3
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how Can the Political Economy
of Communication help us
understand the Internet?
While the catechism presents a superficial and misleading picture of capitalism and condones a weak democracy, the commercial media system in the
united States supplements this with its own catechism. It goes something
like this:
Commercial media compete with each other to satisfy audience demands.
Competition forces commercial media to comply, or else a competitor will steal
their market and force them out of business. As a result, the system “gives the
people what they want.” As for journalism, it too has the threat of competition
to keep the firms in line. But there commercial pressures can be a problem, so
the most important development is the rise of independent professional reporters committed to unbiased, objective news. The key to the success of both the
entertainment and journalism components of the media system is that they be
competitive and part of the private sector, not controlled by the government.
If there is anything that is beyond debate, it is that government involvement
with media is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. A free press is the
key to a free society, and the free market is the foundation of a free press and a
healthy democratic culture.
As with the broader catechism from chapter 2, this vision of a free media
system is pretty much accepted by most observers and is then adapted to
digital technology. Although this vision of a free press has some accurate and
attractive components, it is dubious for effective understanding and action
with regard to the Internet or all media. As valuable as political economy
is for shedding light on capitalism and on the relationship of capitalism to
democracy, it cannot provide in its traditional form the basis for more than
63
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digital disconnect
a cursory critique of this notion of a free media system. Fortunately, there is
a subfield of political economy—the political economy of communication
(PEC)—that is ideally suited to address most of the central issues surrounding the digital revolution in considerable detail.1
The PEC brings communication into the picture alongside capitalism
and democracy. It evaluates media and communication systems by determining how they affect political and social power in society and whether
they are, on balance, forces for or against democracy and successful selfgovernment. This critical or explicit normative basis distinguishes it from
related fields like media economics or media law. Those fields, like mainstream economics, take the united States as it is, for better or worse, and
regard themselves as neutral regarding the status quo, so they give little critical thought to the system as a whole. This neutrality generally resolves into
a tacit acceptance of the status quo and the existing power structure as the
appropriate one for a free society.
The PEC has two general lines of inquiry. First, it examines the institutions, subsidies, market structures, firms, support mechanisms, and labor
practices that define a media or communication system. The way media markets actually operate has little in common with the free-market catechism, so
bromides about competition and the invisible hand are of mostly ideological
value. The PEC strives to provide a more accurate understanding of media
markets and the true role of the government. It examines how these structural and institutional factors shape the content of media and how communication systems function in society. Political economists of communication
take a keen interest in evaluating the caliber of journalism produced by the
commercial news media system.
Second, the PEC emphasizes the foundational role of government policies in establishing media systems, even commercial profit-driven systems.
The PEC studies and assesses how communication policies have been debated and determined, and it has a strong historical component looking at
how media policies and systems were created in the past. Communication
policy debates are the nucleus of the atom, and if media systems are to be
reformed or changed, this is where one must go.
both elements of the PEC, in my view, provide an indispensible way to
understand how the Internet has developed, what the great issues have been
and are, and what options remain before us. The PEC cannot provide all the
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65
answers to all the questions, but it can at least contribute a useful context to
provide a basis for answers to most of them.
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The ABCs of the PEC
The place to start is to understand media as a problem for society. by problem I mean its first definition in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:
“a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution.” The media, in
this sense, are a political problem, and an unavoidable one at that. Media
systems of one sort or another are going to exist, and they do not fall from
the sky. The policies, structures, subsidies, and institutions that are created
to control, direct, and regulate the media will be responsible for the logic
and nature of the media system. understood this way, the manner in which
a society decides how to structure the media system, how it elects to solve the
problem of the media, becomes of paramount importance. These policy debates will often determine the contours and values of the media system that
then produces the content of media that are visible to all.2
The problem of the media exists in all societies, regardless of their structure. A society does not approach the problem with a blank page; the range
of options is influenced by the political economic structure, cultural traditions, and the available communication technologies, among other things.
In dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the problem is solved by those in
power, with the transparent goal of generating a media system that supports
their domination of the nation and minimizes the possibility of effective opposition. The direct link between control over the media and control over
the society is self-evident. In formally democratic societies, too, the same
tension exists between those who hold power and those who do not, but the
battle assumes different forms. Media are at the center of struggles for power
and control in any society, and this is arguably even more often the case in
democratic nations, where the issue is more up for grabs.
The PEC is oriented toward solving the problem of the media in a way
that produces a media system most conducive to democratic values. There is
no one answer to this problem, and the more study, debate, and experimentation, the better the answers will be. Due to circumstances, the PEC tends
to highlight the problems associated with the dominant commercial media
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digital disconnect
system. Raymond Williams, the great Welsh scholar, pioneered discussions
about the necessity of reforming media systems as part of building a more
just, humane, and democratic society. his trailblazing work in the 1960s
and early 1970s made the replacement of commercial media systems and
structures a central part of the modern democratic political project. As early
as 1962, in a pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Williams argued that creating
nonprofit and noncommercial media structures was a necessary part of modern democracy.3 That Williams was considered among the most important
scholars of communication in the English-speaking world only elevated the
importance of his claims and concerns.
In my view, the most influential concept that has guided the PEC is the
notion of the public sphere. The term is drawn from the work of the German
scholar Jürgen habermas, who argued that a crucial factor in the democratic
revolutions of modern times has been the emergence of an independent
realm, a public sphere, a commons, where citizens could meet to discuss
and debate politics as equals free of government scrutiny or interference.4
The media have come to assume the role of the public sphere in the united
States (and elsewhere). The logic of the public-sphere argument is to emphasize the importance of having a media system independent of both the
state and the dominant corporate economic institutions. This insight has
transcended much of the left’s difficulty in being critical of the government
in principle and the conventional refusal to contemplate the core problems
brought on by corporate control and advertising. The public-sphere reasoning rejects the notion that our two choices are Rupert Murdoch or Joseph
Stalin. For a generation it has provided a democratic road map and blasted
open a way of thinking about a third way—an independent nonprofit and/or
small-business sector—as the necessary democratic media system. As with
public-good theory, it does not tell which policies to employ, but it provides
a valuable framework for thinking about appropriate policy making.5
Policies are crucial to establishing media systems, and governments have
the capacity to change policies and media systems, but they do so only on
rare historical occasions. Indeed, it is so rare that most people understandably do not realize that the right to change these policies and systems even
exists. What accounts for that? This is where critical junctures are important.
The idea of critical junctures helps explain how social change works:
there are rare, brief periods in which dramatic changes are debated and
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67
enacted drawing from a broad palette of options, followed by long periods
in which structural or institutional change is slow and difficult.6 “Critical
junctures are rare events in the development of an institution,” as Giovanni
Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen put it; “the normal state of an institution
is either one of stability or one of constrained, adaptive change.” 7 During a
critical juncture, which usually lasts no more than one or two decades, the
range of options for society is much greater than it is otherwise. Ideas that
were once verboten or unthinkable are suddenly on the table. The decisions
made during such a period establish institutions and rules that put society on
a course that will be difficult to change for decades or generations.
This notion of critical junctures is increasingly accepted in history and
the social sciences. It has proven valuable for thinking broadly about societywide fundamental social change, and also as a way to understand fundamental change within a specific sector, like media and communication. Most
of our major institutions in media are the result of such critical junctures;
once one has passed, the existing media regime is on stable ground, and its
legitimacy and permanence are largely unquestioned. In times like those,
communication policy debates tend to support the dominant institutions
and attract little public awareness or participation.
Critical junctures in media and communication tend to occur when two
or all three of the following conditions hold:
•
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•
•
There is a revolutionary new communication technology that undermines the existing system;
The content of the media system, especially the journalism, is increasingly discredited or seen as illegitimate; and/or
There is a major political crisis—severe social disequilibrium—in
which the existing order is no longer working, dominant institutions
are increasingly challenged, and there are major movements for social
reform.
