Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy by McChesney Robert W

Author:McChesney , Robert W. [McChesney , Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 1993-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

MB: What vision underlies the kinds of change you’ve been part of? Your work evidences a commitment to legislation and policy as one front for change, and I wonder how you came to decide on those as a focus for the social movement.

RWM: Well, I think the media reform movement actually has four different components. Working on policies is one of them, and that’s the one we focus on at Free Press. I think it’s the most important one for social and political organizing, and the most important overall. The next two are doing independent media, which is especially important in the digital era, and providing media education and critique. This is something that we have a lot of skill at from years of academia and being on the outside looking in. Groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the tremendous Media Literacy movement are making people informed about how the media system works so they can participate in changing it. And criticism of bias in the news from groups like Media Matters for America is another component of critique. A fourth component is the movement among media producers, especially workers, journalists, and creative people. Their interest in taking a larger role in the media process could just shift some of the power from Wall Street, from advertisers, managers, and corporate interests. That’s the fourth leg of the table.

I think all four parts work together, and I’ve argued this at length in Tragedy and Farce, the book I wrote with John Nichols. They really aren’t competing approaches to solving the problem; they’re entirely complementary and need each other. None of them can succeed without the other. Now, we put most emphasis at Free Press on legislation and policy for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that our media system is not a natural free-market system. It is a system that’s created through policies and subsidies by the government and has been that way since the beginning. It’s a profit-motivated system, but it’s not a free-market system. United States media firms—and I think this is pretty much true in every major nation—I’m sure it’s true in Canada—receive extraordinary subsidies from the government, way beyond what other traditional industries receive. Every private firm gets benefits from the government: they get to use the roads, the water system, public education; they get employees who are trained by the state. Media firms get those same benefits, and theoretically they pay taxes to earn those benefits. But what I’m talking about in terms of subsidies for media firms goes way beyond that. Media firms are receiving direct and indirect subsidies from the U.S. government, especially the federal government, and also state and local governments, totaling in the tens of billions of dollars every year. These include monopoly franchises to radio and TV stations and cable and telephone systems; copyright provisions that protect content providers and give them monopoly markets; government postal subsidies; government work to enhance sales overseas; and subsidies for audiovisual productions.

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