Enhance Media Literacy
Video: Rich Media Poor Democracy
Robert McChesney, Ph.D.  University of Illinois

Content Overview

This time, we were told, the revolution would indeed be televised. In the years and months leading up to1996, a collection of self-styled visionaries – including the Democratic president, a bipartisan majority of Congressional leaders, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the CEOs of national and global media empires, a swarm of media industry lobbyists, and the influential editorial boards of most of the mainstream press – proclaimed they saw what their critics failed to see: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 would liberate the airwaves from the heavy hand of big government and free the market to work its entrepreneurial and democratic magic. The result would be nothing short of revolutionary. Newly tuned to the rhythms of the digital age, the airwaves would shake off the dust of radio-age regulations and burst into the coming millennium with a kaleidoscopic range of exciting new channels, viewer choices, and alternative voices.Media companies, free at last to compete,would unleash creative waves of diverse programming and cutting-edge technologies at lower cost to the consumer, in the process reinvigorating the marketplace of ideas and reviving political culture and democracy.

This was the theory and the pitch, the subject of uncritical and celebratory media coverage at the time. It remains the rhetorical fuel of public relations efforts on behalf of media conglomerates to this day. Rich Media, Poor Democracy, featuring influential media scholar and activist Robert McChesney, tells a dramaticallydifferent story.

McChesney, along with media critic Mark Crispin Miller, surveys the contemporary media landscape through the lens of constitutional democracy to correct the myopic corporate vision of these telecommunications visionaries. Cutting against the grain of self-interested mainstream media reporting on the media industry, the video uncovers the mostly uncovered story behind the push for so-called "deregulatory" policies. The baseline motive of the video: to consider the consequences of these policies and the media system they have created for free speech and democracy. The result is a devastating examination of how and why we have ended up with precisely the opposite of what was promised in 1996: the radical re-regulation of the media industry at the expense of the public interest, the command and control of the public airwaves and public discourse by a handful of corporate empires, and the judicial and legislative triumph of corporate speech over the free speech rights of individuals – in short, a creatively flat and flattening media system averse to competition, entrepreneurship, and the democratic interests of the true owners of the airwaves, the American people.

While McChesney argues that our democracy and the public interest are being corrupted, he also looks to the future with determination and hope. As he reminds us throughout, the media system we live with today is neither natural nor inevitable, but the evolving product of ongoing human decisions – of policies enacted byelected representatives who survive by responding not only to the highest bidder, but also to the loudest voice. The recent storm of public protest against further proposed FCC de-regulations could not have made this moreclear: when people understand the meaning and crucial importance of telecommunications policy, they do not

» Understanding media requires understanding the nature of media ownership.

» We cannot fully grasp media content without first grasping the institutional nature of the industry that produces it – especially the logic of corporate enterprise that flows from the top and demands that programming, whether light entertainment or breaking news coverage, makes as much money as possible.

» The U.S. media system is a three-tier structure dominated at the top level by a small number of commercial media giants.

» The key to understanding this structure – to understanding the very nature of the media industry and the government policies that have created it – is to understand that in reality the industry is dominates and shaped by the economic power of a few top-tier conglomerates, even though on paper there are hundreds of thousands of media companies.

» As the FCC considers relaxing restrictions on mergers, the potential exists for power to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

» Media consolidation and conglomeration result when the big companies buy up the smaller companies to expand market share, maximize profits, and eliminate competition.

» It is in the interest of big media companies to expand their empires, to gobble up other companies and grow as big as possible, because it allows for what the industry calls "synergy": the ability of a conglomerate to cross-promote, cross-produce, and cross-advertise its content across a variety of its own channels and stores and businesses.

» This ability to dominate and saturate huge swaths of the airwaves and public space creates both the conditions and the need for the blockbuster: because conglomerates are so massive, they need the massive profits that only blockbuster films can deliver; and because they own so many TV channels, movie screens, video stores, fast-food restaurants and other ways to promote and distribute films, they minimize their risk when investing the massive amounts of money required to produce and promote blockbuster films.

» This guaranteed cultural penetration in turn drives smaller media outlets out of the market.

» The recent rise to dominance of these top-tier media giants is not simply the natural end-result of healthy market competition, but of the desire to eliminate healthy competition.

» Government policies that deregulated the industry and allowed companies to merge in previously illegal ways, new technologies that have facilitated the merging of different media segments, and the basic logic – rather than the myth –of capitalism have combined to transform the industry.