In the past century, critical junctures in American media and communication occurred three times: in the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), when
journalism was in deep crisis and the overall political system was in turmoil;
in the 1930s, when the emergence of radio broadcasting occurred at the
same time as public antipathy to commercialism rose against the backdrop
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digital disconnect
of the Depression; and in the 1960s and early 1970s, when popular social
movements in the united States provoked radical critiques of the media as
part of a broader social and political critique.8
The result of the critical juncture in the Progressive Era was the emergence of professional journalism. The result of the critical juncture in the
1930s was the model of loosely regulated commercial broadcasting, which
provided the model for subsequent electronic media technologies like FM
radio and terrestrial, cable, and satellite television. The result of the 1960s
and 1970s critical juncture was less sweeping for communication, although
a number of reforms were enacted. In many respects the issues raised then
were never resolved, buried by the pro-corporate epoch that followed.
Today we are in the midst of another profound critical juncture for communication. Two of the conditions are already in place: the digital revolution
is overturning all existing media industries and business models, and journalism is at its lowest ebb since the Progressive Era. The third condition—the
overall stability of the political and social system—is the last domino to fall.
It remains to be seen whether the people will engage with the structural
crises our society is facing or leave matters to elites. In the critical juncture
of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, elites were concerned by a “crisis of democracy.” This “crisis” was created by previously suppressed, apathetic, passive, and marginalized elements of the population—minorities,
students, women—becoming politically engaged and making demands
upon the system.9 The Occupy movement and mass demonstrations of 2011
provide glimmers of popular political activism not seen for many decades; if
this is the start of something big, we truly are entering a full-throttle critical
juncture, and what the country will look like when we get to the other side
is impossible to predict.
Technology
As the discussion of critical junctures suggests, communication technology plays an enormous role in the political economy of communication.
To some extent this role is self-evident, as many media are defined by their
technology, be it the printing press, the radio, or the television. So when
new technologies emerge, so do new media. but it goes much deeper than
that. In some ways, the field can be better understood as political economy
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69
and communication. The PEC is not just about making a structural analysis
of communication systems and policy debates, as important as those are. Its
practitioners also analyze how communication defines social existence and
shapes human development. A study of communication can provide keen
insights into our historical development. Communication affects political
economy as much as political economy affects communication. When both
are put in the hopper as codependent variables, things get interesting. This
is precisely the intellectual cocktail we need in order to address the Internet
and the digital revolution.
here the importance of technology for communication—what are called
“intellectual technologies”—is paramount. The Canadian political economist harold Innis pioneered work that emphasized the “biases” of communication distinct from its political economic utilization, or, better yet, in
combination with the political economic uses. In the mid-twentieth century,
he wrote long studies on the importance of communication in shaping the
course of human history.10 Innis argued that modes of communication and
communication technologies were of central importance in understanding
human development and that they had profound intrinsic biases. Marshall
McLuhan was an acolyte of Innis, though this Canadian English professor
altered Innis’s arguments. McLuhan is best known for his notion that the
“medium is the message,” that the nature of media content derives from the
structure and technology of the medium. The dominant media technology
defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that
human societies operate.11 his work was very influential on innumerable
thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an innate
bias toward superficiality.12
“Every intellectual technology,” as Nicholas Carr puts it, “embodies an
intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or
should work.” These technologies “have the greatest and most lasting power
over what and how we think.” 13 Without a political economic context, this
approach can smack of media technological determinism, but with the PEC
this approach highlights that media technologies have significant impact, an
extra-large helping of what sociologists term “relative autonomy.” 14 Innis did
not only focus upon the importance of communication technologies; he was
also a sharp critic of corporate media and media commercialization.15 The
same was true of Postman, who termed the united States a technopoly, “a
system in which technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty
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digital disconnect
over social institutions and national life, and becomes self-justifying, selfperpetuating, and omnipresent.” “The core of technopoly,” Postman wrote,
“is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the
interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.” 16
For an example of this fusion, Nicholas Carr makes a strong critique of
the Internet’s effect on how our brains function, discussed in chapter 1. Likewise, Eli Pariser expresses concerns about how the Internet is producing
“bubbles” that keep us in a world that constantly reinforces our known interests and reduces empathy, creativity, and critical thought. In both cases,
aspects of the technology that seem most disastrous to Carr and Pariser are
enhanced or driven by commercial imperatives. As Carr puts it, Google is
“quite literally, in the business of distraction.” 17 Indeed, the criticism of outof-control technology is in large part a critique of out-of-control commercialism.18 The loneliness, alienation, and unhappiness sometimes ascribed to
the Internet are also associated with a marketplace gone wild.19 They are very
closely linked in modern America.
because so much of the debate surrounding the digital revolution comes
down to how this technology is not only revolutionizing society but possibly
changing the very nature of human beings, it is appropriate to begin considering the digital communication revolution in the broad sweep of human
development. The question is not whether the Internet’s impact has equaled
or passed that of the telegraph or radio or television. The question is much
grander: Is the digital revolution going to qualify as the fourth great communication transformation in human history. I use the term transformation
to indicate a communication revolution of such stunning magnitude that
it alters the way our species develops. These great communication transformations are always accompanied by dramatic changes in the material
conditions and structures of humanity in our political economy.
The first great transformation was the emergence of speech and language. Although there is some genetic basis for language, it did not emerge
overnight as a result of one or two mutations.20 Some scholars place its development a mere fifty thousand to sixty thousand years ago. Some, perhaps many, anthropologists believe that it was this emergence of language
that permitted a small band of hominids to avoid possible extinction and
to branch out from one corner of Africa across the planet in a geological
nanosecond.21 The acquisition of language helped develop human brains
and made more-advanced toolmaking possible. The eventual development
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71
of agriculture—which permitted the accumulation of surplus and then civilization and history—would not have been remotely possible without language.22 So the first communication transformation was a big deal. In many
ways, it defined our species; it created us. As Aristotle and the ancient Greeks
understood, we are the “talking animal.”
The second great communication transformation was writing, which
came many thousands of years after agriculture, only around five thousand
years ago. Writing was not a “natural” development; many fairly advanced
societies never had it, and there was never anything close to the diversity
found in human languages.23 Even today all the world’s written languages
come from three or four basic systems. Writing was driven in growing empires by the need to record information because of surpluses generated by
agriculture, and those that did not have writing faced real limits to their
expansion or survival. Indeed, empires with writing had a decided advantage
over nonwriting societies and tended to crush and absorb them. As for the
benefits of writing for humanity, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes that “the immediate consequence of the emergence of writing was the enslavement of vast
numbers of people.” 24 Innis, too, was skeptical about writing’s emergence; he
lamented the loss of oral cultures.
Writing also had enormous unanticipated consequences, with much of
what we regard as our cultural heritage the direct and indirect result. Without writing, for example, it is impossible to imagine the human brain being
capable of generating the scientific, philosophical, and artistic accomplishments that define us. The development of the phonetic alphabet was decisive. Its origins can be traced to the Phoenicians before 1000 bce, and the
Greeks definitely had it by around 750 bce and had advanced it. Alphabets
are “energy efficient” in that “considerably less of the brain is activated in
reading words from phonetic letters than in interpreting logograms or other
pictorial symbols.” 25 Shortly thereafter, classical Athens blossomed in a manner that some still consider the high point of human civilization. Athens
is nothing if not a tribute to the written word, although Innis thought its
unique genius was as much due to the fact that the oral tradition was still
strong and co-existed with writing in a manner that would never be the case
again.
The third great communication transformation, the printing press, is better understood among scholars, as it has been the subject of considerable
analysis and debate.26 before the printing press made reading, writing, and
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digital disconnect
literacy widespread, the vocabulary of the English language, for example,
was limited to a few thousands words. After the printing press, it expanded
upward to a million words. “As language expanded,” Carr writes, “consciousness deepened.” 27 The printing press made possible the radical reconstruction of all major institutions, most immediately religion. It is difficult to
imagine political democracy, the scientific revolution, or much of an industrial economy without the printing press and mass literacy. by no means did
the printing press generate modern democracy and industrial capitalism on
its own, but it was a precondition for either to exist.28
Whether this current critical juncture develops into the fourth great communication transformation may not be settled until we are all long gone.
