2 pages essay

DIGITAL DISCONNECT

HOW CAPITALISM IS TURNING THE

INTERNET AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Robert W. McChesney

THE NEW PRESS

NEW YORK LONDON

© 2013 by Robert W. McChesney All rights reserved.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2013 Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA McChesney, Robert Waterman, 1952-

Digital disconnect : how capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy I Robert W. McChesney.

p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-867-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-59558-891-3 (e-book)

l. Internet-Political aspects. 2. Capitalism. 3. Democracy. I. Title. HM8 5 l .M393 2013

302.23'1-dc23 2012035748

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3

How Can the Political Economy of Communication Help Us Understand the Internet?

While the catechism presents a superficial and misleading picture of capital­

ism and condones a weak democracy, the commercial media system in the

United States supplements this with its own catechism. It goes something

like this:

Commercial media compete with each other to satisfy audience demands.

Competition forces commercial media to comply, or else a competitor will steal

their market and force them out of business. As a result, the system "gives the

people what they want." As for journalism, it too has the threat of competition

to keep the firms in line. But there commercial pressures can be a problem, so

the most important development is the rise of independent professional report­

ers committed to unbiased, objective news. The key to the success of both the

entertainment and journalism components of the media system is that they be

competitive and part of the private sector, not controlled by the government.

If there is anything that is beyond debate, it is that government involvement

with media is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. A free press is the

key to a free society, and the free market is the foundation of a free press and a

healthy democratic culture.

As with the broader catechism from chapter 2, this vision of a free media

system is pretty much accepted by most observers and is then adapted to

digital tech nology. Although this vision of a free press has some accurate and

attractive components, it is dubious for effective understanding and action

with regard to the Internet or all media. As valuable as political economy

is for shedding light on capitalism and on the relationship of capitalism to

democracy, it cannot provide in its traditional form the basis for more than

63

64 DIGITAL DIS C O N N E C T

a cursory critique o f this notion o f a free media system. Fortunately, there is

a subfield of political economy - the political economy of communication

( PEC ) - that is ideally suited to address most of the central issues surround­

ing the digital revolution in considerable detail.1

The PEC brings communication into the picture alongside capitalism

and democracy. It evaluates media and communication systems by deter­

mining how they affect political and social power in society and whether

they are, on balance, forces for or against democracy and successful self­

government. This critical or explicit normative basis distinguishes it from

related fields like media economics or media law. Those fields, like main­

stream economics, take the United States as it is, for better or worse, and

regard themselves as neutral regarding the status quo, so they give little criti­

cal thought to the system as a whole. This neutrality generally resolves into

a tacit acceptance of the status quo and the existing power structure as the

appropriate one for a free society.

The PEC has two general lines of inquiry. F irst, it examines the insti­

tutions, subsidies, market structures, firms, support mechanisms, and labor

practices that define a media or communication system. The way media mar­

kets actually operate has little in common with the free-market catechism, so

bromides about competition and the invisible hand are of mostly ideological

value. The PEC strives to provide a more accurate understanding of media

markets and the true role of the government. It examines how these struc­

tural and institutional factors shape the content of media and how commu­

nication systems function in society. Political economists of c o m mu nication

take a keen interest in evaluating the caliber of journalism produced by the

commercial news media system.

Second, the PEC emphasizes the foundational role of government poli­

cies in establishing media systems, even commercial profit-driven systems.

The PEC studies and assesses how communication policies h ave been de­

bated and determined, and it has a strong historical component looking at

how media policies and systems were created in the past. C om munication

policy debates are the nucleus of the atom, and if media systems are to be

reformed or changed, this is where one must go .

Both elements of the PEC, in my view, provide an indispensible way to

understand how the Internet has developed, what the great issues have been

and are, and what options remain before us. The PEC cannot provide all the

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TA N D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 6 5

answers to all the questions, but it can at least contribute a useful context to

provide a basis for a nswers to most of them.

The ABCs of the PEC

The place to start is to u n derstand media as a problem for society. By prob­

lem I mean its fi rst defi nition in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:

"a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution." The media, in

this sense, are a p ol itical problem, and an unavoidable one at that. Media

systems of one sort or another are going to exist, and they do not fall from

the sky. The pol icies, structures, subsidies, and institutions that are created

to control, direct, and regulate the media will be responsible for the logic

and nature of the media system. Understood this way, the manner in which

a society decides how to structure the media system, how it elects to solve the

problem of the m edia, becomes of paramount importance. These policy de­

bates will often determine the contours and values of the media system that

then produces the content of media that are visible to all. 2

The problem of the media exists in all societies, regardless of their struc­

ture. A society does not approach the problem with a blank page; the range

of options is influenced by the political economic structure, cultural tradi­

tions, and the ava ilable communication technologies, among other things.

In dictatorsh ips and authoritarian regimes, the problem is solved by those in

power, with the transparent goal of generating a media system that supports

their domination of the nation and minimizes the possibil ity of effective op­

position. The direct l i nk between control over the media and control over

the society is self-evident. In formally democratic societies, too, the same

tension exists between those who hold power and those who do not, but the

battle assumes different forms. Media are at the center of struggles for power

and control i n any society, and this is arguably even more often the case in

democratic nations, where the issue is more up for grabs.

The PEC is oriented toward solving the problem of the media in a way

that produces a media system most conducive to democratic values. There is

no one answer to th is problem, and the more study, debate, and experimen­

tation, the better the answers will be. Due to circumstances, the PEC tends

to h ighl ight the problems associated with the dominant commercial media

6 6 DIGITAL DIS C O N NE C T

system. Raymond Williams, the great Welsh scholar, pioneered discussions

about the necessity of reforming media systems as part of building a more

just, humane, and democratic society. His tra ilblazing work in the 1 960s

and early 1 970s made the replacement of commercial media systems and

structures a central part of the modern democratic political project. As early

as 1 962, in a pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Williams argued that creating

nonprofit and noncommercial media structures was a necessary part of mod­

ern democracy. 3 That Williams was considered among the most important

scholars of communication in the English-speaking world only elevated the

importance of h is claims and concerns.

In my view, the most influential concept that has guided the PEC is the

notion of the public sphere. The term is drawn from the work of the German

scholar Jiirgen Habermas, who argued that a crucial factor in the democratic

revolutions of modern times has been the emergence of an i ndependent

realm, a public sphere, a commons, where citizens could meet to discuss

and debate politics as equals free of government scrutiny or interference.4

The media have come to assume the role of the public sphere in the United

States (and elsewhere ) . The logic of the public-sphere argument is to em­

phasize the importance of havi ng a media system independent of both the

state and the dominant corporate economic institutions. Th is insight has

transcended much of the left's difficulty i n being critical of the government

in principle and the conventional refusal to contemplate the core problems

brought on by corporate control and advertising. The public-sphere reason­

ing rejects the notion that our two choices are Rupert M urdoch or Joseph

Stal in. For a generation it has provided a democratic road map and blasted

open a way of thinking about a third way - an independent nonprofit and/or

small-business sector - as the necessary democratic media system . As with

public-good theory, it does not tell which policies to employ, but it provides

a valuable framework for thinking about appropriate pol icy making . 5

Policies are crucial t o establ ishing media systems, and governments have

the capacity to change policies and media systems, but they do so only on

rare historical occasions. Indeed, it is so rare that most people understand­

ably do not realize that the right to change these pol icies and systems even

exists. What accounts for that? This is where critical junctures are important.

The idea of critical junctures helps expla i n h ow social change works:

there are rare, brief periods in which dramatic changes are debated and

H OW CAN T H E P EC H ELP US U N D E RSTA N D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 6 7

enacted drawing from a broad palette of options, followed by long periods

in which structural or institutional change is slow and difficult.6 "Critical

j unctures are rare events in the development of an institution," as Giovanni

Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen put it; "the normal state of an institution

is either one of stabil ity or one of constrained, adaptive change."7 During a

critical j unctu re, wh ich usually lasts no more than one or two decades, the

range of options for society is much greater than it is otherwise. Ideas that

were once verboten or unth inkable are suddenly on the table. The decisions

made during such a period establish institutions and rules that put society on

a course that will be difficult to change for decades or generations.

