This new book by Robert McChesney explodes many of the myths that might keep us complacent about the media.

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Book Review By Free Press

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known: a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney’s new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement. McChesney argues that the problems are due to more than the effective concentrated corporate control over the media system with its obsession with maximizing profits regardless of the consequences. The core problem is that the public policies that have created this media system were made corruptly, behind closed doors, with minimal or nonexistent public awareness or participation.

The Problem of the Media combines a rigorous reinterpretation of U.S. media history with a detailed analysis of contemporary media policies and practices. The book provides a comprehensive critique of journalism and a chilling review of the commercialization of the culture. Moving consistently from critique to action, the book outlines the many ways citizens can intervene to make this a vastly superior media system. The book concludes with a riveting account of the public campaign to oppose the relaxation of media ownership rules in 2003.

McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy was hailed as a pioneering analysis of the way in which media had come to serve the interests of corporate profit rather than public enlightenment and debate. Bill Moyers commented, “If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book.” The Problem of the Media is McChesney’s finest work; it extends and enriches the arguments made in Rich Media, Poor Democracy. The Problem of the Media is certain to be a landmark in media studies, a vital resource for media activism, and the defining text for concerned scholars and citizens everywhere The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communications Politics in the 21st Century

Preface of The Problem of the Media

The purpose of this book is to shed light on how the media system works in the United States and to provide a basis for citizens to play a more active role in shaping the policies upon which that system is built. The corporate domination of both the media system and the policy-making process that establishes and sustains it causes serious problems for a functioning democracy and a healthy culture. Media are not the only factor in explaining the woeful state of our democracy, but they are a key factor. It is difficult to imagine much headway being made on the crucial social issues that face our nation given how poorly they are covered by the current U.S. media system.

The democratic solution to this problem is to increase informed public participation in media policy making. The corporate media powers-that-be and their political surrogates oppose this prospect because they know that when the public understands that the media system is the result of explicit public policies and not natural law, the public will probably demand reforms.

In this book I focus on the United States mostly for reasons of expedience and because media policy issues are generally national in scope. A book like this ideally should include a discussion of the U.S. role in the global media system, but that subject is so large that it requires its own book-length treatment. The corporate-insider hegemony over media policy debates, and the lack of public participation, are encouraged and protected ideologically by eight myths surrounding media in the United States. This book addresses these myths because the case for democratic media policy making is weaker, if not implausible, if they are left standing.

The first myth is that media do not matter that much—that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it. In fact, media are a social force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces. These are complex relationships, often difficult to disentangle, because media are so interwoven into the fabric of our lives. It is noteworthy that the argument that media have little or no social effect became prominent precisely as commercial interests locked up their control over media industries in the mid-twentieth century. Proponents of this argument would like us to overlook the fact that media sell billions of dollars worth of advertising on the belief that they, indeed, have tremendous influence. Chapter 1 discusses the power of media, and the entire book is an exercise in establishing the importance of media in our lives.

In chapter 1, I also address the second myth—that the corporate, commercial media system is “natural,” the intent of the Founders, and the logical outgrowth of democracy. In fact, the vision of a free press held during the first few generations of the republic was diametrically opposed to the contemporary idea that a free press means letting media owners do whatever they can to maximize profit. The early republic provided lavish subsidies to support a diverse range of media the market would never have supported; these press policies were sometimes generated by widespread public debate. The notion that letting media owners maximize profit would necessarily generate a free press came much later, when powerful media owners with a decided self-interest propagated that view. Those of us who argue for informed policy making, for enlightened and proactive policies to enhance a vibrant free press, do not stand outside the historical tradition of freedom of the press in the United States. We are the tradition.

The third myth is that debates concerning media policy in the United States have accurately reflected the range of public opinion and public interests. In chapter 1, I reveal how important policy making has been and still is to the creation of the U.S. media system, and I chronicle how corrupt that process has become over time. By the late twentieth century, media policy making was the private playground of a handful of powerful corporate lobbies and trade associations. The public knew next to nothing about the crucial debates over policies that would set the terms for the media system and it played almost no role whatsoever in their development. Chapter 1 provides the basis for understanding why the resultant media system is so deeply flawed: it is set up to serve the needs of a relative handful of profit-seeking corporations and wealthy investors. In that sense our media system is a success because it does that very well. But lost in the shuffle are the requirements of a democratic and self-governing people.

