[Greg Thompson is the publisher of Green Acre News and Treasurer of the Board of Directors for Iowa City Public Access Television, Inc.]

Have you found yourself wondering lately why so many cable channels are filled with entertainment news? Why are new motion pictures produced by the major studios given extensive coverage that rivals or exceeds the studio's own paid advertising? Why does every new children's movie or television show have a commercial tie-in to an expensive new toy that makes the movie seem almost incidental by comparison? Why has political
campaign spending for negative television ads shot up while news coverage
of political campaigns has declined sharply? Does CNN really stand for
Celebrity News Network?

The answers to these and many other crucial questions can be found in Robert McChesney's new book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, an extensively researched investigation of important media issues. (Click on the book cover to order online)

McChesney begins by recounting the battle over public versus commercial broadcasting waged prior to the enactment of the Communications Act of 1934. He concludes his book with a critique of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and an exhortation to the political left to join in the debate over who controls the media. In between there are several pithy quotes on media issues and a wealth of information in this scholarly book, impressively documented in seventy-three pages of endnotes and a thirty-two page index.

McChesney opens by pointing out the limited scope of American Democracy, where the fact that US citizens have the right to vote doesn't necessarily translate into any actual control over the course of government. This "thin reed" of democracy is all that separates the US from being a political oligarchy. He defines the political theory of neoliberalism that is sometimes confused with democracy as one that maximizes the role of markets and profit-making and minimizes the "interference" of governments.

"The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and
offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together."
-- Thomas Paine

So why is cable TV flooded with movie reviews and star interviews? Consider the case of MTV. MTV is owned by the vertically integrated media firm Viacom. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, Simon and Schuster book publishers, Spelling Entertainment, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, eighteen US television stations, the UPN network, the Blockbuster video rental chain, five theme parks, retail stores, and a huge movie theater chain outside the US.

When MTV interviews stars who appear in Viacom movies, or provides extensive reviews with film clips provided by Viacom, it is in effect free advertising since Viacom is merely paying itself to publicize its fare, whether the advertising is presented during the commercial break or as part of the programming. This is called "synergy" by entertainment industry insiders.

Disney has been masterful in its use of "synergy" in its empire. Its 1994 animated film The Lion King generated over $100 billion in profit, most of it not from the film itself, but from related marketing and merchandising. The film led to a Broadway show, a TV series, media spin-offs and 186 items of
merchandising. Such films on average generate four times more profit from
related merchandising and licensing than from their domestic box office take.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. exploits its X-Files TV program in the
same manner. It produces the show, airs it on the Fox TV network, shows
reruns on its twenty-two Fox TV stations and its FX cable network, and
generates X-Files books and merchandise. This arrangement makes it very
difficult for new content producers to enter the industry since investors
demand maximum return, and that return is only possible with the "synergies" created by these giant conglomerates.

The advantages of "synergy" become more obvious considering that in
1998, five of the top ten categories for e-commerce were software, books,
music, videos, and tickets for sports and entertainment events, all products of the vertically integrated media conglomerates. With low access cost to selling music on the web made possible by the new MP3 technology, the music industry may be the first media sector to test the notion that the internet can be utilized to break up the existing oligopoly. Online music sales totaled $87 million in 1998, in 2003 they are projected to reach $4 billion.

McChesney identifies another principle that makes owning a vertically integrated media firm more profitable, branding. Branding gives media properties their own distinct identities. It is the primary means of attracting and keeping audiences while also opening up the possibilities for selling retail products based on the firms' branded properties. This strategy led Disney to merchandise sales of more than $25 billion in 1997, more than twice the global sales of Toys R' Us. Disney's licensing revenue alone in 1997 was $10 billion. It also owns 660 retail stores in which it can peddle its wares.

