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English to Georgian: Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century (by Robert W. McChesney
Source text - English
12
A Sharp Left Turn for the Media
Reform Movement
THE CONTEMPORARY MEDIA REFORM movement exploded into prominence in the United States in 2003 as a response to the effort by President George W. Bushโs Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to weaken media ownership regulations. Three million people signed petitions opposing the rules changes, many of whom were fresh from the antiwar movement and were appalled by the idea that the same media conglomerates that assisted in the propaganda camยฌpaign for the Iraq invasion might be able to gobble up what remained of independent media. The success of this popular uprising was enough to contribute to the federal courtโs decision to toss out the FCCโs ownership scheme. It was a testament to the power of activism to thwart the plans of the powerful in seemingly hopeless conditions.
In subsequent years the U.S. media reform movement blossomed, led primarily by a group I co-founded, Free Press. On a number of major issues, from the broadcasting of โfake newsโ created by corยฌporate PR agencies and the protection of public and community broadcasting to the battle for an open, accessible, and uncensored Internet, Free Press led the charge in Washington, D.C. The thinkยฌing behind the group and the movement was to have one foot in the battles of the day as they were being fought in the capital, while the other foot was organizing in the field, with the idea of expanding popular awareness and involvement in the movement. We realized that for most people the range of media policy outcomes then counยฌtenanced in Washington seemed abstract or inconsequential. We needed to capture their imagination with bold and radical proposals. The strategy was to create an army for structural media reform, so the options expanded beyond what was then permissible in Washington, where, as FAIRโs Jeff Cohen once put it, the โrange of debate extends all the way from GE to GM.โ
With no small amount of irony, the media reform movement, relยฌatively speaking, enjoyed considerable success inside the Beltway in the second term of the Bush administration. The Obama campaign in 2007 and 2008 expressed interest in media reform and worked closely with members of the movement to design what was, by the standards of Washington policy debates, a progressive platform. Except for Obamaโs speech against the Iraq War invasion, it was arguยฌably his communication platform that most distinguished him as a progressive in the 2008 presidential primaries. He had the blogoยฌsphere all atwitter, so to speak. For the media reform movement, the gravitational pull of the Beltway was getting stronger, and it was intoxicating. The movement shifted its emphasis from the field to working in the corridors of power. Around the world, media activists looked to the United States as the place where organizing was getting stuff done. Again, there was irony: as recently as 2002, John Nichols and I had written a short book on how the United States trailed most other nations in media activism, and needed to get its act together.1
One can debate whether this was an appropriate strategic shift, but there can be no debate that the strategy failed. The Obama administration abandoned its platform almost immediately, and repudiated the movement, except for those people who carried its water. For whatever reason, it decided not to put any of its political capital in this area. A few activists argued that they had been more effective in the Bush years at winning their objectives. A deep and pervasive depression clouded the struggle, a depression that remains to this day.
In my opinion, the media reform movement needs to abandon its recent history and turn in a new direction altogether. On the one hand, it needs to return to its roots and the core principles on which the movement was founded. On the other hand, the movement needs to recognize that the world has changed dramatically in the past decade. Specifically, capitalism is in the midst of a prolonged crisis, with no end in sight. This changes the political playing field and opens up new requirements and opportunities for democratic reformers. In what follows I elaborate on these points and offer three policy proposals that might provide vision and direction for the media reform movement. These are radical ideas, far outside the existing range of debate inside political circles or even the academy. Unless ideas along the lines of what follow get โmainstreamed,โ it will be not just the media reform movement but the political left more broadly that will be guaranteed irrelevance and failure.
The Context for Radical Media Reform
The major premises of the media reform movement remain unchanged: communication systems develop largely as a result of policies, since there is no such thing as a natural โdefaultโ course of development. From the development of copyright and postal subยฌsidies for newspapers at the dawn of the Republic to the licensing of telephone, broadcasting, and cable TV monopolies, the state has been in the middle of the creation of the media.2 For example, the Internetโs shift from an anti-commercial, egalitarian institution in the early 1990s to a โwhoever makes the most money by any means necessary winsโ undertaking was not foreordained by the gods. It was the province of politics.3
In a capitalist society, including one with formally democratic practices, the policy debates will be weighted, at times heavily, toward commercial interests, especially in a matter like communi-cation, where there is tremendous profitability as well as political power attached to dominance. But the debates persist nonetheless, and organized popular forces have won media policy victories. In Europe, for example, the same political left that made labor unions, single-payer health insurance, and subsidized higher education possiยฌble was the decisive force that established well-funded nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting systems. U.S. history is riddled with examples of the rich getting their way with communication policy debates, but there have also been victories for popular forces. From free postage for the delivery of small weekly newspapers in the 1840s (which included most abolitionist publications) to the creation of community radio stations in the 1970s, organized people have on occasion defeated organized money.
