Quotations

from the book

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

by Robert McChesney

The New Press, 1999

Preface

p ix
... if we are serious about democracy, we will need to reform the media system structurally ... this reform will have to be part of a broader movement to democratize all the core institutions of society.

p xiii
A media system set up to serve the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue cannot and does not serve the needs of the preponderance of the population.

... the concentration. of media ownership, the hypercommercialization of culture, the ( decline of journalism, the globalization of the corporate media system and its relationship to the neoliberal global economy, the corrupt nature of U.S. media policy making, the collapse of public service broadcasting, and the tragic evolution of the First Amendment into a tool for the protection of corporate privilege.

p xiv
After two decades of conservative criticism and corporate inroads, the public [TV broadcasting] system is now fully within the same ideological confines that come naturally to a profit-driven, advertising-supported system

p xv
In particular the professional reliance upon official sources and the need for a news peg or event, to justify coverage of a story plays directly into the hands of those who benefit from the status quo.

p xvi
Another long-term problem of the system is the commercial media's willingness to provide favorable coverage of politicians who provide them with favorable subsidies and regulations.

... the tacit quid pro quo of favorable coverage for favorable legislation and regulation rarely draws comment

p xvii
The corruption of journalistic integrity is always bad, but it becomes obscene under conditions of extreme media concentration as now exist.

p xviii
... mainstream news ... have effectively morphed over the past two decades as the news is increasingly pitched to the richest one-half or one-third of the population. The affairs of Wall Street, the pursuit of profitable investments, and the joys of capitalism are now often taken to be the interests of the general population... the affairs of working-class people have virtually disappeared from the news.

The sad truth is that the closer a story gets to corporate power and corporate domination of our society, the less reliable the corporate news media is.

What types of important stories get almost no coverage in the commercial news media? The historical standard is that there is no coverage when the political and economic elites are in agreement.

... military spending is a classic example. The United States spends a fortune on the military for no publicly debated or accepted reason. But it serves several important purposes to our economic elite, not the least of which is as a lucrative form of corporate welfare. Since no element of the economic elite is harmed by military spending, and nearly all of them benefit by having an empire to protect profit making worldwide, it rarely gets criticized - unlike federal spending on education or health care or environmental improvements. If a reporter pursued the story of why we are spending $300 billion on the military, he or she would appear to have an axe to grind and therefore to be unprofessional, since top official sources are not critical of the spending.

p xix
By 1998, discounting home ownership, the top 10 percent of the population claimed 76 percent of the nation's net worth, and more than half of that is accounted for by the richest 1 percent. The bottom 60 percent has virtually no wealth, aside from some home ownership; by any standard the lowest 60 percent is economically insecure ...

In the crescendo of news media praise for the genius of contemporary capitalism, it is almost unthinkable to criticize the economy as deeply flawed. To do so would seemingly reveal one as a candidate for an honorary position in the Flat-Earth Society. The Washington Post has gone so far as to describe ours as a nearly "perfect economy".

p xx
The rate of incarceration has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and the United States now has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western Europe. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Moreover, nearly 90 percent of prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the so-called drug war. And the United States is number one ... as the rate of increase in the number of prisoners is perhaps the highest in the world. We are rapidly approaching rates of incarceration associated with the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

It should be highly disturbing and the source of public debate for a free society to have so many people stripped of their rights. Revolutions have been fought, governments have been overthrown, for smaller affronts to the liberties of so many citizens.' Instead, to the extent that this is a political issue, it is a debate among Democrats and Republicans over who can be "tougher" on crime, hire more police, and build more prisons. It is similar to the mainstream debate on who can raise the military budget the most.' Almost overnight the prison-industrial complex has become a big business and a powerful lobby for public funds.'

p xxi
"Blue collar" crimes generate harsh sentences while "white collar" crime - almost always for vastly greater amounts of money - gets kid gloves treatment by comparison. In 2000, for example, a Texas man received sixteen years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar, while, at the same time, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. were found guilty of conspiring to suppress and eliminate competition in the vitamin industry, in what the Justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal antitrust conspiracy in history. The cost to consumers and public health is nearly immeasurable. The four executives were fined anywhere from $75,000 to $350,000 and they received prison terms ranging from three months all the way up to ... four months.'