The fourth myth is that commercial media unquestionably provide the highest quality journalism possible—the caliber of journalism a democracy necessitates for informed self-government. I criticize this position in chapters 2 and 3. This is a curious myth because on the surface the notion of subjecting journalism to commercial principles is a nonstarter. What sort of integrity can the news have if it can be bought and sold like . . . advertising? The inherent problem with commercial journalism is a major reason that professionalism in journalism emerged a century ago. Yet built within the journalists’ professional code are significant flaws that limit its usefulness. Those flaws, combined with media owners’ pressures on journalism to generate maximum profit, offer a recipe for disaster. I examine press coverage of the electoral system to highlight the limitations of contemporary journalism.

The fifth myth is that the news media in the United States today have a “left-wing” bias. This is a peculiar myth, of recent vintage in the United States, and not prevalent in very many other nations. I deconstruct this myth in chapter 3 and show that the reason for its prevalence has little to do with the intellectual strength of the arguments and a great deal to do with the right-wing political muscle behind them, including conservative power within the mainstream media. What this myth does, more than anything else, is reinforce and accentuate the core problems with commercial journalism. Right-wing media bashing and commercial journalism, rather than being antagonistic, constitute a marriage made in heaven.

The sixth myth is that the commercial media, due to the competitive pressure for profit, “give the people what they want”—so the only policy option is to unleash the market. Government policies that interfere with the market substitute the prerogatives of a bureaucrat, no matter how well informed or intended, with the will of the people as expressed in the market. Government actions therefore are antidemocratic and should be kept to a minimum, largely to protect private property rights. If there is a problem with the media, it is not due to the system or the policies that put the system in place but to “the people” who demand the content that the commercial media firms obediently provide. This may well be the most important myth of all, partly because it contains an element of truth. At a certain level it seems like it must be true; after all, why wouldn’t profit-seeking firms try to satisfy the market? But upon close inspection, the argument has a number of flaws. I address it indirectly throughout the book and review the weaknesses of this hypothesis directly in chapters 4 and 5. Not only does the market not necessarily give us what we want, but it also gives us plenty of what we do not want. In particular, the commercial media system has generated a hyper-commercial carpet bombing of our culture that is decidedly unwelcome by much of the population.

The seventh myth is that technologies determine the nature of media. This is a long-standing position and it, too, contains a small element of truth; the nature of media technologies does indeed have distinct effects upon the nature of the media system and its content. This myth, which I address in chapters 6 and 7, has become much more prevalent with the rise of the Internet and digital communication technologies. The Internet, we are told, will set us free. All we have to do is let the technology work its magic. Long-standing and lucrative commercial media industries, such as network commercial television and the music recording industry, appear to be in the process of a radical transformation, if not an elimination, by these new technologies. Indeed, to a casual observer, these technologies are so extraordinary as to render public policies unimportant. But nothing of the kind is true. These satellite and the Internet technologies themselves are the direct result of policies and subsidies. How they are going to be developed is not predetermined. It has everything to do with explicit policies, and commercial pressures wrought by those policies. Indeed, powerful commercial interests use this myth to prevent the public from pursuing alternative policies.

Finally, there is the myth that no alternative to the status quo will improve matters. No matter how many flaws are present, the status quo offers the best of all possible media worlds. In shorthand, the options are usually presented as one of corporate control versus one of government control. Jefferson or Stalin. This framing is dubious; societies can and do have mixed systems all the time. Even a “market” system is based on layers of explicit government policies and laws that make it possible. The point of this claim is patently ideological— to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations. In fact, as I discuss in chapter 6, there are rich traditions in media policy making from which citizens may draw guidance.