One thing that has changed over the past forty years is that it has become more difficult for popular forces to influence policy. The corยฌruption of the media policymaking process was one of the founding concerns for Free Press, and if it is possible, the process has grown even more corrupt in the past decade. The U.S. political system has become what John Nichols and I characterize as a Dollarocracy.4 The vast majority of the population has no influence over core policies, regulations, taxation, or the budget, which are the province of large corporations and the very wealthy who dominate U.S. governance.5 Systemic corruption is the order of the day. The election system has been rendered largely ineffective as a means for citizens to engage in self-government. As former president Jimmy Carter said in 2013, the United States is no longer a โfunctioning democracy,โ even by the weak standards of its own history.6 This means that the chances of winning media policy battles of any great consequence inside the Beltway with the existing array of forces are all but nonexistent.
A second change from 2003 concerns the Internet. Many people knew then that it would just be a matter of time until the Internet overwhelmed and subsumed not only โold mediaโ but much of social life; nobody, myself included, really knew exactly how that would occur. Well, we now have a pretty good idea. The Internet has become a, if not the, dominant force in modern capitalism. Not only that, but the benefits of the Internet economy accrue to a very small number of gigantic firms that all enjoy what economists traditionยฌally characterize as monopoly status. Three of the four most valuable publicly traded corporations in the United States are Internet-related firms, and fourteen of the thirty-two most valuable firms are primarยฌily Internet firms. Several more of the thirty-two largest firms have significant digital operations.7 By contrast, only three of the โtoo big to failโ banksโwhich Senator Richard Durbin, in reference to Congress, conceded โfrankly own the placeโโrank among the thirty-two most valuable firms in the economy.8 What that means is that these Internet giants control the outcomes of all policy debates that affect them, which increasingly covers most issues of fundamental importance, like taxation, regulation, privacy, labor and consumer rights, and trade.
The third great change from 2003 is that U.S. capitalism is in the midst of what Paul Krugman refers to as another Great Depression. Unemployment remains very high, corporations are sitting on some $1.7 trillion they are not investing in new plants and equipment, and downward pressures on wages are extreme, particularly for the young and the working class.9 This is part of a long-term problem of stagnaยฌtion for monopoly-finance capitalism, as John Bellamy Foster and I wrote about in The Endless Crisis.10 Stagnation, combined with politiยฌcal corruption, means that poverty rates have returned to levels not seen for nearly a century in the United States, and inequality is trendยฌing toward that found in Malaysia or the Philippines.11 Nothing in the range of current debates on economic policy proposes anything that will change this dynamic. For the bulk of the population, the future is grim.
The political-economic situation in the United States is therefore unstable and ultimately untenable. When one factors in the environยฌmental crisis, this becomes an even more calamitous and desperate period.12 What is striking is that all the paeans to the genius of the market, which remain commonplace in policy or academic debates on communication from the respectable left to the right, now increasingly smell like month-old fish left out on a table. Though the news has yet to hit the corrupt elites in Washington, academia, or the mainstream news media, it is increasingly understood by a beleaguered citizenry.
It is also understood by Pope Francis, who delivered a condemยฌnation of capitalism, and capitalist media, in November 2013 that was unsparing and radical: โToday everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without posยฌsibilities, without any means of escape.โ He continued:
While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. . . A new tyranny is thus born. . . . The thirst for power and posยฌsessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
โNo one else,โ the journalist Robert Scheer wrote, โhas put it as powerfully and succinctly.โ13
What is taking place is little short of a sea change. As John Nichols notes, โThirty-nine percent of Americans surveyed for a November 2012 Gallup poll said they had a positive image of social-ism. In a 2011 Pew survey, 49 percent of Americans under 30 said they felt positive about socialism, while just 46 percent felt positive about capitalism. Among African Americans, 55 percent had a posiยฌtive reaction to socialism, versus 41 percent to capitalism. Among Latinos, it was 44 percent for socialism, 32 percent for capitalism.โ This is especially notable since few Americans have ever heard anyยฌthing positive about socialism; it would be like a survey in the Soviet Union in 1955 asking people to compare the merits of capitalism versus communism. What Americans do know today from firsthand experience is that really existing capitalism, to employ the vernacular, sucks. In 2013 the โsocialist alternativeโ candidate Kshama Sawant won a citywide election for the Seattle City Council over a liberal Democrat opponent in a two-person race. A decade ago, a radical like Sawantโwho called for the use of eminent domain to allow workers to assume control of abandoned factoriesโwould have been unlikely to nudge 1 or 2 percent of the vote.
In this political-economic environment, it is imperative that activists of all stripes speak boldly and truthfully about the probยฌlems of our times and the need for radical change. If activists assume that radical change is impossible and deem it unmentionableโnot because it is wrong, but because the entrenched forces are so powerful that to challenge them might undermine short-term legitimacyโby our very actions we increase the likelihood that it will be impossible. In view of the centrality of communication to the political economy, media reform activists have to pull their heads out of the Beltway and start talking to the people who voted Sawant onto the Seattle City Council and elected Bill de Blasio the mayor of New York City.
We need to capture the imaginations of people such that they believe politics can lead to radical improvements in their lives, and the lives of those they know and love. Then we can build an army that will be able to shake the foundations of this rotting system.
Expertise