Surely the Information Armageddon is at hand. In 1983 crusading-reporter-turned-journalism-professor Ben Bagdikian deplored the fact that 50 corporations controlled most of what Americans saw, heard, and read. Their CEOs, he observed with alarm, could all meet in one large room.
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McChesney is a man of the left. He’d like to “detach the control of capital over our journalism and culture,” and he does his bit against capitalism as one of three editors of the 52-year-old independent socialist magazine Monthly Review and as an adviser to Chicago Media Watch, a group that goads local media to be more open to leftist viewpoints. Still, he’s not altogether doctrinaire. Much of his media critique, which he has continued with vigor since September 11, appeals to those who may not share all of his political views–populists unnerved by any concentration of power; parents worried about media commercialism, sex, and violence; journalists concerned about the future of investigative reporting; and anyone who wonders why public broadcasting accepts sponsorship money from corporate criminals like Archer Daniels Midland but not from labor unions.
He deserves credit for mentioning facts that don’t support his conclusions. For instance, he opposes megamedia because they increasingly commercialize American culture, but notes in passing that the percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product spent on advertising has fluctuated between 2.1 and 2.4 percent for decades. A less honest book would have omitted this inconvenient fact. A better book would have explained it. McChesney simply mentions the number, then forgets it.
McChesney writes that today’s enormous media firms “exceed by a factor of 10 the size of the largest media firms of just fifteen years earlier.” Compaine’s figures show nothing of the sort. In 1986 the largest media firm was CBS, with revenues of $4.7 billion, or about 6 percent of all media revenues. In 1997 the largest media firm was Time Warner, with revenues of $22 billion–or just over 9 percent of all media revenues, because the size of the pie had tripled in the meantime. McChesney’s statement is misleading twice over: the revenue growth is up by a factor of five, not ten, and because the media industry as a whole was growing, a fivefold increase wasn’t enough to even double the top player’s market share. (In an on-line debate with Compaine at www.opendemocracy.com, McChesney tried to play down the statistics.)
So when McChesney accuses the megamedia of degrading democracy, he doesn’t mean that they’re undermining our current form of government. He means that they aren’t helping to create a society in which most of us would spend our spare time at public meetings discussing how to organize the economy, rather than living our lives. In fairness, he doesn’t take his definition of democracy too seriously when he gets down to exposing the malfeasance of the media moguls. In the book’s most concrete chapters, he tells how media lobbyists mischievously avoided public scrutiny both in the 1930s and again in the 1990s. The basic stratagem was to avoid public discussion as much as possible–if necessary, to put it off to a later day that might never come.
It seems that when McChesney says “media” he usually means radio and television news. That’s the subject of his scholarly work. That’s where all too many Americans get their alleged news. And that’s where he makes a good case, with great historical detail, that commercialism need not rule all the airwaves all the time. The limited electronic spectrum could have been–and still could be–managed very differently than it is now. Part of it could have been set aside for government or other noncommercial use. The fact that most stations are commercial isn’t a law of nature or of capitalism; rather it’s the result of decisions made by the U.S. Congress in the 1930s with an absolute minimum of public scrutiny. I’m glad that McChesney’s leftist proclivities led him to ferret this out, since we can’t expect the Cato Institute or industry-oriented researchers to tell us about noncommercial ways of doing things.