Viacom is what McChesney defines as one of the"first tier" media giants. This group includes Viacom, Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Seagram, Sony, General Electric, and AT&T. The "second tier" includes the newspaper-based conglomerates like Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Company, cable powerhouses like Comcast and Cox Enterprises and broadcast companies like CBS. There are fifteen or so of these conglomerates. They differ from the first tier media firms in that they have annual sales of "only" $2 billion to $7 billion and lack the film, TV, and music production capacities of the first-tier giants.

Among McChesney's three "first tier" media firms are Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp. He calls these the "Holy Trinity" of the Global Media System. Space constraints prohibit listing all the holdings of these three media giants but a partial list of Time Warner's assets gives an idea of the magnitude of these behemoths. Time Warner has:

Outright ownership of:

Warner Bros. film and TV studios, Time, People, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune magazines, the Warner Music Group, 150 Warner Bros. retail stores, the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Braves, Hanna-Barbara studios, Citereseau (the French cable company), twenty-two of the one hundred largest cable television markets in the US, and a theater company that owns over 1000 movie screens outside the US.

Partial ownership of:

The Warner Bros. Television network, CNN, Headline News, TNT, TBS,
Turner Classic Movies, the Cartoon Network, Court TV, HBO, Cinemax, Comedy Central, Primestar, Time Warner Telecom, the cable Internet Access service Road Runner, Midi television of South Africa, Towani, a Japanese movie studio, Atari, Hasbro, and Columbia House Record Club.

Time Warner did $28 billion in business in 1998.

The same neoliberal deregulatory policies and agreements that have paved the way for global markets in goods and services have also aided in the growing domination of eight or so global media giants. These corporations are truly international in character, for example four of the largest media firms are headquartered outside the US, but all of them -- Bertelsmann, News Corp., Sony, and Seagram are major players in the US, with three of them owning major film and television production studios in the US. News Corp. owns Twentieth Century Fox, Seagram owns Universal Studios and Sony owns Columbia Studios.

One result of this global media concentration is that American films now dominate the movie and television screens of the world. Even in culturally nationalistic France, US films account for 65% of the box office revenues, and in Britain the figure is 95%. Media and computer software, the "copyright" industries, are the leading exports of the US, totaling $60 billion in 1997. In response many French film makers have begun to produce films in English, in a effort to reach a wider international audience.

The monopolization of the media has had a disastrous effect on the integrity and content of media news programs. Several of the network TV news divisions made major layoffs in 1998, cutting staffs that were already weakened from several rounds of cuts since the mid-1980's. The news divisions of the major networks are loath to report news that may reflect unfavorably on their corporate owners. This has major implications for reporting on the military industrial complex.

For example, General Electric and Westinghouse, the respective owners of NBC and CBS, are major military contractors. They are also two of the major contractors building nuclear power plants. It comes as no surprise that news detrimental to the future of these two industries is not aired on these two networks. In 1996 the story given the most coverage by NBC was the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, an event that did not even rank among the top ten stories for CBS, ABC, or CNN. That may have had something to do with NBC's exclusive television rights to broadcast the Olympics. They obviously used their nightly news coverage to pump up ratings for their prime-time coverage.

News coverage of international news declined from 45 percent in the early 1970's to 13.5 percent in 1995. The number of crime stories tripled in the early nineties. Stories like celebrity lifestyle pieces, court cases, plane crashes, crime stories and shootouts are cheap and easy to cover and are favored because they do not cause trouble for the parent corporation.

Newspaper journalism has suffered just as badly due to domination by
local monopolies owned by large national chains. McChesney cites the Des
Moines Register, purchased by the Gannett chain the 1980's as a prime example. The paper's once extraordinary coverage of state affairs has been slashed to the bone. As many Iowans agree, this once proud Midwestern newspaper has become largely irrelevant, especially to those living outside of the Des Moines area.

"At present, the advertisers pay the piper and call the tune. And what a tune. The tune of North America is that of the peddler boosting his wares." -- Graham Spry

McChesney assails the 1996 Telecommunications Act as corrupt legislation that will result in more tightly controlled oligopolistic markets. The 1996 Act, among other changes, relaxed restrictions on ownership so that a single firm can own up to eight radio stations in a single market. He points out that since 1996 half of the nation's eleven thousand radio stations changed hands. There were over one thousand mergers.