To some, the jury has already returned. “With the exception of alphabets
and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mindaltering technology that has ever come into general use,” Carr writes. “At
the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book.” 29
John Naughton cautions us that this communication revolution has only just
begun, and if history is any guide, we really have little idea how it will eventually turn out.30 We do know for certain that the interplay of digital communication with political economy will determine its trajectory and strongly
shape its ultimate role in human development.
In the meantime, the united States, like other nations and transnational
bodies, faces myriad communication policy issues affecting digital communication that are often about technological choices. Technologies reinforce
the status quo once a communication regime is put in place. Technologies
are “path dependent,” meaning that once they are in place with a certain
technological standard, it is very difficult and expensive to replace them unless there is a major technological revolution, even if they have considerable
flaws. We still live with the limitations of the QWERTy keyboard, to take
one example, though the rationale for that system disappeared generations
ago.31 Likewise, communication technologies invariably have unintended
consequences—the more significant the technology, the greater the unintended consequences. both of these features point to the need for as careful
and thoughtful an approach to communication policy making as possible. As
Philip N. howard puts it, “technology design can actually involve political
strategy and be part of a nation’s ‘constitutional moment.’ ” 32
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The Commercial Media Entertainment System
The Internet and digital technology encompass all communication. by most
accounts, they have disrupted the business models of existing communication industries and forced media firms to rejigger their operations. These
are some of the greatest concerns brought on by the Internet, and they are
precisely where the PEC can be of value. beyond simply figuring out a way
to give consumers better deals or help firms figure out how to be more profitable, it can help us go large, to think about what type of cultural system
digital technology makes possible. Let’s start by looking at the commercial
entertainment sector.
The united States has a vibrant commercial entertainment media industry. It mushroomed into a key part of the u.S. economy and culture in the
twentieth century with the advent of films, recorded music, radio, and television. American popular commercial culture has its share of critics, but most
of them hold to the view that if there are problems, they are due to the audience, which demands questionable content. After all, if people demanded
great culture, it would be in the interests of the firms to give the people what
they want. If the free market works anywhere, for better or for worse, it is
certainly in the realm of entertainment. At least, that’s the theory.
Commercial media do generate some exceptional material and serve the
needs of many Americans. In many ways, the output of commercial media is
quintessentially American and has become the way we understand our cultural heritage. The PEC cannot and does not say much about aesthetics or
the nature of content, nor does it analyze the way audiences deal with media
content. The PEC does look at structural and institutional factors and assess
what types of pressures exist that will shape the content.33 The catechism
asserts that commercial media “give the people what they want,” that the
audience barks out orders and media firms race to satisfy them in a direct
and unambiguous relationship. The consumer is king. The PEC examines
these claims.
Right away, the catechism washes up against the rocks. Media content
industries tend to be oligopolistic, with only a few firms dominating production in each sector. Moreover, in the past two generations, the largest
media corporations have become conglomerates, meaning they tend to
have major market shares in several different media markets, such as motion
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digital disconnect
pictures, television, recorded music, and magazines.34 A small handful of
gigantic firms control film production, network television, cable TV systems
and channels, publishing, and music recording. It is not simply the standard
tendency toward market concentration in capitalism; it has to do with the
nature of entertainment media markets. In such markets, the “first-copy”
costs—say, of producing a film—are enormous, long before a penny of revenue is earned. This is a very high-risk industry. On the other hand, the
marginal costs of serving additional customers after the first are rock-bottom,
so blockbusters can be extremely profitable. having size and being a conglomerate is the smartest way for firms to manage risk.35
Consequently, instead of consumer sovereignty, there is producer sovereignty. The media firms have a great deal of power over what they produce
and do not produce. They may give the people what they want, but only
within the range that is most profitable for them: This tends to be a narrower range than one would find in a competitive market. That’s why media
consolidation has been a central concern of the PEC. Concentrated control
over culture (and journalism) instantly raises red flags in liberal democratic
theory, for good reason.
The catechism also assumes that media firms and creative talent are conjoined and march in lockstep to high profits and high incomes. This elides
a tension that has been present for centuries: art done purely for profit tends
to be of dubious artistic value. Artists need compensation to be able to do
their work, may need to have a sense of the audience in their minds, and may
desire and embrace public acclaim. but if the commercialism overrides the
art, the art—to invoke howard Stern, who rejected using marketing surveys
to determine the content of his radio program—will most likely suck. The
conflict between creative talent and commercial pressures recurs often. If
it didn’t, Rupert Murdoch and the other media CEOs could simply write
and direct films themselves or indiscriminately hire people to do so at much
lower wages.
Monopoly aggravates the tension: If creative people are dissatisfied, their
options are not great in an oligopolistic market, especially when all the players ape each other. This is why media firms and creative talent tend to have
such a complicated and often antagonistic relationship. As a rule, the best
stuff comes when it has as little corporate interference as possible, and that
goes against the logic of a system in which firms make risky investments.
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75
The corporate instinct is to re-create what worked yesterday. Let some other
chump take a chance—and if it pans out, imitate away.
Moreover, in the conglomerate era, the projects that get green-lighted are
often those that lend themselves to prequels, sequels, spin-offs, adaptation to
other media, toys, videogames, merchandising, and licensing income. Tim
Wu compared the ten most expensive hollywood films of the 1960s and
1970s to the ten most expensive hollywood films of the 2000s. The earlier
films were all stand-alone properties that rose and fell on their box office;
the 1970s were indeed a golden age for American cinema by most critical
accounts. The more recent blockbuster budgets were all spent on films that
had all sorts of additional revenue streams built in, to the point that the
actual quality of the film itself seemed to be far less a concern for ultimate
profitability.36 When one studies the industrial production of culture in hollywood, it is almost bewildering that anything good can be done once a
project runs the gauntlet of a corporate bureaucracy.37
The notion that the system invariably “gives the people what they want”
further unravels when advertising is added to the equation. Advertising is of
particular importance because it has provided much of the revenue that has
supported entertainment media for the past eighty years. That support has
been one of the main defenses of advertising’s otherwise questionable contribution to society. Advertising creates distinct pressures to appeal to certain
types of audiences—generally more affluent—and to avoid certain types of
themes. It can strongly influence the nature of media content, mostly for
the worse.38 Those entertainment sectors, like most of radio and television,
which depend upon advertising for the lion’s share of their revenues, are all
about giving the advertisers what they want, and that is often different from
what people want. They are effectively branches of the advertising industry.
Moreover, internal industry surveys show that most people want much
less advertising in their media and would even be willing to pay more to
have less commercialism.39 but this is rarely a profitable option, so it is not
one people can routinely vote for in the marketplace. The commercial marketplace cannot be used effectively to reject commercialism. For all the talk
about how the system “gives the people what they want,” it also gives people
a truckload of uninvited material they desperately wish to avoid.
So audience demands for entertainment are filtered through the commercial requirements of media conglomerates and advertisers. The market
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research that these firms do is less about determining what audiences want
than what is the cheapest, safest, and most profitable way to reach target audiences. Audience demands that do not fit the commercial needs are likely
to go unmet.
The catechism assumes that popular demand for programming is exogenous, that it springs from some other world and is divinely democratic. but
what people are exposed to significantly shapes what they will demand. To
adapt Say’s law: supply creates demand. Media firms have no incentive to
upgrade the tastes of the audience; they take the market as they find it. One
could argue that through commercialism they degrade it. It is generally nonprofit institutions and noncommercial environments that are tasked with
exposing people to culture they would not experience otherwise. It was marginalized communities that produced the great breakthroughs in popular
music—from jazz and rock to reggae and hip-hop—not the R&D office in a
media conglomerate. It is when young people are exposed to—and educated
in—literature, musical traditions, and the panoply of filmed entertainment
that they develop broader tastes. It was once thought that the Internet would
provide a massive treasure chest of culture that would dramatically expand
any individual’s horizon. As Eli Pariser argues in The Filter Bubble and I discuss in chapter 5, cyberspace is becoming less a frontier where citizens are
like explorers on a glorious adventure than a cul-de-sac where advertisingdriven cues keep people in their little individualized bubble, making it unlikely for serendipity to occur.