The logic of my argument is that a democratic media system—or a democratic solution to the problem of the media, as I put it—would necessitate a large, well-funded, structurally pluralistic, and diverse nonprofit and noncommercial media sector, as well as a more competitive and decentralized commercial sector. Where economics preclude competitive commercial markets, there must be transparent regulation in the public interest. The reforms I envision should be content neutral and viewpoint neutral. This does not mean they would generate bland content, but rather that the reforms would not favor a specific viewpoint over others. We need to think creatively, not be imprisoned by the myth that there can be no alternative to the status quo but the gulag. The exact contours of such a media system must be determined by informed and widespread public debate. Without that, media reform and a democratic media system are unthinkable. Unless all eight of these myths are subjected to critical analysis, the prospects for energizing popular participation in media policy making are remote. That most of these myths are accepted as revealed truth in mainstream political culture helps explain why so many groups that have a stake in media policy debates and should be active in them—for example, environmentalists, civil rights activists, labor unions, working journalists—have generally not engaged in the fight.

In this book I highlight the core problems of the U.S. media system— inadequate journalism and hyper-commercialism—and I chronicle how they are linked to the commercial structures of the media and how these structures are directly and indirectly linked to explicit government policies. These policies have been made in the public’s name but without the public’s informed consent. That is the root of the media crisis in the United States today. Over the past two decades, the turn in media policy making toward neoliberalism, the political philosophy that dogmatically equates generating profits with generating maximum human happiness, has only exacerbated the crisis. All of this suggests that we are in very dark times, with little sign of hope, and that this will be yet another book chronicling how screwed up the media system is, leaving depressed readers looking for the nearest window to jump out of.

But wait. There may be light on the horizon. No longer is concern with the problem of the media an academic one or one limited to the political margins. In 2003 media politics entered the heart of the political culture as millions of Americans stunned the political establishment by joining and organizing protests against concentrated media ownership. In the concluding chapter I assess what may prove to be a renaissance of informed public participation in media policy making. We may be entering an era of profound public debate over the very nature of our media system. If this is the case, it will lead to new solutions to the problem of the media, with a clear change in the nature of the immediate media content people experience in their lives. In this sense, the burgeoning movement to reform media is a necessary, even indispensable, aspect of larger social movements to democratize our politics and society.

I write this book as a scholar who has spent two decades studying these issues, and it reflects arguments and analyses I have developed in discussion and debates with other scholars, activists, journalists, and the public at large. They are fire-tested. But nearly all the research in the book is of recent vintage. I also write this book as an active citizen. When one argues that the corporate media system is deeply flawed and a barrier to a decent and humane society and that the solution to the problem of the media is increased public participation, it is not enough to write books. There is an obligation to write popular articles, to give public lectures, to organize. This book is driven by that political project. Indeed, in 2002, along with Josh Silver and my dear friend John Nichols, I formed a group, Free Press, specifically to advance the cause of increasing popular participation in media policy making. So the reader has reason to ask: Is this a work of scholarship or is it a partisan political pamphlet? The English historian A. J. P. Taylor once argued that the principal difference between the methodologies of the lawyer and those of the historian was that “the lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation.” According to Taylor, the evidence amassed by the lawyer is “loaded” in ways that will maximize the chances of conviction or acquittal: “Anyone who relies on [this kind of evidence] finds it almost impossible to escape from the load with which they are charged.” A historian, however, should allow a “detached and scholarly” examination of the evidence to direct a conclusion rather than take a stand and then, retrospectively, seek documents to support a case. So, to use Taylor’s formulation, is this the work of a historian or a lawyer?