All this corporate concentration, media conglomeration and hyper- commercialism has resulted in a system where the public is regarded not as
a democratic polity but simply as a mass of consumers. The concept of public service or broadcasting in the public interest has all but disappeared. In summing up the state of the public's role in the US media system McChesney turns a colorful phrase. He says, " Public debate over the future of media and communication has been effectively eliminated by powerful and arrogant corporate media, which metaphorically floss their teeth with politician's underpants."

"The more one is aware of political bias, the more one can be independent of it, and the more one claims to be impartial, the more one is biased."
-- George Orwell

McChesney then turns his attention to the Internet. He asks, "Will the Internet set us free?" His answer is a resounding No! He addresses the argument that the open and accessible nature of the Internet will help
eliminate existing corporate monopolies over our media and culture. He
reminds us that similar utopian claims have been made regarding film, AM
radio, shortwave radio, FM radio, terrestrial television broadcasting, cable TV, and satellite broadcasting. He points out that many of the most frequently visited web sites are now commercial sites. Although for many
political activists the Web and the Internet have played a central role in
organizing and educating, McChesney warns that they should not think that
this experience will become the "heart and soul" of the Internet experience.

The development of the Internet follows the typical model of state capitalism where the public subsidizes new technologies until they become profitable, at which point they are given away to private commercial interests. This was true for AM radio in the 1920's, FM radio and UHF television in the 1950's and it is true for the Internet in the 1990's. Beginning in 1993 the US government began to privatize its portion of the Internet backbone, which made possible the elimination of the earlier prohibition against commercialism in cyberspace.

McChesney predicts profound changes ahead for television and the Internet in the next ten years as digital television brings about "convergence." In other words, when television goes fully digital, it effectively becomes interchangeable with a personal computer, becoming an entry point to the Internet. The distinction between television and the Internet will blur, perhaps disappearing entirely.

"The trend in public broadcasting is clear and pronounced: more
commercials, more commercial values. Also, there is more corporate power and influence over what gets on the air and what doesn't, direct and indirect." -- Bill Moyers

McChesney brings all his research together to spell out a devastating critique of the "Mythology of the Free Marketplace." While we are
constantly bombarded with the "magic of the marketplace" and other
capitalist diversions, those atop our economy realize that success is based in large part on eliminating competition. He declares,"No sane firm would ever make a multibillion dollar investment to enter a new area unless it thought the result would be that it would be a member in good standing in a mature oligopoly with high barriers to entry to protect the firm's and the industry's profitability." The commercial broadcasting and advertising industry in the US also benefits from "welfare" subsidies amounting to an estimated $8 billion per year. By comparison the current federal subsidy for public broadcasting is $260 million per year.

McChesney devotes significant attention to the period from the infancy of radio broadcasting in the 1920's to the creation of the Communications Act of 1934. In contrast to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there was significant public debate over the Communications Act of 1934. There is a
wealth of detail in these chapters about the battle between commercial interests and supporters of nonprofit educational and public service broadcasting.

Heading up the efforts to support nonprofit broadcasting were two groups, the National Committee on Education by Radio (NCER) and the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education (NACRE). NCER advocated a nonprofit broadcasting system dedicated to education and public service. NACRE accepted a commercial system as the basis for radio broadcasting, but hoped to reach an accommodation with CBS and NBC, the two national radio networks, for a substantial amount of educational broadcasting. In the end the efforts of both groups failed miserably and the stage was set for sixty-two more years of predominantly commercial radio and television broadcasting in the US.

"It is the right of the listening and viewing public, and not the right of
the broadcaster, that is paramount." -- Supreme Court Justice Byron White

McChesney contrasts the development of the commercial broadcasting system in the US with Canada and Great Britain, where public, non-profit
broadcasting predominated, although recently, commercial interests have
gotten the upper hand. One particularly heartening episode in the development of Canada's public broadcasting system bears retelling on these pages as an encouragement to activists who are feeling isolated and
doubt that the actions of one person can make a difference.

