On Fri, August 21, 1998 at 15:52:22 (-0500) Mark Miller writes:
>...
>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.
Mark is of course right about this "maintenance of democracy" aspect.
Though Chomsky has written that the "concentration thesis" of, say,
Bagdikian, is perhaps overstated, he does make noises about it from
time to time:
Where there is even a pretense of democracy, communications are
at its heart. Concentration of communications in any hands
(particularly foreign hands) raises some rather serious questions
about meaningful democracy.
---Noam Chomsky, "The Passion for Free Markets"
Speaking of Tarbell, I was not overly impressed with her
"muckraking". Her father was an independent oilman forced aside by
Rockefeller, of whom she glowingly remarked (something like) "I
admired him for who he was, but not for how he did it". I believe she was
also quite a fan of Mussolini, was she not?
Bill
