Robert McChesney’s contention that democratizing the mass media must become a central–perhaps the central–concern of progressives is hard to dispute. However, the ways in which progressives are currently approaching the issue seem unlikely to substantially change the status quo.
The first approach is government regulation, i.e. break-up the media conglomerates and undo the Reagan era’s deregulation of broadcasting. The breadth and depth of information available through the corporate media has undeniably shrunk significantly in the last 20 years. But it is unrealistic to think that these reforms, really a return to the status quo ante, would yield a media open to debate beyond Fortune 500 perimeters.
Even before the networks were owned by the behemoths that currently hold them, while they were still subject to “public service” regulations, their reporting was almost always from the vantage point of the Fortune 500 corporations that owned them. One need look no further than today’s New York Times, still owned by the people who owned it 50 years ago, to see the serious limitations of this approach.
Another set of proposals would restructure public broadcasting by ending corporate sponsorship of programming and insulating it from government pressure. This plan is more promising than anti-trust and re-regulation, because experience shows that it can work to some extent. Not that many years ago, public broadcasting–particularly public radio–though slanted heavily toward a Fortune 500 perspective, frequently provided a venue for information and ideas outside that consensus. One could reason that if public broadcasting once did a half-decent job, maybe it is possible to make it a truly independent news organization.
Unfortunately, there are two serious problems with this idea. First, any such effort will be stigmatized for expanding “government bureaucracy,” thanks to the distortions of corporate media. Second, such reform necessarily involves complex legal detail that can prove fatal to the reform. Assuming that such a reform proposal were somehow pushed through Congress, it would be so compromised during the process of approval by various invisible but critical details, such as allocation of discretion over senior appointments, that public broadcasting would likely remain controlled by loyal allies of big business.
Then there is the third, new technologies approach, involving pirate radio and Internet, which avoids the problems of the first two. Here, content is freed from the constraints of government personnel appointments and corporate financing and ownership. There is no stigma of bureaucracy, since one is one’s own Internet or pirate radio programmer. The problem stems from a presupposition that to have a democratic media, we need only have a mass media technology that is affordable to all. I think experience has conclusively shown this to be untrue.
Printing technology has been widely accessible for a long time. Yet, it is the New York Times and Washington Posts of the world that dominate the attention of newspaper readers. Indeed, the corporate elite are quick to cite this as evidence that the public prefers its offerings to anything outside the corporate consensus. Similarly, Pacifica Radio affiliates offer non-corporate alternatives in several cities, but the corporate radio stations dominate audiences even in these venues.
The reason is money. The corporate media has it and the rest of us don’t. New media technologies may be wonderful, but unless their content is engaging and informative, they won’t attract an audience. Producing such content requires hard work by trained reporters, editors, and producers, consistently, over a period of time. Indeed, high quality content alone won’t suffice; it needs to be vigorously and effectively promoted, or nobody will know about it.
All of this requires lots of money for salaries and expenses. Pirate radio and the Internet, as such, don’t generate money–at least, not for non-corporate programmers. So, valuable as they may be, it is improbable that these new technologies will break the corporate media’s vice-grip on the parameters of public discussion.
Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and my brother, has offered a proposal that could solve the money problem. Under Baker’s proposal, every adult citizen would be entitled to direct the U.S. Treasury to grant a specific sum of money (say, $150 per person) annually, to one or more nonprofit communications organizations of their choice. Like allocations to political parties, this could be done on a tax return, except non-taxpayers would also be entitled to participate by filling out a special allocation form.
Such a policy could net in excess of 30 billion dollars per year for nonprofit media. The impact of such an infusion of money on journalistic, intellectual, and artistic freedom and on the breadth of public discourse would be revolutionary. Corporations large and small, advertisers, Congress, government appointees, and foundations would all be removed from the process of selecting, evaluating, writing, and distributing information, ideas, and images. The purse strings of the media would lie in the hands of their audiences, which would not be such a bad thing at all.
With political support, money for this proposal could be generated very easily through a quarter of a percent tax on securities transactions. Such a tax has already been proposed by certifiably mainstream economists Lawrence Summers, formerly of Harvard, now Secretary of the Treasury, and Joseph Stiglitz, former Chairperson of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Baker estimates that this tax would raise well in excess of $30 billion per year. Moreover, Summers and Stiglitz’s analysis shows that the tax could actually benefit the economy by reducing unproductive speculation, thereby rendering securities markets more stable–a benefit many would appreciate in light of the renewed volatility of the markets.
The increasingly crass commercialism and frivolousness of the corporate media has caused substantial numbers of Americans, most of whom do not identify with the left, to conclude that mainstream media, particularly news media, no longer serve their needs, and to desire an alternative.
An immediate source of potential support for this proposal could be the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who work on nonprofit newsletters, websites, radio programs, films, videos, and public access television shows. This group would have a tremendous incentive to support the proposal, since it would increase–even explode–their revenue base. Moreover, since this segment of the population is by definition relatively influential, notwithstanding its presumably widely varying political inclinations, it would be a valuable political ally.
If a person or organization could persuade even 100 citizens to direct the $150 allocation (or 200 citizens to direct half the $150) toward their newsletter or website, they would have a $15,000 annual operating budget. Maybe not enough to live on, but enough to cover significant expenses and yield some compensation. Such a policy would almost certainly give rise to an explosion of community and nonprofit publications and websites. Thousands of aspiring I.F. Stones might emerge to move us away from corporate society and toward a real democracy.
Moreover, it is easy to imagine revenues for independent media with significant audiences, such as In These Times, The Progressive, and Pacifica Radio stations, increasing several hundred percent, vastly expanding their reach and thereby materially contributing to the opening of public discourse.
One may still ask, what justifies taking $30 billion for the media when there are scores of urgent problems, such as healthcare, education, and housing which could use those funds? Well, the truth is, those funds could never be spent on these problems–at least, not at present–because progressives lack the political power to make it happen.
Progressives may, however, be able to build a political power structure through a dramatic expansion of our ability to be seen and be heard. To achieve this, however, we must first acquire the ability to speak without having our speech filtered by the three percent of the people who now control the resources we need to solve our problems. Advancing a proposal such as this may be one of the most effective means of realizing this goal.
Randy Baker is an attorney. He co-produced Fear and Favor in the Newsroom. A longer version of this article appears on www.fearandfavor.org.