This notion of c ritical j unctures is increasingly accepted in h istory and

the social scienc es. It has proven valuable for th inking broadly about society­

wide fundamental social c hange, and also as a way to understand fundamen­

tal change with i n a specific sector, l ike media and communication. Most

of our major i nstitutions in media are the result of such critical j unctures;

once one has passed, the existing media regime is on stable ground, and its

legitimacy and permanence are largely unquestioned. In times l ike those,

communication policy debates tend to support the dominant institutions

and attract little public awareness or participation.

Critical junctures i n media and communication tend to occur when two

or all three of the following conditions hold:

• There is a revolutionary new communication technology that under­

mines the existing system;

• The content of the media system, especially the journalism, is increas­

ingly discredited or seen as illegitimate; and/or

• There is a major pol itical crisis - severe social disequ il ibrium - i n

which the existing order is no longer working, dominant institutions

are i ncreasingly challenged, and there are major movements for social

reform.

In the past century, critical j unctures in American media and commu­

nication occurred three times: i n the Progressive Era ( l 890s- 1 920s ), when

j ournal ism was i n deep crisis and the overall political system was i n turmoil;

i n the 1 9 3 0s, when the emergence of radio broadcasting occurred at the

same time as public antipathy to commercialism rose against the backdrop

6 8 D I GITAL D I S C O N N E C T

of the Depression; and in the 1 960s and early 1 970s, when popular social

movements in the United States provoked radical critiques of the media as

part of a broader social and pol itical critique.8

The result of the critical j un cture in the Progressive Era was th e emer­

gence of professional j ournalism. The result of the critical j uncture in the

1 93 0s was the model of loosely regulated commercial broadcasting, wh ich

provided the model for subsequent electronic media technologies l ike FM

radio and terrestrial, cable, and satellite television. The result of the 1 960s

and 1 970s critical juncture was less sweeping for communication, although

a number of reforms were enacted. In many respects the issues ra ised then

were never resolved, buried by the pro-corporate epoch that followed.

Today we are in the midst of another profound c ritical j u ncture for com­

munication. Two of the conditions are already in place: the digital revolution

is overturning all existing media industries and business models, and j ournal­

ism is at its lowest ebb since the Progressive Era. The third condition - the

overall stability of the political and social system - is the last domino to fall .

It remains to be seen whether the people will engage with the structural

crises our society is facing or leave matters to elites. In the c ritical j u ncture

of the 1 960s and early 1 970s, for example, elites were concerned by a "cri­

sis of democracy." Th is "crisis" was created by previously suppressed, apa­

thetic, passive, and marginal ized elements of the population - minorities,

students, women - becoming pol itically engaged and making demands

upon the system.9 The Occupy movement and mass demonstrations of 20 1 1

provide glimmers of popular political activism not seen for many decades; if

this is the start of someth ing big, we truly are entering a full-throttle critical

j uncture, and what the country will look like when we get to the other side

is impossible to predict.

Te chnology

As the discussion of critical j unctures suggests, communication technol­

ogy plays an enormous role i n the political e conomy of communication.

To some extent th is role is self-evident, as many media are defined by their

technology, be it the printing press, the radio, or the television. So when

new technologies emerge, so do new media. But it goes much deeper than

that. In some ways, the field can be better understood as political economy

H OW CAN T H E P E C H ELP US U N D E R S TAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 6 9

and communication. The PEC is not j ust about making a structural analysis

of communication systems and policy debates, as important as those are . Its

practitioners also analyze how communication defines social existence and

shapes human develop ment. A study of communication can provide keen

insights into our historical development. Communication affects political

economy as much as political economy affects communication. When both

are put in the hopper as codependent variables, things get interesting. This

is precisely the i ntellectual cocktail we need in order to address the Internet

and the digital revolution.

Here the importance of technology for communication -what are called

" intellectual technologies" - is paramount. The Canadian political econo­

mist Harold Innis pioneered work that emphasized the "biases" of commu­

nication distinct fro m its pol itical economic utilization , or, better yet, in

combination with the political economic uses. I n the mid-twentieth century,

he wrote long studies on the importance of communication in shaping the

course of human history.10 Innis argued that modes of communication and

communication technologies were of central importance in understanding

human development and that they had profound intrinsic biases. Marshall

McLuhan was an acolyte of Innis, though this Canadian English professor

altered Innis's argu ments. McLuhan is best known for his notion that the

"medium is the message," that the nature of media content derives from the

structure and technology of the medium. The dominant media technology

defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that

human societies operate .11 His work was very influential on i nnumerable

thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an i nnate

bias toward superficial ity. 1 2

"Every i ntellectual technology," as Nicholas C arr puts it, "embodies an

intellectual ethic , a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or

should work." These technologies "have the greatest and most lasting power

over what and how we thi nk." 1 3 Without a political economic context, this

approach can smack of media technological determinism, but with the PEC

this approach highlights that media technologies have significant impact, an

extra-large helping of what sociologists term "relative autonomy." 14 Innis did

not only focus upon the importance of communication technologies; he was

also a sharp c ritic of corporate media and media commercialization.1 5 The

same was true of Postman, who termed the United States a technopoly, " a

system in which technology o f every k i n d is cheerfully granted sovereignty

70 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

over social institutions and national life, and becomes self-justifying, self­

perpetuating, and omnipresent." "The core of technopoly," Postman wrote,

"is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the

interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers." 16

For an example of this fusion, Nicholas Carr makes a strong critique of

the Internet's effect on how our brains function, discussed in chapter l. Like­

wise, Eli Pariser expresses concerns about how the Internet is producing

"bubbles" that keep us in a world that constantly reinforces our known in­

terests and reduces empathy, creativity, and critical thought. In both cases,

aspects of the technology that seem most disastrous to Carr and Pariser are

enhanced or driven by commercial imperatives. As Carr puts it, Coogle is

"quite literally, in the business of distraction." 17 Indeed, the criticism of out­

of-control technology is in large part a critique of out-of-control commercial­

ism.18 The loneliness, alienation, and unhappiness sometimes ascribed to

the Internet are also associated with a marketplace gone wild. 19 They are very

closely linked in modern America.

Because so much of the debate surrounding the digital revolution comes

down to how this technology is not only revolutionizing society but possibly

changing the very nature of human beings, it is appropriate to begin consid­

ering the digital communication revolution in the broad sweep of human

development. The question is not whether the Internet's impact has equaled

or passed that of the telegraph or radio or television. The question is much

grander: Is the digital revolution going to qualify as the fourth great c om­

munication transformation in human history. I use the term transformation

to indicate a communication revolution of such stunning magnitude that

it alters the way our species develops. These great communication trans­

formations are always accompanied by dramatic changes in the material

conditions and structures of humanity in our political economy.

The first great transformation was the emergence of speech and lan­

guage. Although there is some genetic basis for language, it did not emerge

overnight as a result of one or two mutations. 20 Some scholars place its de­

velopment a mere fifty thousand to sixty thousand years ago . Some, per­

haps many, anthropologists believe that it was this emergence of language

that permitted a small band of hominids to avoid possible extinction and

to branch out from one corner of Africa across the planet in a geological

nanosecond.2 1 The acquisition of language helped develop human brains

and made more-advanced toolmaking possible. The eventual development

H OW CAN THE PEC H E L P US UNDERSTAND T HE INTERNET? 71

of agriculture - which permitted the accumulation of surplus and then civi­

l ization and history - would not have been remotely possible without lan­

guage.22 So the first communication transformation was a big deal . In many

ways, it defined our species; it created us. As Aristotle and the ancient Greeks

understood, we are the "talking animal ."

The second great communication transformation was writing, which

came many thousands of years after agriculture, only around five thousand

years ago. Writing was not a "natural" development; many fairly advanced

societies never had it, and there was never anything close to the diversity

found in h uman languages. 23 Even today all the world's written languages

come from three or four basic systems. Writing was driven in growing em­

pires by the need to record information because of surpluses generated by

agriculture, and those that did not have writing faced real l i mits to their

expansion or survival. Indeed, empires with writing had a decided advantage

over nonwriting societies and tended to crush and absorb them. As for the

benefits of writing for h umanity, Claude Levi-Strauss writes that "the imme­

diate consequence of the emergence of writing was the enslavement of vast

numbers of people." 24 Innis, too , was skeptical about writing's emergence; he

lamented the loss of oral cultures.

