Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay Tuned
By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
The Nation and Free Press
On a Thursday in mid-May, the Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Led by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators--Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives--gave Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe don't expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill.
With a voice vote that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the same local market.
The removal of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big Media. They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that's great for the bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for democracy.
That's just some of the good news at a time when the media policy debate has been redefined by the emergence of a muscular grassroots reform movement. Bush Administration schemes to use federal dollars to subsidize friendly journalists and illegally push its propaganda as legitimate news have been exposed and halted, with the House approving a defense appropriations amendment that outlaws any "concerted effort to propagandize" by the Pentagon.
Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries, telephone and cable--whose entire business model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges--a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or services.
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