The primary education of Americans today appears to be in commercial
values.40 Consider the education provided in the children’s market, which
has exploded in the past generation. It goes way beyond just selling products to children; a majority of people use brands remembered from childhood, and children influence their parents’ purchases, too.41 hence children
under three years old—a market that barely existed forty years ago—are now
a $20 billion annual market for advertisers. by three months old, 40 percent
of infants watch screen media regularly; by two years, 90 percent do. by her
third birthday, the average American child recognizes one hundred brand
logos. The typical child is exposed to forty thousand screen ads per year.
Children know the names of more branded characters than of real animals.
by her tenth birthday, the average American child knows three hundred to
four hundred brands. Research shows over and over that preschoolers will
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overwhelmingly think advertised products, branded products, are superior
even when the actual contents are identical.42
In short, for all its problems in teaching other subjects, the united States
is leading the pack in commercial indoctrination. The massive wave of advertising to children is considered a contributing factor in the epidemic of
juvenile obesity, the growth of attention-deficit disorders, and other psychological issues, as well as the rampant sexualization of girls at ever-younger
ages.43 In 2010, Alex bogusky, who was named Adweek’s Creative Director
of the Decade in 2009 and called “the Elvis of advertising,” announced he
was quitting the industry, in part to protest marketers “spending billions to
influence our innocent and defenseless offspring.” bogusky termed advertising to children a “destructive” practice with no “redeeming value.” 44 “There
can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul,” Nelson Mandela once stated,
“than the way it treats its children.” 45 It is difficult to study the commercial
marination of children’s brains and not regard it as child abuse.46
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Free Market in Action?
The fatal flaw in the catechism is the notion that the commercial entertainment media system is based upon a free market. It is profit driven, to be
sure, but that is a different matter. One need only start with the value of the
monopoly licenses that are given free to commercial radio and TV stations,
or spectrum to satellite television, or monopoly cable TV franchises. One
recent estimate by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staffers of
the market value of the publicly owned spectrum today—some of which is
given to commercial broadcasters at no charge—is around $500 billion.47
When one considers all the wealth created from the free gift of spectrum to
broadcasters since the 1920s, all the empires built upon it, the total transfer
is certainly well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Or consider the
massive empires that firms like Comcast built with government-granted monopoly licenses for cable television systems. Economists acknowledge that
these companies earn “rent”—i.e., superprofits—from the monopoly franchises. (Much of the policy-making process is an effort by communities to
get something in return for these rents.) These old media subsidies remain
of concern in the digital era. As chapter 4 chronicles, these firms are using
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digital disconnect
their monopoly franchises and spectrum allocations to lock in a piece of the
action online.
There are numerous other important direct and indirect subsidies that
the government provides commercial media, and I have documented them
elsewhere.48 Two are of particular importance. First, advertising is condoned
and encouraged by government policies and regulations. Allowing businesses to write off their advertising expenditures as a business expense on
their tax returns not only costs the government tens of billions annually in
revenues, but also encourages ever greater commercialism in our culture.
by performing only lax regulation of advertising content, even as permitted
by the law, the floodgates to commercialism are kept wide open. In addition,
federal, state, and local governments themselves spend billions annually in
advertising, which in effect is money that bankrolls commercial media.
Second, and by far the most important for entertainment media, is copyright. Media products have always been a fundamental problem for capitalist
economics, going back to the advent of the book. Without direct government
intervention, the marketplace would barely exist as we have come to know
it. The problem is that a person’s use of information, unlike tangible goods
and services, does not prohibit others from using it. (In economic terms, it
is nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary.) For tangible products, the type that
fills economics textbooks, one person’s use of a product or service precludes
another person from using the same product or service. Two people cannot
eat the same hamburger or simultaneously drive the same automobile. More
of the product or service needs to be produced to satisfy additional demand.
Not so with information. “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we
exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple,” George bernard Shaw allegedly once said, “but if you have an idea and I have an idea
and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” 49
Stephen King doesn’t need to write an individual copy of his novels for
every single reader. Likewise, whether two hundred or 200 million people
read one of his books would not detract from any one reader’s experience of
it. What this meant for book publishing was that anyone who purchased a
book could then print additional copies and sell them. There would be free
market competition, and the price of the book would come tumbling down
to the marginal cost of publishing a copy, exactly where it should be in a
competitive market. but authors would receive compensation only for those
copies of the book they personally published or authorized, and competition
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would force them to lower the price to where their compensation was zero.
Consumers might get cheap books, great for a democratic culture, but authors would not receive enough compensation to make it worth their while
to write books. The market fails. The problem with nonrivalrous resources is
not allocating consumption; rather, it is encouraging production.
This was apparent long before modern capitalism. It was the basis for
copyright laws, so important that their principle is inscribed in the u.S. Constitution. Authors received temporary monopoly rights to control who could
publish their books in order to make certain they received sufficient compensation. The trick was to encourage production without creating dangerous monopolies over information. Thomas Jefferson only reluctantly agreed
to copyright, detesting it as a government-created monopoly that was effectively a tax on knowledge. The Constitution states explicitly that copyright
licenses cannot be permanent, and their initial length was fourteen years.50
In the early republic, authors or publishers had to specifically apply for
copyright to get such protection; only 556 of the 13,000 books published in
the 1790s were covered. Only American authors were eligible, which pained
Charles Dickens to no end. but Dickens kept on writing, fortunately, able to
build up a fine income on his british sales. he also made a good living giving speaking tours in the united States, where his inexpensive books made
him wildly popular.
When new media technologies developed and powerful media corporations emerged in the twentieth century, they were able to get Congress to
make copyright automatic and to dramatically extend the length and scope
of copyright protection—or to put it in plain English, government monopoly
protection licenses. This has been a godsend to their bottom lines—indeed,
to the very existence of their industries—but at a high cost to consumers and
artists wishing to use material that can remain copyright protected for well
over one hundred years. The copyright for this book, for example, will last
for 70 years after my death. (What is the thinking? That I would not write
a book if it were covered by copyright only for 20 or 30 or 50 years after my
death?) A corporate copyright, as for a film, lasts 95 years after it is published
or 120 years after its creation, whatever come first. The numbers are almost
meaningless, because copyright terms invariably get extended before they
expire.51 We have, in effect, permanent copyright on the installment plan,
and nothing produced since the 1920s has been added to the public domain.
Copyright long ago lost its connection to promoting the interests of authors
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or creative artists so they might have short-term monopoly control over their
work—just long enough for them to theoretically make enough money to
make more culture.52
Today copyright has become a huge market in which control over copyrights is frequently unconnected to the actual persons who created the original work—and the terms for copyright are extended after the fact, which
makes no sense at all. Copyright is now something entirely different: it protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomerates. They could not exist without it.53 Copyright has
become a major policy encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.54 It is also an enormous annual indirect subsidy for copyright
holders, mostly large media corporations, by the public, in the form of severely inflated prices both for consumers and for cultural producers wishing
access to material. No one knows the exact amount of “rent” these monopoly
privileges confer upon copyright holders, because there is no accounting for
this category. but the handful of lawsuits over the spoils of copyright suggests
it is enormous, probably running into the tens of billions annually. It was for
this reason that Milton Friedman regarded copyright as an anticompetitive
mechanism, and he generally opposed the various extensions it received in
the twentieth century.55
Scholars term this history the paradox of copyright. A policy meant to
encourage creativity and cultural output has become a primary weapon to
prevent the same. The media conglomerates routinely take public-domain
material, like Cinderella, and make a fortune using it—because it was produced before copyright began to be routinely extended. but no future artists
will be able to do the same to their creations without the conglomerate’s
permission (and usually a generous payoff).