Writing also had enormous unanticipated consequences, with much of

what we regard as our cultural heritage the direct and indirect result. With­

out writing, for example, it is impossible to imagine the h uman brain being

capable of generating the scientific, philosophical , and artistic accomplish­

ments that define us. The development of the phonetic alphabet was deci­

sive. Its origins can be traced to the P hoenicians before 1 000 BCE, and the

Greeks definitely had it by around 7 50 B C E and had advanced it. Alphabets

are "energy efficient" in that "considerably less of the brain is activated in

reading words from phonetic letters than in interpreting logograms or other

pictorial symbols." 25 Shortly thereafter, classical Athens blossomed in a man­

ner that some still consider the high point of human civi l ization. Athens

is noth ing if not a tribute to the written word, although Innis thought its

unique genius was as much due to the fact that the oral tradition was still

strong and co-existed with writing in a manner that would never be the case

agam.

The third great communication transformation, the printing press, is bet­

ter understood among scholars, as it has been the subject of considerable

analysis and debate.26 B efore the printing press made reading, writing, and

72 D IG I TA L D ISCONNECT

literacy widespread, the vocabulary of the Engl ish language , for exampl e,

was l imited to a few thousands words. After the printing press, it expanded

upward to a million words. "As language expanded," C arr writes, "conscious­

ness deepened." 27 The printing press made possible the radical reconstruc­

tion of all major i nstitutions, most immediately religion. It is difficult to

imagine political democracy, the scientific revolution, or much of an indus­

trial economy without the printing press and mass literacy. By no means did

the printing press generate modern democracy and industrial capitalism on

its own , but it was a precondition for either to exist. 28

Whether this current critical j u ncture develops into the fourth great com­

munication transformation may not be settled until we are all long gone.

To some, the j u ry has already returned. "With the exception of alphabets

and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind­

altering technology that has ever come into general use ," C arr writes. "At

the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book." 29

John Naughton cautions us that th is communication revolution has only j ust

begun, and if history is any guide, we really have little idea how it will even­

tually turn out. 30 We do know for certain that the interplay of digital com­

munication with political economy will determi ne its tra jectory and strongly

shape its ultimate role in human development.

In the meantime, the United States, like other nations and transnational

bodies, faces myriad communication policy issues affecting digital commu­

nication that are often about technological choices. Technologies reinforce

the status quo once a communication regime is put in place . Technologies

are "path dependent," meaning that once they are i n place with a certain

technological standard, it is very difficult and expensive to replace them un­

less there is a major technological revolution, even if they have considerable

flaws. We still live with the l imitations of the QWER1Y keyboard, to take

one example , though the rationale for that system disappeared generations

ago . 31 Likewise, communication technologies i nvariably have unintended

consequences - the more significant the technology, the greater the unin­

tended consequences. Both of these features point to the need for as careful

and thoughtful an approach to communication pol icy making as possible. As

Philip N . Howard puts it, "technology design can actually involve political

strategy and be part of a nation's 'constitutional moment.' " 32

H OW CAN T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 73

The Commercial Media Ente rtainme nt Syste m

The Internet and digital technology e ncompass all communication. By most

accounts, they have disrupted the busi ness models of existing communica­

tion industries and forced media firms to rej igger their operations. These

are some of the greatest concerns brought on by the Internet, and they are

precisely where the PEC can be of value . Beyond simply figuring out a way

to give consumers better deals or help firms figure out how to be more prof­

itable, it can help us go large, to thi nk about what type of cultural system

digital technol ogy makes possible. Let's start by looking at the commercial

enterta inment sector.

The U nited States has a vibrant commercial entertainment media i ndus­

try. It mushroomed into a key part of the U . S . economy and culture in the

twentieth century with the advent of films, recorded music, radio, and televi­

sion. American popular commercial culture has its share of critics, but most

of them h old to the view that if there are problems, they are due to the audi­

ence , which demands questionable content. After all, if people demanded

great culture, it would be in the interests of the firms to give the people what

they want. If the free market works anywhere, for better or for worse, it is

certainly in the realm of entertainment. At least, that's the theory.

Commercial media do generate some exceptional material and serve the

needs of many Americans. In many ways, the output of commercial media is

quintessentially American and has become the way we understand our cul­

tural heritage . The PEC cannot and does not say much about aesthetics or

the nature of content, nor does it analyze the way audiences deal with media

content. The PEC does look at structural and i nstitutional factors and assess

what types of pressures exist that will shape the content. 33 The catechism

asserts that commercial media "give the people what they want," that the

audience barks out orders and media firms race to satisfy them in a direct

and unambiguous relationsh ip. The consumer is king. The PEC examines

these claims.

Right away, the catechism washes up agai nst the rocks. Media content

industries tend to be oligopolistic, with only a few firms dominating pro­

duction in each sector. Moreover, in the past two generations, the largest

media corporations have become conglomerates, meaning they tend to

have ma jor market shares in several different media markets, such as motion

74 D IG I TAL D IS C ONN E C T

pictures, television, recorded music, and magazines. 34 A small handful of

gigantic firms control film production, network television, cable 1V systems

and channels, publish i ng, and music recording. It is not simply the standard

tendency toward market concentration in capitalism; it has to do with the

nature of entertainment media markets. In such markets, the "fi rst-copy"

costs - say, of producing a film - are enormous, long before a penny of rev­

enue is earned. This is a very high-risk i ndustry. On the other hand, the

marginal costs of serving additional customers after the first are rock-bottom,

so blockbusters can be extremely profitable. Having size and being a con­

glomerate is the smartest way for firms to manage risk. 35

Consequently, instead of consumer sovereignty, there is producer sover­

eignty. The media firms have a great deal of power over what they produce

and do not produce. They may give the people what they want, but only

within the range that is most profitable for them: This tends to be a nar­

rower range than one would find in a competitive market. That's why media

consolidation has been a central concern of the PEC . Concentrated control

over culture (and journalism) instantly raises red flags in liberal democratic

theory, for good reason .

The catechism also assumes that media firms and creative talent are con­

joined and march in lockstep to high profits and h igh incomes. Th is elides

a tension that has been present for centuries: art done purely for profit tends

to be of dubious artistic value. Artists need compensation to be able to do

their work, may need to have a sense of the audience in their minds, and may

desire and embrace publ ic acclaim. But if the commercial ism overrides the

art, the art- to invoke Howard Stern, who rej ected using marketing surveys

to determine the content of his radio program - will most likely suck. The

conflict between creative talent and commercial pressures recurs often. If

it didn't, Rupert Murdoch and the other media CEOs could simply write

and direct films themselves or indiscriminately h i re people to do so at much

lower wages.

Monopoly aggravates the tension: If creative people are dissatisfied, their

options are not great in an oligopolistic market, especially when all the play­

ers ape each other. This is why media firms and creative talent tend to have

such a complicated and often antagonistic relationship. As a rule, the best

stuff comes when it has as little corporate i nterference as possible, and that

goes against the logic of a system in which firms make risky investments.

H OW CAN T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E RSTA N D T H E I NT E R N E T ? 75

The corporate instinct is to re-create what worked yesterday. Let some other

chump take a chance - and if it pans out, imitate away.

Moreover, in the conglomerate era, the projects that get green-lighted are

often those that lend themselves to prequels, sequels, spin-offs, adaptation to

other media, toys, videogames, merchandising, and licensing i ncome. Tim

Wu compared the ten most expensive Hollywood films of the 1 960s and

1970s to the ten most expensive Hollywood films of the 2000s. The earlier

films were all stand-alone properties that rose and fell on their box office;

the 1 970s were i ndeed a golden age for American cinema by most critical

accounts. The more recent blockbuster budgets were all spent on films that

had all sorts of additional revenue streams built in, to the point that the

actual quality of the film itself seemed to be far less a concern for ultimate

profitab ility. 36 When one studies the industrial production of culture in Hol­

lywood, it is almost bewildering that anyth ing good can be done once a

proj ect runs the gauntlet of a corporate bureaucracy. 37

The notion that the system invariably "gives the people what they want"

further unravels when advertising is added to the equation. Advertising is of

particular importance because it has provided much of the revenue that has

supported enterta i nment media for the past eighty years. That support has

been one of the ma in defenses of advertising's otherwise questionable con­

tribution to society. Advertising creates distinct pressures to appeal to certain

types of audiences - generally more affluent- and to avoid certain types of

themes. It can strongly influence the nature of media content, mostly for

the worse . 38 Those entertai nment sectors, like most of radio and television,

wh ich depend upon advertising for the l ion's share of their revenues, are all

about giving the advertisers what they want, and that is often different from

what people want. They are effectively branches of the advertising industry.