In the spring of 1932 the Canadian House of Commons held extensive and widely publicized hearings to decide the future of Canada's broadcasting system. NBC president Merlin Aylesworth declined his invitation to testify at the hearings, a decision he may have later regretted. In fact, the only American to travel to Ottawa to testify in person for the hearings was US educator Joy Elmer Morgan. He spoke eloquently to the Canadian lawmakers, declaring, "The important thing is not that a few people shall make money out of radio broadcasting, but rather that this new tool shall be used to beautify and to enrich human life. Now is the time to take a long look ahead to avoid mistakes which it would take decades or even centuries to correct."

Graham Spry, founder of the Canadian Radio League, which mobilized support for public broadcasting, declared that Morgan had virtually singlehandedly turned the opinion of the Canadian Parliament toward the non-profit path. He wrote to Morgan, "Until your appearance the committee had regarded the American situation as largely satisfactory and...that educational broadcasts were eminently possible through commercial stations. Your evidence gave an entirely new complexion to the situation and we are entirely grateful to you for you assistance."

"I don't think there's any reason for public television to exist any more,
I honestly don't." -- Garrison Keillor

McChesney examines the state of public broadcasting throughout the world and observes that it is in precipitous decline everywhere. He observes that "in general, the more democratic a nation, the more enlightened and viable its public broadcasting system." He observes that "the US public broadcasting system exists in a system where on one hand it has a small budget which requires it to solicit corporate support to survive, and at the same time is beholding to and censored by the political right in Congress." Public broadcasting has been expected to bear the burden of producing programming that is unprofitable for the commercial broadcasters, but still must remain within the same ideological confines as the commercial system. He strongly and correctly criticizes those conservatives who pay lip service to traditional values that public broadcasting is best suited to promote, while catering to the immediate commercial needs of the wealthiest members and institutions of society, regardless of the social implications.

"The idea that commercial advertising is always protected by the First
Amendment is a bizarre rereading of history." -- University of Chicago
law professor Cass Sustein

McChesney devotes several pages to discrediting the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its commercialized interpretation of "extensions" of the First Amendment that expand free speech rights to corporations. He writes that, "...the First Amendment has become more a mechanism for protecting class privilege than for protecting and promoting freedom and democracy." He assails the class power attained by corporations and the wealthy as every bit as immense as that enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times. He writes, "Letting people spend as much money as they want is simply letting people at the top buy their way out of a genuine democracy with a level playing field."

As many astute observers such as Noam Chomsky have observed, the business press is often the most brutally honest and believable. This is partly because investors demand real news on which to base their investment decisions and partly because it is well understood that the regular readers of the business press are not likely to react violently to frank admissions of class issues that are forthrightly presented there, for example when higher unemployment figures and greater "worker insecurity" are lauded as favorable signs for the economy. McChesney notes that, "In the business press, the media are often referred to in exactly the way they present themselves in their candid moments: as a branch of the advertising industry."

"A moral condemnation of great wealth must inform any defense of the free market and that moral condemnation must be backed up by effective political action." -- Christopher Leach

Those in the ACLU who cite the "absolutist" position, that any and all political speech falls under the protection of the First Amendment, are referred to by McChesney as Meiklejohnians, after Alexander Meiklejohn,
the twentieth-century absolutist. He refutes those absolutists by quoting
Meiklejohn himself as saying in 1948, "The radio as it now operates among
us is not free. Nor is it entitled to the protection of the First Amendment. It is not engaged in the task of enlarging and enriching human communications. It is engaged in making money. And the First Amendment does not intend to guarantee men freedom to say what some private interest pays them to say for its own advantage. It intends only to make men free to say as citizens, what they think, what they believe, about the general welfare." Meikejohn's statements have proven to be very prescient about the state of US media at the end of the twentieth century as well.