Hence, the portion of the population that ends up in jail has little political clout, is least likely to vote, and is of less business interest to the owners and advertisers of the commercial news media. It is also a disproportionately non-white portion of the population, and this is where class and race intersect and form their especially noxious American brew. Some 50 percent of U.S. prisoners are African American.' In other words, these are the sort of people that media owners, advertisers, journalists, and desired upscale consumers do everything they can to avoid, and the news coverage reflects that sentiment. As Barbara Ehrenreich has observed, the poor have vanished from the view of the affluent; they have all but disappeared from the media.'

p xxiii
The corrupt nature of U.S. communication policy making continues on course. Vital decisions are made all the time concerning the future of our media system, but they are made behind closed doors to serve powerful special interests, with nonexistent public involvement and minuscule press coverage ... the commercial broadcasters have effectively stolen control of digital television from the American people, with the support of their well-paid politicians. The one sop thrown to the public, the Gore Commission, which was to recommend suit able public-interest requirements for commercial broadcasters in return for the free gift of some $50-100 billion of public property, was a farce.

p xv
... the FCC proposed a cautious program in 2000 for the introduction of low-power, noncommercial, community FM radio broadcasting across the nation. After being pushed around by the commercial broadcasting lobby at every turn, the FCC thought it could use the remarkable development of microradio to offer some diversity on the dial. For only a few hundred dollars, someone could transmit a microradio signal of high quality to a large portion of a metropolitan area. To some extent the FCC did not have a choice, because microradio was so easy to do that even if illegal there would be many willing to send pirate signals into the open slots on the FM dial. The commercial broadcasters were incensed because they did not want any new competition for "their" listeners. Their stations were worth hundreds of millions, not because the cost of transmitting a signal was high, but because they had a semi-monopoly over the industry. So the radio lobby went to work and got the House of Representatives to pass a bill overturning the FCC plan in April 2000.

p xxvii
Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN)

"There's no question that we have to start talking in a serious way about media, about media mergers and monopolies, about the balance between public and commercial television, about how we can encourage more diversity in ownership and in content," says Wellstone. "There's no question that we ought to be talking about the role that media plays in a democracy where most people don't vote. There's no question of any of this."

xxviii
William Safire

"Concentration of power over what we see in the news," Safire concluded, "is a danger to democracy."

p xxviii
Karl Marx

... a democracy cannot exist without a press system that provides a rigorous accounting of people in power and the presentation of a wide range of informed opinions on the important issues of the day and age.

p xxix
... it is the political left that must provide leadership on this issue [media reform]. In my view, the reason is simple. The leaders, intellectuals, and pundits of traditional liberalism and conservatism in the United States have proven to be either morally bankrupt and corrupt or cowardly. They are incapable of making a stand on principle for democracy that would require their antagonizing entrenched moneyed interests. As much as regular folks who regard themselves as liberals or conservatives might support media reform (or other democratic measures), their "leaders"-be they elected or self- appointed-will not take any initiative in this matter.

p xxix
C. B. Macpherson

At its best, overlooking the elitist aspects, liberalism in the John Stuart Mill/John Dewey vein has been devoted to the idea that everyone is capable of maximizing their talents and their happiness in a free and fair society. The government can and must be a progressive force. In this liberal worldview, it is the ultimate right of the people to determine whatever property system best serves society's aims. In this sense, liberals share with radicals a belief in the primacy of popular will over property rights. Unlike radicals however, liberals do not regard capitalism as a fundamental barrier to liberal values, but only as an ambiguous source of tension which education and enlightened public policy can overcome.

... modern corporate capitalism has continually undermined the best of the liberal tradition, especially in these pro-corporate times, leaving liberals with a moment of truth to face: their choice is to defend core liberal values by becoming explicitly anti-capitalist, or declare capitalism off-limits to fundamental change (and become decidedly less liberal and democratic). Regrettably, liberalism in the United States, with only a handful of exceptions, has opted for the latter course, and so it has lost its backbone, and much hope of generating enthusiastic support.

p xxx
Contemporary conservatism ... is the proponent of property rights uber alles, or, in more concrete terms, the right of corporations to rule the world without popular interference. It is dressed up as "freemarket" conservatism. Its commitment to democracy is paper thin and quickly abandoned if property rights are threatened. In reality, if not rhetoric, this brand of conservatism supports a large state, but a state that works primarily on behalf of the rich.

p xxxi
... the military is indispensable to the buttressing of corporate power economically and politically.

... the left must play a central role in media reform. It alone can be defined by its hostility to concentrated private power and its commitment to social justice.

... the corporate media system ... generates a depoliticized society, one where the vast majority of people logically put little time or interest into social or political affairs.

p xxxiii
... awash in massive campaign contributions from billionaires and multimillionaires, the Democrats and Republicans spend a fortune on manipulative and insulting advertisements aimed at the dwindling numbers that take them seriously. The corporate media rake in this money for TV ads, highlight only the activities of politicians who support their agenda, and then pretend that this charade has something to do with democracy.

p xxxiv
... our political parties are about as responsive to the needs of the people as were the old communist parties of the one-party-state era.

... Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement. If progressive forces can just get media reform on the agenda, merely make it part of legitimate debate, they will find that it has considerable support from outside the ranks of the left ... This has been the pattern abroad: where left parties have gotten media issues into debate, the mainstream parties could no longer blindly serve the corporate media masters. And this point is well understood by the media giants, which do everything within their considerable power to see that there be not even the beginnings of public discussion of media policy.

