====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
http://www.alternet.org/story/149207/what%27s_behind_the_gop%27s_war_against_npr?page=entire#disqus_thread These are my comments posted to this Alternet story: The collapse of public radio and TV are part of an egregious on-going saga of failing democracy in the US as elsewhere: With radio, TV, print news, and investigative journalism being controlled by corporate oligarchies, with newspapers failing as a profitable investment mainly because fewer are subscribing and ad revenues do not pay for any semblance of responsible journalism, we should recall that at this nation's founding and throughout the 19th century newspapers were heavily subsidized by the federal government - not only very low mail rates but tax and many other incentives - which produced literally thousands of small, local start-up newspapers, with every conceivable shade of opinion. The stated rationale was that a literate, informed citizenry was essential to a functioning, participatory, Jeffersonian democracy. Then came corporate ownership of newspapers, eventually by the turn of the last century ownership by oligopoly and support not by subscribers but by restrictive, content-restraining corporate advertisers. Also, we should recall that originally, with the inception of radio and TV, Congress imposed minimally protective public interest requirements in exchange for turning our public airwaves over to private control and virtual ownership. Those requirements have in their application by private media been winnowed away to nothing, and now even so-called 'public' radio and TV, ratcheted down to a minimum of objective information in a corporate-supported format, are to be dispensed with altogether. Also, now what of the newly emergent Congressional internet legislation, which has removed Communications Commission oversight over the internet, giving free rein to corporate control over this once-promising new medium of multi-directional communication? And humanity's intellectual record now sits no longer in our print libraries but in electronic records. Those records are increasingly in the control of governmental and corporate archives, subject to erasure, concealment and distortion, with no effective public oversight. As Julian Assange said in Oslo last month, 'he who controls the internet controls the intellectual history of mankind.' ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