"...the Constitution places no such restraint on government as respects
purely commercial advertising." -- US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black

In the final chapter of his book McChesney addresses the US left and its role in media politics. He criticizes the New Party, the Green Party, the Labor Party and progressive Democrats for ignoring the issue of media
ownership and control. He does acknowledge that some chapters of the
Green Party, under the influence of Ralph Nader, he suggests, have made
some "token" gestures in the direction of stricter control over the public
airwaves. He rightly points out that the single greatest casualty of the
corporate media system has been coverage of the labor movement and
political views that fall outside the limits of acceptable debate defined by the business class. In the 1940's, for example, nearly every daily newspaper had at least on full-time labor editor or reporter. In the 1990's there are fewer than ten labor reporters on the staffs of all the daily newspapers in the entire nation. When labor issues are covered, it is usually coverage of strikes and their cost to business, the threat of union violence and the burden on customers and people in the local community.

"If left means anything anymore it means "democracy".
- -- Joel Rogers

McChesney urges activists to "press for the repeal of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its replacement with a law that reflects not just the interests of Washington's corporate lobbying superstars but the informed consent of the bulk of the citizenry."

McChesney offers the following suggestions for restoring a more
democratic media system:

• To protect and expand traditional public-service broadcasting, making it fully noncommercial and democratically accountable
• To develop a distinct community and public access radio and television system that is thoroughly decentralized
• To strengthen journalists and media workers' trade unions, giving the
  members of these trade unions a greater role in determining editorial
  content
• To hold commercial broadcasters to strict standards, such as prohibiting advertising directed at children
• To limit the concentration of media ownership as much as possible
• To reduce the sheer amount of advertising, through regulation and taxation
• To subsidize film and cultural production eschewed by the market
• To subsidize the existence of multiple newspapers and magazines to
  provide a diversity of opinion.

McChesney's otherwise enlightening and superbly researched book is marred by one puzzling personal attack that both undermines his credibility and calls into question the logic of his pronouncements on the desirability of nonprofit media like public access television. Early in his book he says the occasional "maverick gets on the FCC who might want to press the issue of public service." Discussing the impotence of the FCC, he declares,"Usually even the mavericks are harmless enough and are permitted to blow off enough steam to get a job teaching at a university once their FCC stint is completed, like 1960's rebel Nicholas Johnson."

One wonders what kind of personal ax McChesney has to grind against Nicholas Johnson, the former FCC commissioner who was largely responsible for the creation of the concept of local public access. With the depth of research the author has done on all other aspects of the history of US media it is difficult to believe he has overlooked Johnson's role in the
creation of public access, one of his own suggested remedies for our media
monopoly. Underused and underfunded as it has been, public access is one
of the few positive developments in the history of US television.

Notwithstanding this criticism, Rich Media, Poor Democracy is an
important book and deserves careful study by anyone who hopes to
understand the rapidly changing face of US and global media issues.

Greg Thompson is the publisher of the Green Acre News and Treasurer of the Board of Directors for Iowa City Public Access Television, Inc.
Copyright (c) 1999 Green Acre News.

Green Acre News is published monthly in Iowa City, Iowa. It features
stories that are unreported or misreported in the mainstream media,
biotechnology issues and third-party politics. You can reach Green Acre News and Greg Thompson at
4222 Harmony Lane SE
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319-337- 7722 or JTGardens@aol.com.

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What others had to say about Rich Media, Poor Democracy:

BILL MOYERS - "If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book. If Pau l Revere were here, he would spread the word. Thank God we have in Robert McChesney their equal in his love of liberty and his passion to reclaim it from the media gian ts who treat the conversation of
democracy as their private property."

RALPH NADER--"Rich Media, Poor Democracy" is more than a prolonged wake-up call; it shames those who do nothing and motivates those who are trying to build a more democratic media that reflects the all-important noncommercial values which forge a just society."

NOAM CHOMSKY--"McChesney's rich and penetrating study advances considerably his pioneering work on media and democracy...A very significant contribution."November 1999