We are in precipitous times. The corporate media system is consolidating into the hands of fewer and fewer enormous firms at a rapid rate, providing a hypercommercialized fare suited to wealthy shareholders and advertisers, not citizens. At the same time, there is a budding movement for media reform which is part and parcel of a broader anti-corporate movement. At present the smart money says that the big guys will win and the wise move is to accept the inevitable and abandon any hope of social change. But the same smart money once said communism was going to last forever unless overthrown from without, and that South African apartheid could never be removed peacefully so it was best to work with the status quo white regime. Smart money is often more interested in protecting money than in being smart. Nobody can predict the future, especially in turbulent times like these. All we can do is attempt to understand how the world works so we can try to protect and expand those values we deem important. And if enough people come together to protect and expand democratic values-as it is in their interest to do-anything can happen.

p 3
Capitalism benefits from having a formally democratic system, but capitalism works best when elites make most fundamental decisions and the bulk of the population is depoliticized.

... any meaningful attempt ... to democratize the United States, or any other society, must make media reform a part (though by no means all) of its agenda.

The ultimate trump card of conservatism and reaction, after all their other arguments have been discredited, is that there is no possibility of social change for the better, so it is a notion not even worth pondering, let alone pursuing. This card has been played by ruling elites since the dawn of civilization, but never has it been waved more ferociously than at the close of the twentieth century. It has deadened social thought and has demoralized social movements and public life. And it is a lie, the biggest lie of them all.

p 5
In strict terms, what distinguishes the United States from a political oligarchy is that citizens do retain the right to vote in elections and thereby remove politicians from office, even if they have little control over what politicians actually do while in office. Since the elections are rather dubious enterprises-they are more like auctions favoring those with great sums of money, the campaign debate almost always avoids wide-ranging debate on the core issues, and the choices on the ballot are mostly inconsequential to the important decisions to be made after the election-even this democratic right to vote seems trivial. Yet in dominant thinking the existence of this right to vote is what qualifies the United States as a democracy. It is an awfully, awfully thin reed.

p6
... neoliberalism is a political theory; it posits that society works best when business runs things and there is as little possibility of government "interference" with business as possible. In short, neoliberal democracy is one where the political sector controls little and debates even less. In such a world political apathy and indifference are a quite rational choice for the bulk of the citizenry, especially for those who reside below the upper and upper-middle classes.

p11
... if the United States is to change its media system for the better, it will require the emergence of a broad-based democratic left that makes media reform one of the core elements of its platform.

p16
The media system exists as it does because powerful interests have constructed it so that citizens will not be involved in the key policy decisions that have shaped it.

p66
Whatever their [media and communication lobbies] disagreements, the one thing they all agree upon is that the corporate sector should rule U.S. media and communication to maximize profit - and that this precept should not be the subject of debate by Congress or the general public.

p69
The commercial broadcasters have become de facto owners of the public airwaves, and challenges to broadcast licenses on the grounds that a commercial broadcaster has failed to provide a public service are virtually impossible to win.

p110
The logical consequence of a commercial media system is less to instill adherence to any ruling powers that be - though that can and does of course happen - than to promote a general belief that politics is unimportant and that there is little hope for organized social change.

As such, the global media system buttresses what could be termed "neoliberal" democracy, that is, the largely vacuous political culture that exists in the formally democratic market-driven nations of the world ... neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system but as a political and cultural system as well. Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making.

p111
... neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same probusiness policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; that is, so long as it isn't democracy.

Neoliberal democracy therefore has an important and necessary by-product - a depoliticized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. If electoral democracy affects little of social life, it is irrational to devote much attention to it. The United States provides the preeminent model of "neoliberal" democracy and shows the way for combining a capitalist economy with a largely toothless democratic polity.

p114
The Economist magazine, July 4, 1998, p13

"In this information age, the newspapers which used to be full of politics and economics are thick with stars and sport.''

p114
...there is an appalling schlock journalism for the masses, based upon lurid tabloid-type stories. For the occasional "serious" story, there is the mindless regurgitation of press releases from one source or another, with the range of debate mostly limited to what is being debated among the elite.

p114
a British observer, I998

"Bad journalism is a consequence of an unregulated market in which would-be monopolists are free to treat the channels of democratic debate as their private property."

p142
A 1998 investigative report in Time magazine noted that the U.S. government pays out some $125 billion annually in "corporate welfare".

p185
... the illusions of consumer choice and individual freedom merely provide the ideological oxygen necessary to sustain a media system ( and a broader social system) that serves the few while making itself appear accountable and democratic.

p226

One of the most striking developments of the past decade has been the decline of public service broadcasting systems everywhere in the world. By public service broadcasting l mean a system that is nonprofit and noncommercial, supported by public funds, ultimately accountable in some legally defined way to the citizenry, and aimed at providing a service to the entire population-one which does not apply commercial principles as the primary means to determine its programming.