» The myth of capitalism is that it is based on competition, and assuring competition. The corporate culture we have today is based not on competition, but on smashing and eliminating competition.

The distinction is crucial when the corporations in question are those who own the public airwaves, and therefore the main sources of information in a democracy.

» The Telecommunications Act of 1996 incorporated Congress’s vision of communication in the digital age, laying out the basic values that would guide the FCC for the next two generations.

» With little debate, despite the magnitude of the issues at stake, Congress passed the law and hailed it, with industry leaders, as a victory for democracy: the "deregulation" of the media industry would foment a new wave of competition, which would lead to lower prices and higher quality service, eliminatingthe need for government regulation on behalf of the public interest.

» The baseline selling point here was that the market would regulate the media industry better than the government.

» What the rhetoric of deregulation missed – and continues to miss in debates today – is that the very term"deregulation" is a misnomer, a factual and historical distortion.

» Deregulation is commonly defined as liberating the market from government checks and controls, allowing private interests to compete without interference from those who would attempt to misguidedly"regulate" or temper the excesses of the market to assure that the public interest – and capitalism itself– is served by the healthy and competitive flow of information, ideas, debate, and capital.

» In reality, then, there is no such thing as "deregulation," if deregulation is taken to mean freeing the market from government attempts to regulate it. With regard to the media industry, what’s really meantby "deregulation" is re-regulation – a switch from government regulation of the public airwaves onbehalf of the public owners of these airwaves, to government regulation of the public airwaves on behalf of the private companies that broadcast on these airwaves.

» Framed this way, the effects of the Telecommunications Act make more sense: the immediate re-regulation of the telephone industry and the radio industry on behalf of private interests has resulted in a shrinking number of companies in both industries – therefore less competition and less freedom for the public to make choices.

» The fundamental and clear change is this: more private power, less public accountability. Before the "deregulations" of 1996, we had a handful of companies that were regulated in the public interest; we now have an even a smaller number of companies that are even less regulated in the public interest.

» The result with radio has been especially disastrous; the easing of ownership restrictions has effected precisely the opposite of what was promised: fully two-thirds of radio stations have been sold since the Telecommunications Act eased restrictions on how many stations a company could own, so that ahandful of companies now own most radio stations.

» Radio, previously the most democratic and creative of our media, has been transformed into our most regimented, formulaic, standardized, hyper-commercialized medium.

» There is little doubt that a broad cross-section of the American public is dissatisfied with radio, and media generally – but lacking clear information about the nature of these decisions, the potentialpolitical power of this dissatisfaction pales in comparison with the influence of corporate lobbies on legislators wielded behind closed doors.

» The Founders understood the centrality of information to democracy and democratic theory: that to have a healthy democracy, you have to have a healthy, independent, and vibrant journalism to check power and the status quo in the public interest.

» No freedom of speech and the press and no informed public – no meaningful democracy.

» Journalism in a democracy has three basic and necessary functions: 1) to provide an accounting of people in power and those with designs on power; 2) to provide and ensure a diversity of opinions on important issues so that citizens can form their own opinions; and 3) to check facts, assure for accuracy, and point out lies.

» These basic functions have been undermined with the slow erosion of the necessary border between the work of editors and reporters on one side, and the interests of owners and advertisers on the other.

» The result is a fundamental clash between the commercial base of media, and the basic responsibilities of professional journalism – as autonomous, independent journalism no longer makes fiscal sense given the pressure commercial news organizations face to maximize profits.

» The Constitutional First Amendment guarantee of free speech and a free press has been fundamentally compromised, as news media have become the province of big corporations and wealthy owners in increasingly monopolistic markets.

» The First Amendment was formulated as a social right: the right of citizens to have access to a free press.

» This principle has been eroded by a series of court decisions that have interpreted the First Amendment on behalf of corporate "speech" – in this view, the right of owners and investors to control journalism without interference trumps the right of journalists and editors to do what they want without interference.

What Happened to the News

Given that our media are themselves corporations, it should come as no surprise that journalistic autonomy and dissenting voices have virtually disappeared from mainstream news coverage.There is little to no business sense in encouraging the autonomy and independence of journalists given the corporate structure of media: It makes far more sense for owners and shareholders to hold their news divisions, like their television and film divisions, to a fierce accounting that demands profits over investing resources for controversial investigative work.