Consider, for example, bob Dylan. his first six albums of original material from the early to mid-1960s—The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan through
Blonde on Blonde—are some of the greatest, most iconic albums in American history. Many of them rank on any list of the top fifty or hundred popular music albums of all time, and a couple of them are usually in the top
ten. If I had a dollar for every time I listened to one of the songs on those
albums I could retire comfortably. yet when a Library of Congress musicologist studied the first seventy songs Dylan composed and recorded, he documented that “about two-thirds of Dylan’s melodies from that period were
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lifted directly from the Anglo- and African-American traditional repertory.”
Dylan admitted that was his approach to songwriting. because those songs
were unprotected by copyright, Dylan was able to do what he did, and we
are very fortunate that Dylan was not prohibited from producing his great
songs. The catch is that today no one could do to bob Dylan what Dylan did
to the folk canon without making far greater alterations to the melodies than
Dylan did, because those melodies will be protected by copyright for a very
long time.56 For that reason, we are all the poorer.
In this light, the existential threat posed by the Internet to the commercial
media system becomes clear: Now digital content could be spread instantly,
at no charge, all over the world with the push of a button. The marginal cost
of reproducing material was zero, nothing, nada. by free-market economics, that was its legitimate price. Once sufficient broadband existed, music,
movies, books, TV shows—everything!—would be out there in cyberspace
accessible to anyone for free. Copyright enforcement would be helpless in
the face of all-powerful digital technology.
To make matters worse from the capitalist perspective, advertising, which
had been the way commercial interests had been able to convert the public
good of over-the-air broadcasting into a lucrative industry, was likewise imperiled by the Internet. Who would ever voluntarily watch an ad on their
computer, not to mention allow herself to be carpet-bombed with ads? On
the Internet, media corporations could no longer hold people prisoner. “We
are talking about a field,” one commercial website producer lamented in
1997, “where it’s not even clear who should pay whom.” 57
This led in the 1990s to an initial deluge of euphoria from those who
found the corporate media status quo unsatisfactory. “The world has suddenly developed a printing press for every person on the planet,” henry Jenkins enthused.58 The media conglomerates, in their wheeling and dealing,
were simply engaging in the “rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic,”
as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation famously put it. The infinitude of websites and the ability of anyone
to go toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch was their death knell: “I think they are,
in their present manifestations, goners.” 59 Scarcity, a requirement for capitalist markets, no longer existed! There was no longer any need for the PEC;
the digital revolution was ending scarcity and making communication ubiquitous, free, participatory, and wonderfully empowering and democratic. We
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digital disconnect
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can have a generation of potential bob Dylans able to draw from, and be
inspired by, all the fruits of human culture.
Of course, it has not developed quite that way. The giant media firms
have not disappeared, nor has the Internet eliminated television and hollywood. Marketing is a mandatory core institution of contemporary capitalism; the $300 billion spent annually on advertising and sales promotion was
not about to go gentle into that good night when John Perry barlow fired up
his bong and showed it the door. These are extremely powerful institutions
with tremendous political and economic power; they have flexed it mightily and with great effect. but their world was being turned upside down,
and the emergence of social media only underscored their dilemma. “At the
end of this first decade of the twenty-first century, the line between media
producers and consumers has blurred,” Michael Mandiberg writes, “and the
unidirectional broadcast has partially fragmented into many different kinds
of multidirectional conversations.” 60
This blurring and fragmentation pointed to an even more fundamental
problem. No matter how much havoc the digital revolution might wreak
upon commercial media business models, the Internet offered no solution
at all to the core problem of funding and organizing media content. If a
shrinking number of people could make a living producing content, what
sort of culture would society produce? The online logic seemed as much
pre-surplus as post-scarcity, as much Dark Ages as Age of Enlightenment. In
short, the need for the PEC, the need to develop effective systems and policies, was and is more important than ever.
Journalism
I separate news media from the rest of commercial media (entertainment)
for three reasons. First, journalism has developed out of a somewhat different tradition than entertainment: from the beginning of the republic, it has
been a key part of the governing system and has been understood that way.
Largely in recent decades, when media conglomeration merged the ownership of news media with that of entertainment media, especially in broadcast
and cable TV news, the distinction between news media and entertainment
media has been blurred, if not obliterated.
Second, even in the catechism, market criteria cannot to be used to
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evaluate the quality of journalism. Commercialism has been a key factor
in journalism since the beginning of the republic and has grown in importance, but it has never been embraced as entirely legitimate. Indeed, the
pure pursuit of profit has generally produced sensationalism, corruption,
and crisis for the news media. It has also meant that control over political
information has been placed in the hands of a small number of very wealthy
people. Normative assessments of journalism use different criteria, so the
tension between the capitalist basis of news media and the information requirements of self-government is a central issue in the PEC critique of the
news media.
Third, although broadcast news gets the generous subsidy of monopoly
spectrum licenses and all news media benefit from the advertising subsidy,
the news media get little benefit from copyright, because their product tends
to become quickly dated. hence the single most important subsidy for commercial entertainment media is of minimal value to news media. If journalism is in crisis due to the Internet and/or commercial pressures, it will likely
require a specific set of policies devoted to it, because the economics are
different.
There is considerable consensus in democratic theory and among journalism scholars about what a healthy journalism should entail: 61
1. It must provide a rigorous account of people who are in power and
people who wish to be in power in the government, corporate, and
nonprofit sectors.
2. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies or at least to
prevent liars from being unaccountable and leading nations into catastrophes—particularly wars, economic crises, and communal discord.
3. It must regard the information needs of all people as legitimate. If there
is a bias in the amount and tenor of coverage, it should be toward those
with the least economic and political power, for they are the ones who
most need information to participate effectively. Those atop the system
will generally get from their own sources the information they need to
rule the roost.
4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times. Research demonstrates that this is a crucial factor for encouraging informed citizen involvement in politics.62 Such
journalism addresses not only the transitory concerns of the moment,
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but also challenges that loom on the horizon. It must translate important scientific issues accurately into lay language. These issues cannot
be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about.
Journalism must provide the nation’s early warning system, so problems can be anticipated, studied, debated, and addressed before they
grow to crisis proportions.
It is not possible that all media outlets can or should provide all these
services to their communities; that would be impractical. It is necessary,
however, that the media system as a whole makes such journalism a realistic expectation for the citizenry. There should be a basic understanding of
the commons—the social world—that all people share, so that all people
can effectively participate in the political and electoral processes of selfgovernance. A free press is measured by how well it meets these criteria for
giving citizens the information they need to keep their freedoms and rights.
There is more. Great journalism, as ben bagdikian put it, requires great
institutions. Like any complex undertaking, a division of labor is required to
achieve success: Copy editors, fact checkers, and proofreaders are needed,
in addition to reporters and assigning editors. Great journalism also requires
institutional muscle to stand up to governments and corporate power—
institutions that people in power not only respect, but fear. Effective journalism requires competition, so that if one newsroom misses a story, it will be
caught by someone else. It requires people being paid to cover stories they
would not cover if they were doing journalism on a voluntary basis. In short,
to have democratic journalism requires material resources, which have to
come from somewhere and need to be organized on an institutional basis. It
also must be an open system, so anyone can engage in the practice without
needing a license, credentials, or approval from on high.
Of course, journalism is not the only provider of political information
or stimulant for informed debate and participation. Political information
also comes from schools, art, academic research, entertainment media,
and conversations with friends and family. but all of those other avenues
are much more effective and valuable if they rest atop a strong journalism
and support that journalism. A basic weakness of the catechism is the superficial understanding of journalism’s history and evolution. Defenders
of the catechism and Internet celebrants tend to fail to appreciate how far
twentieth-century American journalism has strayed from reaching these
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ideals. hence reconstructing the journalism system under digital auspices
begins on a suspect foundation.