Moreover, i nternal industry surveys show that most people want much

less advertising in their media and would even be willing to pay more to

have less commercialism. 39 But this is rarely a profitable option, so it is not

one people can routinely vote for i n the marketplace. The commercial mar­

ketplace cannot be used effectively to reject commercialism. For all the talk

about how the system "gives the people what they want," it also gives people

a truckload of uni nvited material they desperately wish to avoid.

So audience demands for entertainment are filtered through the com­

mercial requirements of media conglomerates and advertisers. The market

76 D IG I TAL D I S C O N N E C T

research that these firms do is less about determining what audiences want

than what is the cheapest, safest, and most profitable way to reach target au­

diences. Audience demands that do not fit the commercial needs are l ikely

to go unmet.

The catechism assumes that popular demand for programmi ng is exog­

enous, that it springs from some other world and is divinely democratic . But

what people are exposed to significantly shapes what they will demand . To

adapt Say's law: supply creates demand. Media firms have no incentive to

upgrade the tastes of the audience; they take the market as they find it. One

could argue that through commercial ism they degrade it. It is generally non­

profit institutions and noncommercial environments that are tasked with

exposing people to culture they would not experience otherwise . It was mar­

ginalized communities that produced the great breakthroughs in popular

music - from jazz and rock to reggae and h ip-hop - not the R&D office in a

media conglomerate. It is when young people are exposed to - and educated

in - l iterature, musical traditions, and the panoply of filmed entertainment

that they develop broader tastes. It was once thought that the Internet would

provide a massive treasure chest of culture that would dramatically expand

any i ndividual's horizon . As Eli Pariser argues in The Filter Bubble and I dis­

c uss in chapter 5, cyberspace is becoming less a frontier where citizens are

l ike explorers on a glorious adventure than a cul-de-sac where advertising­

driven cues keep people in th eir l ittle individual ized bubble, making it un­

l ikely for serendipity to occur.

The primary education of Americans today appears to be in commercial

values.4° Consider the education provided in the children's market, which

has exploded in the past generation . It goes way beyond just sell i ng prod­

ucts to children; a majority of people use brands remembered from ch ild­

hood, and children influence their parents' purchases, tooY Hence ch ildren

under three years old - a market that barely existed forty years ago - are now

a $20 bill ion annual market for advertisers. By three months old, 40 percent

of infants watch screen media regularly; by two years, 90 percent do. By her

third birthday, the average American ch ild recognizes one hundred brand

logos. The typical child is exposed to forty thousand screen ads per year.

Children know the names of more branded characters than of real animals.

By her tenth birthday, the average American ch ild knows three hundred to

four hundred brands. Research shows over and over that preschoolers will

H OW CAN T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? . 77

overwhelmingly think advertised products, branded products, are superior

even when the actual contents are identicalY

In short, for all its problems i n teach ing other sub j ects, the United States

is leading the pack i n commercial indoctrination. The massive wave of ad­

vertising to ch ildren is considered a contributing factor in the epidemic of

juvenile obesity, the growth of attention-deficit disorders, and other psycho­

logical issues, as well as the rampant sexual ization of girls at ever-younger

ages:n In 2 0 1 0 , Alex Bogusky, who was named Adweek's Creative Director

of th e Decade in 2009 and called "the Elvis of advertising," announced he

was quitting the industry, in part to protest marketers "spending billions to

influence our innocent and defenseless offspring." Bogusky termed advertis­

ing to ch ildren a "destructive" practice with no "redeeming value."44 "There

can be no keener revelation of a society's soul," N elson Mandela once stated,

"than the way it treats its ch ildren ."4 5 It is difficult to study the commercial

marination of children's brains and not regard it as child abuse .46

Fre e Market in Action?

The fatal flaw in the catechism is the notion that the commercial entertain­

ment media system is based upon a free market. It is profit drive n, to be

sure , but that is a different matter. One need only start with the value of the

monopoly licenses that are given free to commercial radio and 'IV stations,

or spectrum to satellite television, or monopoly cable 'IV franch ises. One

recent estimate by Federal Communications Commission (F CC) staffers of

the market value of the publicly owned spectrum today - some of which is

given to commercial broadcasters at no charge - is around $ 5 00 billion .47

When one considers all the wealth created from the free gift of spectrum to

broadcasters since the 1 920s, all the empires built upon it, the total transfer

is certainly well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Or consider the

massive empires that firms l ike Comcast built with government-granted mo­

nopoly l icenses for cable television systems. Economists acknowledge that

these companies earn "rent" - i. e . , superprofits - from the monopoly fran­

ch ises. (Much of the policy-making process is an effort by communities to

get something in return for these rents.) These old media subsidies remain

of concern i n the digital era . As chapter 4 chronicles, these firms are using

78 D IG ITAL D IS C ONN E C T

their monopoly franchises a n d spectrum allocations t o lock in a piece o f the

action online.

There are numerous other important direct and i ndirect subsidies that

the government provides commercial media, and I have documented them

elsewhere.48 Two are of particular importance. F irst, advertising is condoned

and encouraged by government policies and regulations. Allowing busi­

nesses to write off their advertising expenditures as a busi ness expense on

their tax returns not only costs the government tens of billions annually in

revenues, but also encourages ever greater commercialism in our culture.

By performing only lax regulation of advertising content, even as permitted

by the law, the floodgates to commercialism are kept wide open. In addition,

federal , state, and local governments themselves spend billions annually in

advertising, which in effect is money that bankrolls commercial media.

Second, and by far the most important for entertainment media, is copy­

right. Media products have always been a fundamental problem for capitalist

economics, going back to the advent of the book. Without direct government

intervention, the marketplace would barely exist as we have come to know

it. The problem is that a person's use of i nformation, unl ike tangible goods

and services, does not prohibit others from using it. ( I n economic terms, it

is nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary. ) For tangible products, the type that

fills economics textbooks, one person's use of a product or service precludes

another person from using the same product or service. Two people cannot

eat the same hamburger or simultaneously drive the same automobile. More

of the product or service needs to be produced to satisfy additional demand.

Not so with information. "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we

exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple," George Ber­

nard Shaw allegedly once said, "but if you have an idea and I have an idea

and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas ."49

Stephen King doesn't need to write an individual copy of h is novels for

every single reader. Likewise, whether two hundred or 200 million people

read one of h is books would not detract from any one reader's experience of

it. What this meant for book publ ishing was that anyone who purchased a

book could then print additional copies and sell them. There would be free

market competition, and the price of the book would come tumbling down

to the marginal cost of publ ishing a copy, exactly where it should be in a

competitive market. But authors would receive compensation only for those

copies of the book they personally publ ished or authorized, and competition

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E RSTA N D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 79

would force them to lower the price to where their compensation was zero.

Consumers might get cheap books, great for a democratic culture, but au­

thors would not receive enough compensation to make it worth their while

to write books. The market fails. The problem with nonrivalrous resources is

not allocating consumption; rather, it is encouraging production .

Th is was apparent long before modern capitalism. It was the basis for

copyright laws, so important that their principle is i nscribed in the U . S . Con­

stitution. Authors received temporary monopoly rights to control who could

publ ish their books in order to make certain they received sufficient com­

pensation. The trick was to encourage production without creating danger­

ous monopol ies over information . Thomas Jefferson only reluctantly agreed

to copyright, detesting it as a government-created monopoly that was effec­

tively a tax on knowledge. The C onstitution states explicitly that copyright

licenses cannot be permanent, and their initial length was fourteen years . 50

In the early republic, authors or publish ers had to specifically apply for

copyright to get such protection; only 5 5 6 of the 1 3 ,000 books published in

the 1 790s were covered. Only American authors were eligible, which pained

Charles D ickens to no end. But Dickens kept on writing, fortunately, able to

build up a fine income on his B ritish sales. H e also made a good living giv­

ing speaking tours in the United States, where his inexpensive books made

h im wildly popular.