p255
... what type of society will dominate in the United States and globally for the coming generations? Will it be one in which the market and profits are sacrosanct, off-limits to informed political debate? One in which the notion of citizen will be replaced by that of consumer and where we will have a society effectively based on one dollar, one vote rather than one person, one vote? Will we have a society where people are regarded primarily as fodder for corporate profitability, or will we have a society where citizens have the right to actually determine whatever economic and media systems they regard as best.

p261

In the United States the richest one-quarter of 1 percent of Americans make 80 percent of individual campaign contributions, and corporations outspend organized labor by a margin of ten to one.

p281
... U.S. democracy is in a decrepit state - exemplified by a depoliticization that would make a tyrant envious, and the corporate commercial media system is an important factor though not the only or even the most important factor, in understanding how this sorry state came to be. The corporate media cement a system whereby the wealthy and powerful few make the most important decisions with virtually no informed public participation. Crucial political issues are barely covered by the corporate media, or else are warped to fit the confines of elite debate, stripping ordinary citizens of the tools they need to be informed, active participants in a democracy. Moreover, the media system is not only closely linked to the ideological dictates of the business-run society, it is also an integral element of the economy. Hence, for those who regard inequality and untrammeled commercialism as undermining the requirements of a democratic society, media reform must be on the political agenda.

At present, however, and for generations, the control and structure of the media industries has been decidedly off-limits as a subject in U.S. political debate. So long as that holds true, it is difficult to imagine any permanent qualitative change for the better in the U.S. media system. And without media reform, the prospects for making the United States a more egalitarian, self-governing, and humane society seem dim to the point of nonexistence.

p282

... the only hope for significant media reform in the United States and elsewhere will be the emergence of a strong left political movement that puts media reform on the political agenda... this is an argument aimed at those concerned with the antidemocratic tendencies of the U.S. media system, urging them to see media reform as part of a broader political project. And it is an argument aimed at those on the political left, stressing that it is imperative that the left incorporate media reform into its platform. This has been, and remains, a weak spot in much US. left organizing... the left needs to do this because the vast, unbridled power of the media is central to the antidemocratic nature of U.S. society and to the dominant role of corporations and combinations of wealth. In addition ... there exists considerable dissatisfaction with the U.S. media system, and that this could become an organizing tool for an aggressive left. ... this dissatisfaction cuts across many of the left constituencies that are sometimes at odds with each other and reaches many people who would not regard themselves as being anywhere near the political left. In short, media reform is an issue with the potential to help galvanize a movement to democratize U.S. society.

p284
Wealthy interests in the United States ... work resolutely to limit the capacity for informed self-government, through, among other things, maintaining corrupt campaign finance and lobbying systems, elite-dominated economic policy making, distorted electoral systems, weakened educational systems, and commercial media.

This tension between the democratic interests of the many and antidemocratic interests of the wealthy few has existed since the dawn of civilization.

p285
Democracy works best when there exists a democratic spirit, a notion that an individual's welfare is directly and closely attached to the welfare of the community, however broadly community may be defined. Capitalism, with its incessant pressure to think only of Number One regardless of the implications for the balance of the community, is hardly conducive to building a caring, democratic culture.

p287
Philip Lesly, a leading U.S. PR figure wrote in I 974

"Our society has grossly overbuilt its expectations of what can be achieved and provided. This is a consequence of the extremism of 'democracy'- never foreseen by the most visionary founders of our democratic society - that seeks to give a voice and power to everyone on every issue, regardless of his merit in serving society or ability.

p287
Philip Lesly, a leading U.S. PR figure wrote in I 974 (as observed by PR historian Stuart Ewen)

"The task of public relations must be to curtail Americans' democratic expectations."

p288
Unlike their predecessors, contemporary upper classes and business loudly swear their allegiance to democracy-even to the idea of popular sovereignty-but in private do whatever they can to limit its actual viability.

p288
Unless communication and information are biased toward equality, they tend to enhance social inequality, whether the society happens to be democratic or otherwise.

p290
Philip Green

Nowhere else in the world [as in the U.S.] is there to be found such a gap, an immense gap, between the rhetoric of equality on one hand and the actual substance of inequality on the other.

p294
Representative Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vt.).

[Media reform] ...is an issue that is absolutely vital to democracy, and that only the left can address. The New Party, the Green Party, the Labor Party, progressive Democrats should be all over this issue. But, for most of the left, it's not even on the agenda. The challenge of our time is to make media relevant for a vibrant democracy. This issue is absolutely vital to rebuilding democracy in America and to reasserting the voice of democracy on a global scale."

p297
The entire corporate media system is all about selling audiences to advertisers or media producers to consumers...

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

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