In the first century of the republic, journalism was marked by a ubiquitous and highly partisan press that tended to have a wide range of viewpoints, including a crucial abolitionist press. The mostly unknown feature
of this period, which I return to in chapter 6, is that this system was based
on extraordinarily large public subsidies; it was anything but a testament to
the free market. As advertising increasingly supported newspapers and publishing became a source of growing profitability, the subsidies decreased in
importance. For much of the final third of the nineteenth century, the news
media system tended to be quite competitive in economic terms. Large cities
often had over a dozen competing daily newspapers; papers came and went,
and nearly every newspaper was owned by a single publisher who also was
the editor or had a strong say in the editorial direction.63
but capitalism imposed its logic. In some cases profit-hungry publishers
found that sensationalism, what came to be called yellow journalism, was a
lucrative course. bribery of journalists, showing favoritism toward advertisers, and many other unethical practices were common. Most important, by
the 1890s newspaper markets began to shift from competitive to oligopolistic, even monopolistic. Although revenues and population continued to
increase sharply, the overall number of newspapers began to stagnate and
then fall. “The stronger papers are becoming stronger and the weaker papers
are having a hard time to exist,” one newspaper executive observed in 1902.64
Newspapers began to serve a larger and larger portion of their community’s
population—with much less fear of new competition than had been the
case—and had considerable power as a result.
Moreover, the great newspaper chains of Pulitzer, hearst, and Scripps
were being formed almost overnight. The new publishing giants no longer
had any need to be closely tied to political parties; in fact, as local newspapers grew more monopolistic, partisanship could antagonize part of the
market and undermine their commercial prospects. yet many publishers
continued to use their now monopolistic power to advocate for their political
viewpoints, which were generally conservative, probusiness, and antilabor.65
The great progressive Robert La Follette devoted a chapter of his 1920 book
on political philosophy to the crisis of the press. “Money power,” he wrote,
“controls the newspaper press . . . wherever news items bear in any way upon
the control of government by business, the news is colored.” 66
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digital disconnect
by the first two decades of the twentieth century, this bias became a major
crisis for American journalism. The news business was under constant attack for venality and duplicity. As even the publisher of the Scripps-owned
Detroit News acknowledged in private in 1913, the corrosive influence of
commercial ownership and the pursuit of profit were such that the rational
democratic solution would be to set up municipal ownership of newspapers
with popular election of the editors.67 In view of the explicitly political nature of newspapers in American history, this was not as absurd a notion as it
may appear today. Scripps, always the most working-class dedicated of the
major chains and realizing how commercialism undermined the integrity of
the news, even launched an ad-less daily newspaper in Chicago in 1911.68
Reconciling a monopolistic commercial news media with the journalism requirements of a political democracy is difficult. In many wealthier
European nations, the solution came in the form of strong partisan and occasionally public subsidies to support journalism dedicated to working-class
and labor interests, as well as the creation of independent public broadcasting. In Latin America, news media often have been the private preserve of
wealthy families with strongly conservative politics and no interest in political democracy if their probusiness candidates do not win. They seldom
care to expand the power or privileges of the great mass of poor people in
their nations. Efforts by popularly elected socialist or populist governments
to generate a news media that is not abjectly hostile to their policies—or, in
the governments’ claims, to have elements representing the interests of the
majority—understandably have met with charges of censorship.69 but even
those who defend the Latin American media chieftains acknowledge they
are often a dubious sort, and that their dominance is no democratic solution
to a very real problem.70
In the united States, the solution to the problem was self-regulation by
the newspaper industry, in the form of professional journalism. This embodied the revolutionary idea that the owner and the editor could be separated
and that the political views of the owner (and advertisers) would not be reflected in the nature of the journalism, except on the editorial page.
This was a 180-degree shift from the entire history of American journalism, which was founded on the notion of an explicitly partisan and highly
competitive press. Now, news would be determined and produced by trained
professionals, and the news would be objective, nonpartisan, factually accurate, and unbiased. Whether there were ten newspapers in a community or
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87
only one or two would be mostly irrelevant, because trained journalists—like
mathematicians addressing an algebra problem—would all come up with
the same news reports. As press magnate Edward Scripps explained, once
readers “did not care what the editor’s views were . . . when it came to news
one paper was as good as a dozen.” 71 There were no schools of journalism
in the united States (or the world, for that matter) in 1900. by the 1920s all
the major journalism schools had been established, and by 1923 the American Society of Newspaper Editors had been formed and had established a
professional code for editors and reporters to follow.
There is nothing inevitable or natural about the type of professional journalism that emerged in the united States in the last century. The professional news values that came to dominate in this country were contested;
the journalists’ union, the Newspaper Guild, in the 1930s unsuccessfully
attempted to foster a nonpartisan journalism far more critical of all people
in power. It argued journalism should be the agent of people outside of
power—to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as humorist
Finley Peter Dunne put it. The guild regarded journalism as a third force
independent of both government and big business and wanted to prohibit
publishers from having any control over the content of the news. As the leading history of the formation of the guild reports, “The idea that the Guild
could rebalance the power struggle between public and publisher through a
new kind of stewardship of freedom of the press became a core tenet of their
mission as an organization.” 72 This institutionalized independence remains
a compelling vision of journalism, worthy of being a portion of a good news
system, and it is still practiced today by some of our best journalists.
This way of practicing journalism was anathema to most publishers, however, who wanted no part of aggressive reporting on their fellow business
owners or the politicians they routinely worked with and relied upon for
their success. They also were never going to sign away their direct control
over the newsroom; editors and reporters had their autonomy strictly at the
owners’ discretion. The resulting level of professionalism was to the owners’
liking, for the most part, and more conducive to their commercial and political needs. It was also porous, so commercial factors could influence the
values that led to story selection and advertising could influence the nature
and content of news coverage.73
The core problem with professional journalism as it crystallized was that
it relied far too heavily upon official sources as the appropriate agenda setters
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digital disconnect
for news and as the deciders as to the range of legitimate debate in our political culture. There is considerable irony in this development. Consider Walter Lippmann, generally regarded as the leading advocate of professionalism
and a ferocious critic of the bankrupt quality of journalism in 1910s America. In two brilliant essays written in 1919 and 1920, Lippmann argued that
the main justification for, and requirement of, professionalism in journalism
was that it provide a trained group of independent nonpartisan reporters who
could successfully, systematically, and rigorously debunk government (and
implicitly, corporate) spin, not regurgitate it.74
This reliance upon official sources—people in power—as setting the
legitimate agenda and range of debate removed some of the controversy
from the news, and it made the news less expensive to produce. It didn’t
cost much to have reporters repeat what the mighty said. Thus the news
had an establishment tone. Reporters had to be careful about antagonizing
those in power, upon whom they depended for “access” to their stories.75
Chris hedges, the former New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter,
describes the reliance on official sources this way: “It is a dirty quid pro
quo. The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report
what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down,
reporters—real reporters—are cast into the wilderness and denied access.” 76
This fundamental limitation of professional journalism does not manifest
itself in the coverage of those issues where there is rich and pronounced
debate between or within leading elements of the dominant political parties.
Then journalists have generous space in which to maneuver, and professional standards can work to assure a measure of factual accuracy, balance,
and credibility. There tend to be slightly fewer problems in robust political
eras, like the Sixties, when mass political movements demand the attention,
respect, and fear of the powerful.