When new media technologies developed and powerful media corpora­

tions emerged in the twentieth century, they were able to get Congress to

make copyright automatic and to dramatically extend the length and scope

of copyright protection - or to put it in plain English, government monopoly

protection licenses. This has been a godsend to their bottom l i nes - indeed,

to the very existence of their i ndustries - but at a h igh cost to consumers and

artists wishing to use material that can remain copyright protected for well

over one hu ndred years . The copyright for th is book, for example, will last

for 70 years after my death. (What is the thi nking? That I would not write

a book if it were covered by copyright only for 20 or 30 or 50 years after my

death ?) A corporate copyright, as for a film, lasts 95 years after it is published

or 1 2 0 years after its creation, whatever come first. The numbers are almost

meaningless, because copyright terms invariably get extended before they

expire .5 1 We have , in effect, permanent copyright on the installment plan,

and nothing produced since the 1 920s has been added to the public domain.

Copyright long ago lost its connection to promoting the interests of authors

80 D I G I TA L D I S C O N N E C T

o r creative artists s o they might have short-term monopoly control over their

work - just long enough for them to theoreti cally make enough money to

make more culture .5 2

Today copyright has become a huge market in wh ich control over copy­

rights is frequently unconnected to the actual persons who created the origi­

nal work - and the terms for copyright are extended after the fact, wh ich

makes no sense at all . Copyright is now someth ing entirely different: it pro­

tects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provi des much of the prof­

its to media conglomerates. They could not exist without it. 53 Copyright has

become a maj or policy encouraging the wholesale privatization of our com­

mon culture .54 It is also an enormous annual indirect subsidy for copyright

holders, mostly large media corporations, by the public, in the form of se­

verely inflated prices both for consumers and for cultural produ cers wish ing

access to material . No one knows the exact amount of "rent" these monopoly

privileges confer upon copyright holders, because there is no accounting for

th is category. But the handful of lawsuits over the spoils of copyright suggests

it is enormous, probably running into the tens of billions annually. It was for

th is reason that Milton Friedman regarded copyright as an anticompetitive

mechanism, and he generally opposed the various extensions it received in

the twentieth century.55

Scholars term th is history the paradox of copyright. A policy meant to

encourage creativity and cultural output has become a primary weapon to

prevent the same . The media conglomerates routinely take publi c-domain

material, l ike Cinderella, and make a fortune using it- because it was pro­

duced before copyright began to be routinely extended. But no future artists

will be able to do the same to their creations without the conglomerate's

permission (and usually a generous payoff).

Consider, for example, Bob Dylan. His first six albums of original ma­

terial from the early to mid- l 960s - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan through

Blonde on Blonde - are some of the greatest, most iconic albums in Ameri­

can h istory. Many of them rank on any list of the top fifty or hundred popu­

lar music albums of all time, and a couple of them are usually in the top

ten . If I had a dollar for every time I listened to one of the songs on those

albums I could retire comfortably. Yet when a Library of Congress musicolo­

gist studied the first seventy songs Dylan composed and recorded, he docu­

mented that "about two-th irds of Dylan's melodies from that period were

H O W CAN T H E PEC H E L P US U N DE R STA N D T H E I N TE RNE T ? 81

lifted directly from the Anglo- and Mrican-American traditional repertory."

Dylan admitted that was his approach to songwriting. Because those songs

were unprotected by copyright, Dylan was able to do what he did, and we

are very fortunate that Dylan was not prohibited from producing h is great

songs. The catc h is that today no one could do to Bob Dylan what Dylan did

to the folk canon without making far greater alterations to the melodies than

Dylan did, because those melodies will be protected by copyright for a very

long time .'t' For that reason, we are all the poorer.

In this light, the existential threat posed by the Internet to the commercial

media system becomes clear: Now digital content could be spread instantly,

at no charge, all over the world with the push of a button. The marginal cost

of rep roducing material was zero, noth ing, nada . By free-market econom­

ics, that was its legitimate price. Once sufficient broadband existed, music,

movies, books, 1V shows- everyth i ng! - would be out there in cyberspace

acc essible to anyone for free. Copyright enforcement would be helpless in

the face of all-powerful digital technology.

To make matters worse from the capital ist perspective, advertising, which

had been the way commercial interests had been able to convert the publ ic

good of over-the-air broadcasting into a lucrative industry, was likewise im­

periled by the Internet. Who would ever voluntarily watch an ad on their

computer, not to mention allow herself to be carpet-bombed with ads? On

th e Internet, media corporations could no longer hold people prisoner. "We

are talking about a field," one commercial website producer lamented i n

1997, "where it's n o t even clear w h o should pay whom." 57

This led in the 1 990s to an i nitial deluge of euphoria from those who

found the corporate media status quo unsatisfactory. "The world has sud­

denly developed a printing press for every person on the planet," Henry Jen­

kins enthused .58 The media conglomerates, in their wheeling and dealing,

\vere simply engaging i n the "rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic,"

as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foun­

dation famously put it. The infinitude of websites and the abil ity of anyone

to go toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch was their death knell : "I th i nk they are,

in th eir present manifestations, goners ." 59 S carcity, a requirement for capital­

ist markets, no longer existed! There was no longer any need for the PEC;

the digital revolution was ending scarcity and making communication ubiq­

uitous, free , participatory, and wonderfully empowering and democratic . We

82 D IG I TAL D I S C O N NE C T

can have a generation of potential Bob Dylans able to draw from, and be

inspired by, all the fruits of human culture.

Of course, it has not developed quite that way. The giant media firms

have not disappeared, nor has the Internet eliminated television and H ol­

lywood. Marketing is a mandatory core institution of contemporary capital­

ism; the $ 3 00 billion spent annually on advertising and sales promotion was

not about to go gentle into that good night when John Perry Barlow fired up

his bong and showed it the door. These are extremely powerful institutions

with tremendous political and economic power; they have flexed it might­

ily and with great effect. But their world was being tu rned upside down ,

and the emergence of social media only underscored their dilemma . "At the

end of th is first decade of the twenty-first century, the l ine between media

producers and consumers has blurred," Michael Mandiberg writes, "and the

unidirectional broadcast has partially fragmented i nto many different kinds

of multidirectional conversations ."60

This blurring and fragmentation pointed to an even more fundamental

problem. No matter how much havoc the digital revolution might wreak

upon commercial media business models, the Internet offered no solution

at all to the core problem of funding and organizing media content. If a

shrinking number of people could make a living producing content, what

sort of culture would society produce? Th e online logic seemed as much

pre-surplus as post-scarcity, as much Dark Ages as Age of Enlightenment. In

short, the need for the PEC, the need to develop effective systems and poli­

cies, was and is more important than ever.

Journalism

I separate news media from the rest of commercial media ( entertainment)

for three reasons. F irst, journal ism has developed out of a somewhat differ­

ent tradition than entertainment: from the beginning of the republic, it has

been a key part of the governing system and has been understood that way.

Largely in recent decades, when media conglomeration merged the owner­

ship of news media with that of entertainment media, especially in broadcast

and cable 1V news, the distinction between news media and entertainment

media has been blurred, if not obliterated.

Second, even in the catechism, market criteria cannot to be used to

H OW CAN T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R STAND T H E I NT E RN E T ? 83

evaluate the quality of j ournal ism. Commercialism has been a key factor

in journalism since the beginning of the republic and has grown in impor­

tance, but it has never been embraced as entirely legitimate. Indeed, the

pure pursuit of profit has generally produced sensationalism, corruption,

and crisis for the news medi a . It has also meant that control over political

information has been placed in the hands of a small number of very wealthy

people . Normative assessments of journalism use different criteria, so the

tension between the capitalist basis of news media and the information re­

quirements of self-government is a central issue in the PEC critique of the

news media.

Thi rd, although broadcast news gets the generous subsidy of monopoly

spectrum licenses and all news media benefit from the advertising subsidy,

the news media get little benefit from copyright, because their product tends

to become quickly dated. Hence the single most important subsidy for com­

mercial entert ainment media is of minimal value to news media . If j ournal­

ism is in crisis due to the Internet and/or commercial pressures, it will likely

require a specific set of pol icies devoted to it, because the economics are

different.

There is considerable consensus in democratic theory and among jour­

nalism scholars about what a healthy j ournalism should entail: 61

l . It must provide a rigorous account of people who are in power and

people who wish to be in power in the government, corporate, and

nonprofit sectors.

2. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from l ies or at least to

prevent l iars from being unaccountable and leading nations into catas­

trophes - particularly wars, economic crises, and communal discord.

