I've never met Doug Henwood, but have evidently pissed him off big-time. He seems intent on finding something foul in everything I've ever said or written. Thus he offers no coherent argument, but merely makes a lot of bitter charges, which I'll answer one by one. 1. I don't believe I "spend too much time talking about how the mighty are grinding the masses into the dust," nor do I fail to "encourage the margins." Almost all my writing is, like Doug's, published on those margins. Moreover, I've argued strenuously and often for the reinforcement and extension of a non-commercial media system. The purpose of that move would be to win a broader hearing for those voices now dismissed as marginal. There's nothing virtuous in marginality per se, although some leftists (and some rightists too) prefer to hunker down out there, exchanging purist bromides with their comrades. 2. Too bad (if true) that Eric Alterman could not think of a reply to Michael Bloomberg's question. I could have answered it at length, as could many other media critics, who deal with just that sort of question all the time. In any case, I'm not Eric Alterman, nor is there any single-minded movement out there talking up "the concentration thesis." While that bogey obviously serves Doug's purposes as a polemicist, it represents no extant group. 3. Yes, elite opinion, as Doug says, has certainly moved rightward through the last two decades. To say that that appalling shift bears no relation to the megalithic structure of the media, however, is, if I may say so, over-simple. As FAIR has lately demonstrated, most of the DC press corps is, on economic issues, now way right of most Americans. This change just might owe something to the fact that all your Sams and Cokies are now much too well-fed by a corporate media system that is far too big and powerful. Likewise, the recent tendency of journalism's managers and owners to apologize for troubling news reports--the kind of thing we've lately seen with CNN and the Cincinnati Inquirer--is yet another "rightward" move that bears relation to the facts of ownership. 4. I've never claimed, nor would I ever claim, that there was once a "Golden Age of media." It is of course all relative, as anyone who knows a jot of history understands. I think we can agree (if Doug is able to agree with me on anything) that certain prior standards, journalistic and aesthetic, have lost a good deal of authority--in news reporting, movie-making, music, book publishing, TV and radio production, as more and more reporters, directors and screenwriters, editors and novelists, musicians and TV and radio producers are complaining lately. This decline is not, of course, a consequence of media concentration only. To say so would be almost as ridiculous as arguing that media concentration doesn't have a thing to do with it. 4. Doug keeps accusing me, and other "partisans of the concentration thesis," of arguing that concentration is the only problem with the media--that All You Need Is Antitrust. As I said above (in #1), my recent argument has all along entailed as well a call for the creation of a vigorous (i.e., well-funded) independent (i.e., non-commercial) media system. You can't have one without the other, as Bob McChesney and I have argued, together and separately, in print. Anyone who's read my work, moreover, knows that I do not ascribe all TV's failings to its economic structure. In fact, my first book, Boxed In: The Culture of TV (Northwestern UP, 1988), anticipates a number of Bourdieu's points, many of which are not original with him. 5. Yes, "there are a lot of other players in the game," and they too have been merging into ever larger entities. The media industries are, however, more important to the maintenance of democracy, since it is, or ought to be, through them that we can learn about the depredations of those "other players." It was through the independent press that, say, Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell could edify a national audience as to the sins of, respectively, the meat and oil cartels. It is no accident that such muckraking largely ceased in 1912, which was when the pertinent periodicals began succumbing to commercial pressure. We're living in an era of unprecedented concentration throughout the economy--a fact whose major implications go unnoted in our corporate press. 6. "Are 'teen pregnancy' and 'divorce' evil?" Gee, I never thought so. "Bring back the days of 'Father Knows Best,'" Doug jeers, as if I were akin to William Bennett. (I've written on the dismal sitcoms of the Fifties.) That sarcastic pseudo-argument bears no relation to a thing I've said or written, but it does make clear that Doug gets very "queasy" at the thought of paying serious attention to the qualms of millions of non-leftists. 7. Speaking of things I've said, Doug reports a casual comment that I made to Micah Sifry back in 1996--a private comment, which Doug seems to have overheard as he was hovering somewhere close to me, evidently taking notes. What I meant, Doug, was simply that Bill Clinton was (and is) exactly the same sort of expert actor that we'd seen in Ronald Reagan--pseudo-folksy, full of bogus "warmth," and perfectly at ease before the camera. He made Dole look half-dead, just as Reagan had made Mondale look; and Clinton was the Democratic candidate, as Reagan had been a Republican. And for the record, Doug, I didn't vote for Clinton then (or for Dole either). I would have been quite glad to tell you why I made that comment, if you had calmed yourself enough to ask me.