The real problem with professional journalism becomes evident when
political elites do not debate an issue but march in virtual lockstep. In such
a case, professional journalism is at best ineffectual and at worst propagandistic. This has often been the case in u.S. foreign policy, where both parties
are beholden to an enormous global military complex and accept the exclusive right of the united States to invade countries when it suits u.S. interests.77 In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic
assumptions and policy objectives and attempt to raise issues no one in the
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89
leadership of either party wishes to debate are considered “ideological” and
“unprofessional.” This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists.78
So it was that, even in the glory days of Sixties journalism, our news media
helped lead us into the Vietnam War, despite the fact that dubious claims
from the government—e.g., the Gulf of Tonkin hoax—could in many cases
have been easily challenged and exposed. “The process of brain-washing
the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen,” I.F. Stone
wrote at the time. Two great dissident Democratic senators, Alaska’s Ernest
Gruening and Oregon’s Wayne Morse, broke with both their own party
and the Republicans to warn against imperial endeavors in places such as
Vietnam. Their perspective, which history has shown to be accurate, was
marginalized in mainstream news media. The press, Stone observed, had
“dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the antiwar speeches of Morse and
Gruening.” 79 Morse recognized that the lack of critical coverage and debate
in the news media was undermining popular participation in foreign policy.
“The American people need to be warned before it is too late about the
threat which is arising as a result of monopolistic practices [in newspaper
ownership].” 80
Journalism schools lament these lapses in retrospect, but the situation
never improves; such is the gravitational pull of the professional code toward the consensus of those in power in matters of war and peace. The
2003 invasion of Iraq—based upon entirely fictitious “weapons of mass
destruction”—was one of the darkest episodes in American journalism history. It had astronomical, almost unimaginable, human and economic costs.
In his 2012 book, The Operators, foreign correspondent Michael hastings,
who spent considerable time in the company of General Stanley McChrystal and his staff, wrote about how military officials gloated in private at “how
massively they were manipulating the press,” including the most prestigious
correspondents.81 In March 2012, Glenn Greenwald critiqued National
Public Radio’s hallowed coverage, in particular a report on Iran in which
the correspondent
gathers a couple of current and former government officials (with an
agreeable establishment think-tank expert thrown in the mix), uncritically airs what they say, and then repeats it herself. This is what establishment-serving journalists in Washington mean when they boast
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digital disconnect
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that they, but not their critics, engage in so-called “real reporting”; it
means: calling up Serious People in Washington and uncritically repeating what they say.82
It seems the only time elite journalists exhibit rage is when their practices are
exposed. “The unwritten rule” for journalists is a simple one, hastings wrote.
“you weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially
those the media deemed untouchable.” 83
Another weakness built into professional journalism as it developed in the
united States was that it opened the door to an enormous public relations
industry that was eager to provide reporters with material on their clients.
Press releases and packets came packaged to meet the requirements of professional journalism, often produced by former journalists. The point of PR
is to get the client’s message in the news so that it looks like legitimate news.
The best PR is that which is never recognized for what it is. Although reporters generally understood the dubious nature of PR and never embraced it,
they had to use it to get their work done. Publishers tended to appreciate PR
because it lowered the costs of production. The dirty secret of journalism
is that a significant percentage of our news stories, in the 40 to 50 percent
range, even at the most prestigious newspapers in the glory days of the 1970s,
was based upon press releases. Even then, a surprising amount of the time,
these press releases were only loosely investigated before publication.84
The high-water mark for professional journalism was the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Even at its best, however, it tended to take the context and excitement out of politics, turning it into a dry and sometimes incoherent
spectator sport. unlike the partisan journalism of the nation’s first century,
it tended to promote depoliticization and apathy as much as participation.
Christopher Lasch characterized one of the limitations of American-style
professional journalism: “What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of
information it needs can be generated only by debate. We do not know what
we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the
right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test
of public controversy.” 85
Since the early 1980s, commercial pressure has eroded much of the autonomy that professional journalism afforded newsrooms and that had provided the basis for the best work done over the past fifty years. It has led to
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a softening of standards such that stories about sex scandals and celebrities
have become more legitimate because they make commercial sense: they
are inexpensive to cover, they attract audiences, and they give the illusion of
controversy without ever threatening anyone in power.
The emergence of the Internet has done much more damage to news
media than it has done to entertainment media. The entire area is disintegrating, as I chronicle in chapter 6. Most of the discussion of this issue, however, has been vacuous because of the lack of a political economic critique of
journalism. Professionalism has tended to be regarded as the natural American or democratic system of journalism, the organic result of profit-driven
media firms, which were doing a bang-up job until the digital revolution
rained on their parade. Imprisoned by this bogus schema, commentators
have been incapable of addressing what is arguably the single most important communication issue of our time: creating a system of journalism in the
digital era sufficient for credible self-government.
Copyright © 2014. The New Press. All rights reserved.
Policy Making
ultimately the nature of entertainment media, journalism, and the Internet
depend on policy making. As digital communication comes to engulf all traditional media, all of telephony, and much of commerce and social life, the
stakes are enormous. here the PEC has important lessons. As a rule, policies
will be made by elites and self-interested commercial interests, unless there
is organized popular intervention. In the united States today, there is considerable cynicism about democratic governance, such that many people have
abandoned hope that anyone but powerful commercial interests have a say.
The cynicism is well founded. The metaphor that best captures American communication policy making is the famous havana patio scene in
The Godfather II, in which Michael Corleone, hyman Roth, and other
American gangsters are dividing up Cuba among themselves during the batista dictatorship. They each take a slice of hyman Roth’s birthday cake—
appropriately shaped like Cuba—to demonstrate their piece of the action.
After divvying up the spoils, hyman Roth states how great it is to be in Cuba,
with a friendly government that knows how to work with “private enterprise.”
That is pretty much how communication policy making has been conducted
in the united States. Monopoly broadcast licenses, copyright extensions,
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digital disconnect
and tax subsidies are doled out all the time, but the public has no idea what
is going on. Like Michael Corleone and hyman Roth, extremely powerful
lobbyists battle it out with each other—in this case to get cushy deals from
the FCC and the relevant congressional committees—whose members and
top staffers often move to private industry to cash in after their stint in “public service.”
Above all else, the FCC has been dedicated to making the dominant
firms bigger and more profitable. Congress, too, is under the thumb of big
money. The one thing the big firms all agree upon is that it is their system
and the public has no role to play in the policy-making process. And because
the news media—generally owned by beneficiaries of the secretive system—
almost never cover this story in the general news, 99 percent of the public
has no idea what is going on. The best way to describe the role of the public
in communication policy deliberations is this: If you’re not at the negotiating
table, you’re what’s being served.
An example of corrupt policy making is the “debate” over copyright in the
u.S. Congress. It has been entirely one-sided, and for the past three decades,
copyright terms have been extended several times, for material that had already been produced. Why? The powerful media corporations and interests
that own most copyrights spent $1.3 billion on public relations and lobbying
Congress on this issue from 1998 to 2010. The proponents of protecting the
public domain and fair use—librarians, educators, and the like—have spent
$1 million in the same period. That is a 1,300-to-1 ratio.86 Furthermore, few
Americans have any awareness of the issue except through the news media,
so their exposure to it is largely via extravagant corporate PR scare campaigns
against “piracy.”
Is it any wonder that few members of Congress even understand there is
an issue to debate? Giving the copyright industries what they want is basically beyond debate; the specific ways Congress can expand and protect the
domain of copyright holders is what is under review. hence the gargantuan
lobbying expenses. Congress is creating enormous profits for these industries by extending, expanding, and enforcing monopoly rights. The only time
copyright industries seem to face opposition is when they square off against
other corporate lobbies that want access to copyright-protected material in
their operations. Such was the case in the 2011–12 debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), when Google joined an avalanche of public opposition to battle the unprecedented extension of government policing power
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93
desired by the copyright lobby. In that rare instance, the pro-copyright forces
were unable to get their dream legislation passed.
but cynicism must be avoided, as it feeds pessimism and depoliticization,
and becomes self-fulfilling. It is also wrong. In fact, American history is rich
with popular involvement with communication policy making, and many
of the most democratic aspects of our systems were due to popular political pressure. Most of these moments of popular participation were during
critical junctures, when the stakes were higher and the range of possible
outcomes greater. During the nineteenth century, abolitionists and populists
fought to keep postage low on periodicals, and they were successful to the
point that these publications were able to survive and sometimes thrive. It
was popular pressure that helped force universal service and common carriage on the AT&T telephone monopoly. Popular pressure in the Progressive
Era pushed newspapers to lessen explicitly right-wing journalism.87 What
public interest regulation of commercial broadcasting and advertising exists
came from grassroots popular organizing efforts in the 1930s and 1940s.88
The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were able to increase minority media ownership, establish community radio stations, and create publicaccess TV channels.89 And that is just a partial list.