3 . It must regard the information needs of all people as legitimate . If there

is a bias in the amount and tenor of coverage, it should be toward those

with the least economic and political power, for they are the ones who

most need information to participate effectively. Those atop the system

will generally get from their own sources the information they need to

rule the roost.

4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most impor­

tant issues of our times. Research demonstrates that this is a crucial fac­

tor for encouraging informed citizen involvement in politics.62 Such

journalism addresses not only the transitory concerns of the moment,

84 D I G I TAL D I S C O N NE C T

but also challenges that loom on the horizon. It must translate impor­

tant scientific issues accurately i nto lay language . These issues cannot

be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about.

Journal ism must provide the nation's early warning system, so prob­

lems can be anticipated, studied, debated, and addressed before they

grow to crisis proportions .

It is not possible that all media outlets can or should provide all these

services to their communities; that would be impractical . It is necessary,

however, that the media system as a whole makes such journal ism a real is­

tic expectation for the citizenry. There should be a basic understanding of

the commons - the social world - that all people share, so that all people

can effectively participate in the pol itical and electoral processes of self­

governance. A free press is measured by how well it meets these criteria for

giving citizens the information they need to keep their freedoms and rights.

There is more . Great j ournal ism, as Ben Bagdikian put it, requires great

institutions . Like any complex undertaking, a division of labor is required to

achieve success: Copy editors, fact checkers , and proofreaders are needed,

in addition to reporters and assigning editors . Great journalism also requ ires

institutional muscle to stand up to governments and corporate power ­

institutions that people in power not only respect, but fear. Effective journal­

ism requires competition, so that if one newsroom misses a story, it will be

caught by someone else. It requires people being paid to cover stories they

would not cover if they were doing journalism on a voluntary bas is. In short,

to have democratic journal ism requires material resources, wh ich have to

come from somewhere and need to be organized on an institutional bas is. It

also must be an open system, so anyone can engage in the practice without

needing a license, credentials, or approval from on h igh .

Of course, journalism is not the only provider of political information

or stimulant for informed debate and participation. Political information

also comes from schools, art, academic research, enterta inment media,

and conversations with friends and family. But all of those other avenues

are much more effective and valuable if they rest atop a strong j ournal ism

and support that journalism. A basic weakness of the catechism is the su­

perficial understanding of journal ism's history and evolution. Defenders

of the catech ism and Internet celebrants tend to fail to appreciate how far

twentieth-century American journalism has strayed from reaching these

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 8 5

ideals. Hence reconstructing the journalism system under digital auspices

begins on a suspect foundation.

I n the first century of the republic, journalism was marked by a ubiq­

uitous and highly partisan press that tended to have a wide range of view­

points, including a crucial abolitionist press. The mostly unknown feature

of this period, which I retu rn to in chapter 6, is that this system was based

on extraordinarily large public subsidies; it was anyth ing but a testament to

the free market. As advertising increasingly supported newspapers and pub­

lishing be came a source of growing profitability, the subsidies decreased in

importance. For much of the final third of the nineteenth century, the news

media system tended to be quite competitive in economic terms. Large cities

often had over a dozen competing daily newspapers; papers came and went,

and nearly every newspaper was owned by a single publisher who also was

the editor or had a strong say in the editorial direction .63

But capitalism imposed its logi c . In some cases profit-hungry publishers

found that sensational ism, what came to be called yellow journal ism, was a

lucrative cours e . Bribery of journalists, showing favoritism toward advertis­

ers, and many other uneth ical practices were common. Most important, by

the 1 890s newspaper markets began to shift from competitive to oligopo­

listic, even monopol istic . Although revenues and population continued to

increase sharply, the overall number of newspapers began to stagnate and

then fall . "The stronger papers are becoming stronger and the weaker papers

are havi ng a hard time to exist," one newspaper executive observed in 1 90 2 .64

Newspapers began to serve a larger and larger portion of their community's

population - with much less fear of new competition than had been the

case - and had considerable power as a result.

Moreover, the great newspaper chains of Pulitzer, Hearst, and Scripps

were being formed almost overnight. The new publ ishing giants no longer

had any need to be closely tied to political parties; in fact, as local news­

papers grew more monopolistic, partisanship could antagonize part of the

market and undermine their commercial prospects. Yet many publishers

continued to use their now monopolistic power to advocate for their political

viewpoints, which were generally conservative, probusiness, and antilabor.65

The great progressive Robert La Follette devoted a chapter of his 1 92 0 book

on political philosophy to the crisis of the press. "Money power," he wrote,

"controls the newspaper press . . . wherever news items bear in any way upon

the control of government by business, the news is colored ." 66

86 D IG ITAL D I S C O N N E CT

By the first two decades of the twentieth centu ry, th is bias became a ma jor

crisis for American journalism. The news business was under constant at­

tack for venality and duplicity. As even the publisher of the Scripps-owned

Detroit News acknowledged in private in 1 9 1 3 , the corrosive influe nce of

commercial ownership and the pursuit of profit were such that the rational

democratic solution would be to set up municipal owne rship of newspapers

with popular election of the editors.67 In view of the explicitly political na­

ture of newspapers in American h istory, this was not as absurd a notion as it

may appear today. Scripps, always the most working-class dedicated of the

major chains and realizing how commercialism undermined th e integrity of

the news, even launched an ad-less daily newspaper in Ch icago in 1 9 1 1 .08

Reconciling a monopolistic commercial news media with the journal­

ism requirements of a political democracy is difficult. In many wealth ier

European nations, the solution came in the form of strong partisan and oc­

casionally public subsidies to support journalism dedicated to working-class

and labor interests, as well as the creation of independent public broadcast­

ing. In Latin America, news media often have been the private preserve of

wealthy families with strongly conservative politics and no interest in po­

litical democracy if their probusiness candidates do not win. They seldom

care to expand the power or privileges of the great mass of poor people in

their nations. Efforts by popularly elected socialist or populist governments

to generate a news media that is not abjectly hostile to their policies - or, in

the governments' claims, to have elements representing the interests of the

ma jority - understandably have met with charges of censorship.69 But even

those who defend the Latin American media chieftains acknowledge they

are often a dubious sort, and that their dominance is no democratic solution

to a very real problem. 70

In the United States, the solution to the problem was self-regulation by

the newspaper industry, in the form of professional j ournalism. This embod­

ied the revolutionary idea that the owner and the editor could be separated

and that the political views of the owner (and advertisers) would not be re­

flected in the nature of the journalism, except on the editorial page .

This was a 1 80-degree shift from the entire history of American j ournal­

ism, which was founded on the notion of an explicitly partisan and h ighly

competitive press. Now, news would be determined and produced by tra i ned

professionals, and the news would be obj ective, nonpartisan , factually accu­

rate, and unbiased. Whether there were ten newspapers in a community or

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TA N D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 87

only one or two would be mostly irrelevant, because trained journalists - like

mathematicians addressing an algebra problem- would all come up with

the same news reports. As press magnate Edward Scripps explained , once

readers "did not care what the editor's views were . . . when it came to news

one paper was as good as a dozen." 71 There were no schools of journalism

i n the United States (or the world, for that matter) in 1 900. By the 1 920s all

the major journalism schools had been established, and by 1 92 3 the Ameri­

can Society of Newspaper Editors had been formed and had established a

professional code for editors and reporters to follow.

There is noth ing inevitable or natural about the type of professional jour­

nalism that emerged in the U nited States in the last century. The profes­

sional news values that came to dominate in th is country were contested;

the j ournal ists' union, the Newspaper Gu ild, in the 1 9 3 0s unsuccessfully

attempted to foster a nonpartisan j ournalism far more critical of all people

in power. It argued j ournalism should be the agent of people outside of

power - to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," as humorist

F inley Peter Dunne put it. The guild regarded j ournalism as a th ird force

i ndependent of both government and big business and wanted to prohibit

publishers from having any control over the content of the news. As the lead­

ing h istory of the formation of the guild reports, "The idea that the Guild

could rebalance the power struggle between public and publisher through a

new kind of stewardship of freedom of the press became a core tenet of their

mission as an organization."72 This institutionalized independence remains

a compelling vision of journalism, worthy of being a portion of a good news

system, and it is still practiced today by some of our best journal ists .

