchises to cable- and satellite-TV systems, or copyright protection for their content....
If policies establish the nature of the media system, and the nature of the media system determines the nature and logic of media content, the nucleus of the media atom is the policy-making process. And it is here that we get to the source of the media crisis in the United States. Media and communication policies have been made in the most corrupt manner imaginable for generations. Perhaps the best way to capture the media policy-making process in the United States is to consider a scene from the 1974 Oscar-winning film The Godfather: Part II. Roughly halfway through the movie, a bunch of American gangsters, including Michael Corleone, assemble on a Havana patio to celebrate Hyman Roth's birthday. This is 1958, pre–Fidel Castro, when Fulgencio Batista and the Mob ruled Cuba. Roth is giving a slice of his birthday cake, which has the outline of Cuba on it, to each of the gangsters. As he does so, Roth outlines how the gangsters are divvying up the island among themselves, then triumphantly states how great it is to be in a country with a government that works with private enterprise.

That is pretty much how media policies are generated in the United States. But do not think it is a conspiracy through which the corporate interests peacefully carve up the cake. In fact, as in The Godfather: Part II, where the plot revolves around the Corleone-Roth battle, the big media trade associations and corporations are all slugging it out with one another for the largest slice of the cake. That is why they have such enormous lobbying arsenals and why they flood politicians with campaign donations. But, like those gangsters in Havana, there is one crucial point on which they all agree: It is their cake. Nobody else gets a slice.
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Imagine, for example, that there had been a modicum of public involvement when Congress lifted the national cap on how many radio stations a single company could own in 1996. That provision -- written, as far as anyone can tell, by radio-industry lobbyists -- sailed through Congress without a shred of discussion and without a trace of press coverage. It is safe to say that 99.9 percent of Americans had no clue. As a result, radio broadcasting has become the province of a small number of firms that can own as many as eight stations each in a single market. The notorious Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations nationally.

As a result of this single change in policy, competition has declined, local radio news and programming have been decimated (too expensive and much less competitive pressure to produce local content), musical playlists have less nutrition and variety than the menu at McDonald's, and the amount of advertising has skyrocketed. This is all due to a change in policy -- not to the inexorable workings of the free market. "There is too much concentration in radio," John McCain said on the Senate floor in 2003. "I know of no credible person who disagrees with that."

And McChesney has much more valuable writing in the article. Give his and the other articles a read.