As we are now arguably in the mother of all critical junctures, it is worth
noting that there has been an attendant burst of organized popular mediapolicy activism. beginning in the 1990s, the burgeoning political economic
critique of commercial news media generated by people like Edward S. herman, Noam Chomsky, and ben bagdikian and organizations like Fairness &
Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) spawned a generation of activists who saw
changing media as a necessary part of creating a more just and humane
world. The emergence of the Internet fueled this desire, both as a means to
that end and because of the great concern that citizens needed to organize to
prevent commercial interests from doing to the Internet what they had done
to u.S. broadcasting.90 As I have been a participant in this movement, I can
report that its very existence is predicated upon the work done in the PEC.
Specifically, I co-founded the public interest group Free Press with John
Nichols and Josh Silver late in 2002. The idea behind Free Press was simple:
to get democratic media policies, we need to have informed and organized
public participation in communication policy making. We needed to generate popular awareness of the issues and organize it as a political force. While
we lobbied on the issues at play in Washington, our goal had to be to expand
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94
digital disconnect
the range of debate and options beyond what was countenanced inside the
corporation-dominated beltway culture. We could not continue the practice
of just taking the “lesser-of-two-evils” side in intracorporate scrums about
who would get the biggest slice of the media pie. We needed to have one
foot in the future and one foot in the present, and our goal had to be to
convince all organized popular groups that media reform had to become a
central issue for them. unless we could do so, our chances of success, of real
structural reform, were slim.
On the one hand, Free Press has been a striking success. In conjunction
with its partners, it has organized or participated in major successful campaigns around a range of issues, including diverse media ownership, stopping fake news, protecting public and community broadcasting, preventing
harassment of independent journalists covering political demonstrations,
making TV stations disclose online who is paying for political ads, establishing low-power community radio stations, and preserving what there is of Net
neutrality. The group counts around five hundred thousand active members
and has thirty-five full-time staff members. It has become a force in Washington and has played a key role in helping draft public interest regulations.
Perhaps the highest recognition is the extent to which corporate communication firms have gone to attack it. Glenn beck and the coin-operated rightwing PR firms have regarded Free Press as a major threat to the republic,
because it challenges AT&T’s monopoly power.91
At the same time, the Free Press experience demonstrates how far we
have to go and how little time we have. It has been too isolated from other organized popular groups that still fail to understand the importance of media
policy making. Too often, it is forced to operate inside the beltway’s parameters, so it must continually evince a commitment to “free-market competition,” even when that is an unworkable option—or else be cast into the
wilderness. It must spend too much time fighting defensive battles, getting
caught up in the game of picking sides in intracorporate squabbles, because
that is where the action is. This makes it doubly difficult to galvanize popular
interest, as the issues seem wonky and the stakes seem low: no matter the
outcome, corporations still win.
The fact that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are
effectively owned by communication corporations highlights the difficulty
for any populist group in Washington. As a veteran activist put it, whichever party is in power mostly determines “whether AT&T overtly or covertly
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writes the laws.” 92 Nowhere is the corruption and bankruptcy of the political
system more apparent. The lack of a broader political base is smothering
Free Press and the media reform movement. It is like trying to grow plants in
the richest Iowa topsoil without sunlight.
Presently in the coming decade there will be a series of policy debates that
will be crucial for the fate of the Internet. “What happens in the next ten
years,” heather brooke wrote in 2011’s The Revolution Will Be Digitised, “is
going to define the future of democracy for the next century and beyond.” 93
That, in a nutshell, defines a critical juncture. Left to the usual suspects,
who will embrace and brandish the catechism, the Internet will be put to
the service of capital, with dubious or disastrous consequences. Armed with
the insights of the political economy of communication, we can take a hard
look at the marriage of capitalism and the Internet and the resulting crisis
of communication and democracy in the digital era. There are alternative
paths leading to a much brighter future.
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In De-Westernizing Media Studies, edited by James Curran & Myung-Jin Park,
Routledge, 2000.
PUBLIC MEDIA AND
POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE:
Lessons for the Future of Journalism
from Around the World
By Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers
New York University
Department of Media, Culture and Communication
FEBRUARY 2011
PUBLIC MEDIA AND POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE:
Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rodney Benson is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department
of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.
Matthew Powers is a Ph.D. student in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and
Communication.
NYU Ph.D. student Beza Merid also conducted research for this report.
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the close readings and helpful editing
of this text by Josh Stearns, S. Derek Turner and Craig Aaron of Free Press, and by our
academic and journalistic colleagues around the globe (listed at the end of this report).
The conclusions of this study, and any factual errors, are our own.
ABOUT FREE PRESS
Free Press is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media.
Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent
media ownership, strong public media, quality journalism, and universal access to
communications.
www.freepress.net
Supported by a grant from the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
2
PUBLIC MEDIA AND POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE:
Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
We live in paradoxical times. The core institutions and systems that have supported
journalism in America for decades are weathering a perfect storm of challenges that have
undercut our country’s longstanding information infrastructure. At the same time, a
new generation of news and journalism organizations are driving a renaissance in local
reporting and reinvigorating our media system. This shifting media landscape has inspired
a range of important reports and initiatives designed to help chart a course toward stronger
journalism and media in America.
A diverse set of stakeholders – policymakers, academics, foundations, nonprofits, and
former and current journalists – have weighed what the future of journalism might
look like and what it might take to get there. In report after report, America’s public and
noncommercial media sector has been held up as a core component to the future of hardhitting, accountability journalism. All of the major reports released in 2009 and 2010
agreed that there is a vital role for public and noncommercial media to play, and that the
federal government must work to strengthen and expand funding for it.1 Together, these
reports sparked inquiries at both the Federal Communications Commission and the
Federal Trade Commission.
However, too often the moderate proposals for federal funding and public media run into
a wave of protest and knee-jerk reactions against any and all government action. In fact,
government has always and will always influence how our media system functions, from
the early newspaper postal subsidies to handing out broadcast licenses and subsidizing
broadband deployment. The question is not if government should be involved, but how,
and that is a question that demands an in-depth conversation, not a shouting match.
Those concerned about government involvement in journalism have legitimate concerns
about the ways federal funding can open the door to undue political pressure. While there
is broad agreement that the current situation in American journalism is a classic case of
market failure, remedial action has been stymied by the fear that any public policy cure
would be worse than the disease. The proper response to these concerns, however, should
See Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, published online October 19, 2009. This report was endorsed in a CJR editorial, “A Helping Hand: The
case for (smart) government support of journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review (November / December 2009). For
other positive evaluations of targeted government support of U.S. journalism, see Geneva Overholser and Geoffrey
Cowan, “Free press, with profits,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2009; Bree Nordenson, “The Uncle Sam Solution,”
Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 2007); Victor Pickard, Josh Stearns, and Craig Aaron, “Saving the
News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy,” Free Press Policy Report, Washington, D.C., 2009; The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in
the Digital Age,” The Aspen Institute, 2009; and David Westphal and Geoffrey Cowan, “Public Policy and Funding the
News,” USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, 2010.
1
3
PUBLIC MEDIA AND POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE:
Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World
be to identify how best to insulate journalists and newsrooms from political pressure, not
to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Although U.S. public broadcasting has accomplished much in the 40 years since its
founding, today there is a growing sense that we can and must do better. In the global
context, our public media system’s independent civic mission is woefully underfunded:
U.S. per capita public spending is less than $4, far less than the $30 to $134 per capita
for the 14 countries examined in this study. And as the recent efforts by politicians to
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