This way of practicing j ournal ism was anathema to most publishers, how­

ever, who wanted no part of aggressive reporting on their fellow business

owners or the politicians they routinely worked with and relied upon for

their success. They also were never going to sign away their direct control

over the newsroom; editors and reporters had their autonomy strictly at the

owners' discretio n . The resulting level of professional ism was to the owners'

liking, for the most part, and more conducive to their commercial and po­

litical needs. It was also porous, so commercial factors could i nfluence the

values that led to story selection and advertising could influence the nature

and content of news coverage . 73

The core problem with professional journalism as it crystallized was that

it relied far too heavily upon official sources as the appropriate agenda setters

88 D I G I TA L D I S C O N N E C T

for news a n d a s the deciders as t o the range of legitimate debate in o u r politi­

cal culture . There is considerable irony in th is development. Consider Wal­

ter Lippmann, generally regarded as the leading advocate of professional ism

and a ferocious critic of the bankrupt quality of journal ism in 1 9 1 Os Amer­

ica. In two brilliant essays written in 1 9 1 9 and 1 920, Lippmann argued that

the ma in justification for, and requirement of, professional ism in journal ism

was that it provide a trained group of independent nonpartisan reporters who

could succ essfully, systematically, and rigorously debunk government (and

implicitly, corporate) spin, not regurgitate it.l4

This reliance upon official sources- people in powe r - as setting the

legitimate agenda and range of debate removed some of th e controversy

from the news, and it made the news less expensive to produce . It didn't

cost much to have reporters repeat what the mighty said. Thus the news

had an establishment tone. Reporters had to be careful about antagoniz i ng

those in power, upon whom they depended for "access" to th eir stories.7'

Ch ris Hedges, the former New York Times Pul itzer Prize-winning reporter,

describes the rel iance on official sources th is way: "It is a dirty qu id pro

quo . The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report

what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down,

reporters - real reporters - are cast into the wilderness and denied access." 7 6

This fundamental limitation of professional journalism does not manifest

itself in the coverage of those issues where there is rich and pronounced

debate between or with in leading elements of the dominant political parties.

Then journal ists have generous space in which to maneuver, and profes­

sional standards can work to assure a measure of factual accuracy, balance,

and credibility. There tend to be slightly fewer problems in robust political

eras, like the S ixties, when mass pol itical movements demand the attenti on,

respect, and fear of the powerful.

The real problem with professional j ournalism becomes evident when

political elites do not debate an issue but march in virtual lockstep. In such

a case, professional journalism is at best ineffectual and at worst propagan­

distic. This has often been the case in U . S . foreign policy, where both parties

are beholden to an enormous global military complex and accept th e exclu­

sive right of the United States to invade cou ntries when it suits U . S . inter­

estsJ7 In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic

assumptions and policy ob jectives and attempt to raise issues no one in the

H O W C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 89

leadership of either party wishes to debate are considered "ideological" and

''unprofessional ." This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists. 78

So it was that, even in the glory days of Sixties journalism , our news media

helped lead us into the Vietnam War, despite the fact that dubious claims

from the government - e .g. , the Gulf of Tonkin hoax - could in many cases

have been eas i ly c hallenged and exposed. "The process of brain-washing

the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen," I . F. Stone

vvrote at the tim e . Two great dissident Democratic senators, Alaska's Ernest

Gruening and Oregon's Wayne Morse, broke with both their own party

and the Republi cans to warn against i mperial endeavors in places such as

Vietnam. Their perspective, which history has shown to be accurate, was

marginalized in mai nstream news media. The press, Stone observed, had

"dropped an Iron C urtai n weeks ago on the antiwar speeches of Morse and

Gruening." 79 Morse recognized that the lack of critical coverage and debate

in th e news media was undermining popular participation in foreign policy.

"The American people need to be warned before it is too late about the

threat which is arising as a result of monopolistic practices [in newspaper

ownersh ip] ." 80

Journalism schools lament these lapses in retrospect, but the situation

never improves; such is the gravitational pull of the professional code to­

ward the consensus of those in power in matters of war and peac e . The

200 3 invasion of Iraq - based upon entirely fictitious "weapons of mass

destruction" - was one of the darkest episodes in American journal ism h is­

tory. It had astronomical, almost unimaginable, human and economic costs.

In h is 2 0 1 2 book, The Operators, foreign correspondent M i chael Hastings,

\vho spent considerable time in the company of General Stanley McChrys­

tal and h is staff, wrote about how military officials gloated in private at "how

massively they were manipulating the press," including the most prestigious

correspondents . 81 In March 20 1 2 , Glenn Greenwald critiqued National

Publi c Radio's hallowed coverage, in particular a report on Iran in wh ich

the correspondent

gathers a couple of current and former government officials (with an

agreeable establishment thi nk-tank expert thrown in the mix ) , uncriti­

cally airs what they say, and then repeats it herself. Th is is what es­

tablishment-serving journal ists in Washington mean when they boast

90 D I G I TAL D I S C O N N E C T

that they, but not their critics, engage in so-called "real reporting"; it

means: calling up Serious People in Washington and uncritically re­

peating what they say. 82

It seems the only time el ite j ournalists exhibit rage is when their practices are

exposed. "The unwritten rule" for j ournal ists is a simple one, Hastings wrote.

"You weren't supposed to write honestly about people i n power. Especially

those the media deemed untouchable." 83

Another weakness bu ilt into professional journalism as it developed in the

United States was that it opened the door to an enormous public relations

industry that was eager to provide reporters with material on their cl ients .

Press releases and packets came packaged to meet the requ irements of pro­

fessional journal ism, often produced by former journal ists. The point of PR

is to get the client's message in the news so that it looks l ike legitimate news.

The best PR is that which is never recognized for what it is. Although report­

ers generally understood the dubious nature of PR and never embraced it,

they had to use it to get their work done. Publishers tended to appreciate PR

because it lowered the costs of production. The dirty secret of journalism

is that a significant percentage of our news stories, in the 40 to 50 percent

range, even at the most prestigious newspapers in the glory days of the 1 970s,

was based upon press releases. Even then, a surprising amount of the time,

these press releases were only loosely investigated before publ ication. 8-+

The h igh-water mark for professional journalism was the late 1 960s and

early 1 970s. Even at its best, however, it tended to take the context and ex­

citement out of politics, turning it into a dry and sometimes incoh erent

spectator sport. Unl ike the partisan journalism of the nati on's first c entury,

it tended to promote depoliticization and apathy as much as participation.

Christopher Lasch characterized one of the limitations of American-style

professional journal ism: "What democracy requ i res is vigorous publ ic de­

bate, not informati on. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of

information it needs can be generated only by debate . We do not know what

we need to know until we ask the right questions , and we can identify the

right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to th e test

of public controversy." 85

Since the early 1 980s, commercial pressure has eroded much of th e au­

tonomy that professional journalism afforded newsrooms and that had pro­

vided the basis for the best work done over the past fifty years . It has led to

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E RSTAN D T H E I N T E R N E T ? 9 1

a softening of standards such that stories about sex scandals and celebrities

have become more legitimate because they make commercial sense: they

are i nexpensive to cover, they attract audiences, and they give the illusion of

controversy without ever threatening anyone in power.

The emergence of the Internet has done much more damage to news

media than it has done to entertainment media. The entire area is disinte­

grating, as I c hronicle in chapter 6. Most of the discussion of th is issue, how­

ever, has been vacuous b ecause of the lack of a political economic critique of

journalism. Professionalism has tended to be regarded as the natural Ameri­

can or democratic system of j ournalism, the organic result of profit-driven

media firms, wh ich were doing a bang-up j ob until the digital revolution

ra ined on their parade. Imprisoned by th is bogus schema, commentators

have been incapable of addressing what is arguably the single most impor­

tant communication issue of our time : creating a system of j ournalism in the

digital era sufficient for c redible self-government.

Policy Making

Ulti mately the nature of enterta inment media, journalism, and the Internet

depend on pol icy making. As digital communication comes to engulf all tra­

ditional media, all of telephony, and much of commerce and social life, the

stakes are enormous . Here the PEC has important lessons. As a rule, pol icies

will be made by elites and self-interested commercial interests, unless there

is organized popular intervention. In the U nited States today, there is consid­

erable cynicism about democratic governance, such that many people have

abandoned hope that anyone but powerful commercial interests have a say.

