Home > Rich Media, Poor Democracy (+ video)

Rich Media, Poor Democracy (+ video)

by Open-Publishing - Friday 14 December 2007
3 comments

Democracy USA

A key indicator of the health of a democracy is the state of its journalism, the United States is in deep trouble. In Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Robert McChesney lays the blame for this state of affairs squarely at the doors of the corporate boardrooms of big media, which far from delivering on their promises of more choice and more diversity, have organized a system characterized by a lack of competition, homogenization of opinion and formulaic programming.

Through numerous examples, McChesney, and media scholar, Mark Crispin Miller, demonstrate how journalism has been compromised by the corporate bosses of conglomerates such as Disney, Sony, Viacom, News Corp, and AOL Time Warner to produce a system of news that is high on sensationalism and low on information. They suggest that unless citizen activism can reclaim the commons, this new corporate system will be characterized by a rich media and an ever impoverished, poor democracy.

Watch the video:

http://internationalnews.over-blog.com/article-14600762.html

Forum posts

  • One biggest name that was left off the list is "GENERAL ELECTRIC" (GE).

    After seeing what GE was doing to the world, I make it a point to not purchase anything GE’s name is on.

  • What I find surprising is that numerous small independent newspapers haven’t sprung up to challenge the "Corporate Quo". Newspapers seem to be the one area that it would be hard to stop independents from doing, as they don’t "broadcast" anything over the airwaves. There’s obviously a market of some sort, because there are bound to be netilliterates that are not buying the "party line." Any party’s line. (When it comes to the major US political parties, I’m of the opinion that "Packers, Bears, who cares, it’s all the NFL.")

  • What I find surprising is that numerous small independent newspapers haven’t sprung up to challenge the "Corporate Quo". Newspapers seem to be the one area that it would be hard to stop independents from doing, as they don’t "broadcast" anything over the airwaves. There’s obviously a market of some sort, because there are bound to be netilliterates that are not buying the "party line." Any party’s line. (When it comes to the major US political parties, I’m of the opinion that "Packers, Bears, who cares, it’s all the NFL.")

    Another thought: how many blogs out there are cooperative efforts from people with true journalistic skills that might lend themselves effectively to content for a print version of an independent newspaper, or an alternate feed source from the AP and Reuters? This might be an angle that would let netizens get some penetration into the "old paper world."

    Radio and TV are much tougher nuts to crack, and I don’t really know enough about them from a merket and legal perspective to comment elsewise, but I’d bet there’s ways to do it.

    The corporations can only own the competition if the competition is willing to sell.