It is the work of a historian, a scholar. The value of these arguments, if they have value, is that I have applied evidence to them, and I have weighed evidence that undermines my arguments, and I have changed and improved my arguments if the evidence pushed me in that direction. Otherwise my work would have little credibility. That said, when one ventures into the realm of contemporary media criticism and when one criticizes the corporate status quo, one goes up against a lot of “lawyers,” both literal and figurative. Industry public relations offices churn out piles of surveys, studies, and documents that invariably point to one conclusion: this is the best possible media system in the best of all possible worlds. This material typically ignores or distorts evidence that undermines this euphoric vision. It is understandable for commercial interests to present such a perspective; it is unacceptable conduct for a scholar or a public servant. As I demonstrate in chapter 7, FCC chairman Michael Powell, who is a lawyer, has also distinguished himself as a lawyer in Taylor’s sense of the term. In my view, he is also one of the most dishonorable public officials of our time. I think there also is an important case to be made that scholarship that grows out of an engagement with real and immediate political struggles, rather than handcuffed by political bias and opportunism, can be the laboratory for breakthroughs in social theory and analysis. One look at economics, a field in which many great theorists from Smith and Ricardo to Marx and Keynes generated their work by direct engagement with the politics of the day, makes that clear. This book is hardly a work of great theory or some sort of paradigm-busting intellectual breakthrough, but it grows out of a direct engagement with core political questions of our times. In fact, in U.S. media studies the removal of academics from the hurly-burly real world of media policy debates along with the ahistorical nature of much of this work arguably have contributed to the scholarship being unread and irrelevant; to its being . . . well . . . academic.

This book was written over the course of 2003, precisely as the battle over U.S. media ownership laws was in full swing. As I pulled the book together in the autumn, I drew upon a small coterie of fellow scholars and close friends for criticism and suggestions. Together we form a school of critical work in media studies, and I hope our ranks will grow because there is much work to be done. I drew from the trailblazing and brilliant historical work of Ben Scott and Inger Stole in chapters 2 and 4, respectively. Ben and Inger each gave a close reading to the entire manuscript and provided me with priceless comments. Inger’s comments helped me reorganize the book, to make it more coherent than it would have been otherwise. Dan Schiller, my colleague at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graciously read and commented upon several chapters. Dan’s pioneering historical research on policy struggles surrounding U.S. telecommunications was foundational for me as I developed the model in chapter 1. My coeditor at Monthly Review, John Bellamy “Duke” Foster, worked with me on drafts of parts of chapters 3 and 4 and inspired the broader vision of the book with a loving and meticulous read. C. Edwin Baker, for my money the best legal scholar on free press issues in the nation, commented upon chapter 6. Sut Jhally, in whose path I follow as I do my work, graciously read and commented on chapter 4 under absurdly short notice—as in, “Hey, can you read this and give me comments by tomorrow, because it is due at the publisher in forty-eight hours?” Lawrence Lessig did the same with the discussion of copyright in chapter 6. Victor Pickard helped me tighten up several citations.

I also received invaluable help from several nonacademics. Jeff Cohen, the journalist and founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), gave detailed comments on the entire book, line by line; I have never worked with a better editor or a smarter media critic. If this book is understandable, Jeff gets the lion’s share of the credit. Janine Jackson, the program director at FAIR, read most of the book and helped me clarify some key points. Gene Kimmelman of the Consumers Union read chapter 7 and made several excellent suggestions. Jeff Chester provided some thoughts concerning my discussion of broadband policy issues in chapter 6. All these comrades get credit for the good in what follows; none of them gets blame for the flaws. Most important, I leaned heavily on the journalist John Nichols, with whom I wrote two short books on this subject in 2000 and 2002 and several articles for The Nation over the course of 2002 and 2003. John’s political knowledge and instincts are unmatched, and I have learned more from him about politics than I could have learned in a lifetime of graduate seminars.

During 2003, our organization Free Press grew from one paid staffer working in borrowed space in the corner of someone else’s office to some ten activists working on a range of media reform issues and campaigns. In November 2003, Free Press sponsored the first-ever National Conference on Media Reform, held in Madison, Wisconsin, and drawing some two thousand people. The Free Press website these activists have assembled has become a comprehensive entre to the U.S. media reform movement (www.mediareform.net). The work ethic, principles, and commitment of these young activists inspired and motivated me as I put the finishing touches on this book. To see tangible organizing actually work, to see people from a variety of backgrounds come together, to see social change leading to increased justice and human happiness is the most extraordinary feeling imaginable. It makes one feel alive. Another world is not only possible; it is there for the taking.