OPENING TO CHAPTER NINE

the debasement of the media & the sound of democracy

"Servitude cannot be complete if the press is free: the press is the chief democratic instrument of freedom."
-ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1835

Press freedom-it's enshrined in the American way of life. After all, the very first amendment to our Constitution protects it, and Thomas Jefferson felt so strongly that if forced to choose, he once said, he'd sooner forfeit elected government than give up the free press.

So now the question: If our news is so free, why isn't every revelation in this book already old news? None of these stories are arcane, relevant only to a narrow slice of America; they touch on the most critical questions of our time. Why are so few of us aware of the alarming measures of decline and the promising breakthroughs-all key pieces of the big picture we need in our "pursuit of happiness"?

That's the $64,000 question, or more apt for media today, it's the $70 billion question, as you'll soon see.

Here's my stab at an answer.

We assume freedom of the press to be among the most deeply embedded of American values, and maybe this is part of our problem: that too many of do assume press freedom-which is hardly the same as deeply valuing it. In fact, in a 2004 survey, a third of high school students said newspapers should have to get government approval before publishing stories. And the United States now comes in a sad twenty-fourth in a ranking of press freedom throughout the world.

We've been encouraged to believe that being muzzled by government is the only real threat to a free press-or what today we call "the media," shorthand for "media of communication." And many of us don't seem to take that threat very seriously either.

We sigh with relief, knowing that our journalists don't face threats like those in China, Burma, or Iran, where reporters have been jailed for their writing even in recent years. Or face fear of death as Azerbaijani journalists must after a colleague was killed in 2005 after criticizing his government.

Not here, no way, we're safe. We have media fit for democracy.

But here is the snag: while we've been watching our backs against government censorship, a threat to the open exchange of ideas and information-essential to democracy-marched in through the front door. The Founders, like most of the rest of us, never imagined a challenge to the principle of press freedom from the mundane, everyday workings of capitalism and its relentless pressure toward consolidation.

The threat began when "the press" got demoted.

In prior eras, and certainly in the eyes of our Founders, it was an "instrument of freedom," to use de Tocqueville's words. In "old Europe"-France in the eighteenth century-journalism constituted the "Fourth Estate," a pillar of society equal to government. But by the late twentieth century, the media had become a "product," an expensive product whose purpose is selling other products.

"We're not in the business of providing news and information," explained Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel, owner of more than twelve hundred radio stations, to Fortune magazine in 2003. "We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

Or even more starkly: "Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures," quipped Mark Fowler, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission during the Reagan presidency.

Demoted to "another appliance," the media are now a multibillion-dollar industry in which a frenzy of mergers over the past twenty years has wiped out hundreds of competitors. Creating a company worth an estimated $350 billion, the AOL-Time Warner merger in 2000 broke all previous records. By the turn of the millennium, only six companies were left standing-all preoccupied with their shareholders' financial health, not our society's health.

The result is a downward spiral of programming: News sound bites shrink to a seven-second average-one-sixth the length of a typical commercial. Entertainment replaces news. Election coverage gives way to candidate ads. Crudeness becomes commonplace. And despite an increasingly interconnected world, foreign coverage withers; local coverage geared to communities' distinct concerns does too.

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Lappé is a pioneer in democratic thought and action. Democracy's Edge exemplifies her path blazing role in keeping democracy alive in our time.
-Cornel West
Professor, Princeton University

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