The cynicism is well founded. The metaphor that best captures Amer­

ican communication policy making is the famous Havana patio scene in

The Godfather II, in wh ich Michael Corleone, Hyman Roth, and other

American gangsters are dividing up Cuba among themselves during the Ba­

tista dictatorship. They each take a slice of Hyman Roth's birthday cake ­

appropriately shaped l ike C uba - to demonstrate their piece of the action .

After divvying up the spoils, Hyman Roth states how great it is to be in Cuba,

with a friendly government that knows how to work with "private enterprise ."

That is pretty much h ow communication policy making has been conducted

in the U nited States. Monopoly broadcast licenses, copyright extensions,

92 D I G I TA L D I S C O N N E C T

and tax subsidies are dol ed out all th e time, but th e publ ic has no idea what

is goi ng on. Like Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth, extremely powerfu l

lobbyists battle it out with each other- in this case to get cushy deals from

the FCC and the relevant congressional committees - whose members and

top staffers often move to private industry to cash in after th eir stint in "pub­

lic service."

Above all else , the FCC has been dedicated to making the dominant

firms bigger and more profitable. Congress, too, is under th e th umb of big

money. The one th ing the big firms all agree upon is that it is their system

and the publ ic has no role to play in the pol i cy-making process . And because

the news media - generally owned by beneficiaries of the secretive system ­

al most never cover th is story in the general news, 99 percent of the publ ic

has no idea what is going on. The best way to describe the role of the publ i c

in communication pol icy del iberations is th is: If you're not a t the negotiating

table, you're what's being served.

An example of corrupt policy making is the "debate" over copyright in the

U. S . Congress. It has been entirely one-sided, and for the past three decades,

copyright terms have been extended several times, for material that had al­

ready been produced. Why? The powerful media corporations and interests

that own most copyrights spent $ 1 . 3 billion on publ i c relations and lobbying

Congress on th is issue from 1998 to 20 1 0. The proponents of protecting the

public domain and fair use - l ibrarians, educators, and the l ike - have spent

$ 1 million in the same period. That is a 1 , 3 00-to- 1 rati o. 86 Furthermore, few

Americans have any awareness of the issue except through the news media,

so their exposure to it is largely via extravagant corporate PR scare campaigns

against "piracy."

Is it any wonder that few members of Congress even understand there is

an issue to debate? Giving the copyright industries what they want is basi­

cally beyond debate ; the specific ways Congress can expand and protect the

domain of copyright holders is what is under review. Hence the gargantuan

lobbying expenses. Congress is creating enormous profits for these indus­

tries by extending, expanding, and enforcing monopoly rights . Th e only time

copyright ind ustries seem to face opposition is when they square off against

other corporate lobbies that want access to copyright-protected material in

th eir operations. Such was the case in the 2 0 l l - 1 2 debate over the Stop On­

line Piracy Act ( SOPA) , when Coogle joined an avalanche of public opposi­

tion to battle the unprecedented extension of government pol icing power

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E RSTAND T H E I N T E R N E T ? 9 3

desired b y the copyright lobby. In that rare i nstance, the pro-copyright forces

were unable to get their dream legislation passed.

But cynicism must be avoided, as it feeds pessimism and depoliticization,

and becomes self-fulfilling. It is also wrong. In fact, American h istory is rich

with popular i nvolvement with communication policy making, and many

of the most democratic aspects of our systems were due to popular pol iti­

cal pressure . Most of these moments of popular participation were during

critical j unctures, when the stakes were h igher and the range of possible

outcomes greater. During the nineteenth century, abolitionists and popul ists

fought to keep postage low on periodicals, and they were successful to the

point that these publications were able to survive and sometimes thrive. It

was popular pressure that helped force universal service and common car­

riage on the AT&T tel ephone monopoly. Popular pressure in the Progressive

Era pushed newspapers to lessen explicitly right-wing journal ism.81 What

publi c i nterest regulation of commercial broadcasting and advertising exists

came from grassroots popular organizing efforts in the 1 9 3 0s and l 940s .88

The social movements of the 1 960s and 1 970s were able to increase minor­

ity medi a ownership, establish community radio stations, and create public­

acc ess 1V channels. 89 And that is j ust a partial list.

As we are now arguably in the mother of all critical j unctures, it is worth

noting that there has been an attendant burst of organized popular media­

policy activism. Beginning in the 1 990s, the burgeoning political economic

critique of commercial news media generated by people l ike Edward S . Her­

man, Noam Chomsky, and Ben Bagdikian and organizations l ike Fairness &

Accuracy In Reporting ( FAIR) spawned a generation of activists who saw

changing media as a necessary part of creating a more j ust and humane

worl d . The emergence of the I nternet fueled th is desire, both as a means to

that end and because of the great concern that citizens needed to organize to

prevent commercial interests from doing to the I nternet what they had done

to U . S . broadcasti ng.90 As I have been a participant in th is movement, I can

report that its very existence is predicated upon the work done in the PEC .

Speci fically, I co-founded the p ublic interest group Free Press with John

N i chols and Josh S ilver late in 2002. The idea behind Free Press was simple:

to get democratic media policies, we need to have informed and organized

publ ic participation in communication pol icy making. We needed to gener­

ate popular awareness of the issues and organize it as a pol itical force . While

we lobb ied on the issues at play i n Washington, our goal had to be to expand

94 D I G ITAL D I S C O N N E C T

the range o f debate a n d options beyond what was countenanced inside th e

corporation-dominated Beltway culture . We could not continue the practice

of j ust taking the "lesser-of-two-evils" side in intracorporate serums about

who would get the biggest slice of the media pie . We needed to have one

foot in the future and one foot in the present, and our goal had to be to

convi nce all organized popular groups that media reform had to become a

central issue for th em. Unless we could do so, our chances of success, of real

structural reform, were slim.

On the one hand, Free Press has been a striking success. I n conj unction

with its partners, it has organized or participated i n major successful cam­

paigns around a range of issues, including diverse media ownersh ip, stop­

ping fake news, protecting public and community broadcasting, preventing

harassment of independent journalists covering political demonstrations,

making TV stations disclose online who is paying for pol itical ads, establish­

ing low-power community radio stations, and preserving what there is of Net

neutrality. The group counts around five hundred thousand active members

and has th irty-five full-time staff members. It has become a force in Wash­

ington and has played a key role in helping draft public interest regulations.

Perhaps the highest recognition is the extent to which corporate communi­

cation firms have gone to attack it. Glenn B eck and the coin-operated right­

wing PR firms have regarded Free Press as a major threat to the republic,

because it challenges AT&T's monopoly power.91

At the same time , the Free Press experience demonstrates how far we

have to go and how little time we have . It has been too isolated from other or­

ganized popular groups that still fail to understand the importance of media

policy making. Too often , it is forced to operate inside the Beltway's param­

eters, so it must continually evince a commitment to "free-market compe­

tition," even when that is an unworkable option - or else be cast into the

wilderness. It must spend too much time fighting defensive battles, getting

caught up in the game of picking sides in intracorporate squabbles, because

that is where the action is. Th is makes it doubly difficult to galvanize popular

interest, as the issues seem wonky and the stakes seem low: no matter the

outcome, corporations still win .

The fact that both the Democratic Party and the Republ ican Party are

effectively owned by communication c orporations h ighl ights the difficulty

for any populist group in Washington. As a veteran activist put it, which­

ever party is in power mostly determines "whether AT&T overtly or covertly

H OW C A N T H E P E C H E L P US U N D E R S TA N D T H E I NT E R N E T ? 9 5

writes t h e laws." 92 Nowhere is t h e corruption a n d bankruptcy o f t h e political

system more apparent. The lack of a broader political base is smothering

Free Press and the media reform movement. It is like trying to grow plants in

the richest Iowa topsoil without sunl ight.

Presently in the coming decade there will be a series of pol icy debates that

will be crucial for the fate of the Internet. "What happens in the next ten

years," H eather Brooke wrote in 20 l l 's The Revolution Will Be Digitised, "is

going to define the future of democracy for the next century and beyond." 93

That, i n a nutshell , defines a critical juncture . Left to the usual suspects,

who will embrace and brandish the catechism, the I nternet will be put to

the service of cap ital , with dubious or disastrous consequences. Armed with

the insights of the political economy of communication, we can take a hard

look at the marriage of capitalism and the Internet and the resulting crisis

of communication and democracy in the digital era . There are alternative

paths leading to a much brighter future .