Tide is Turning on Big Media

posted by Peter Rothberg on 07/11/2008 @ 3:03pm

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The Senate voted in overwhelming numbers recently to reject an FCC ruling that would unleash a new wave of media consolidation across America. Spurred by a grassroots campaign by our friends at Free Press, more than a quarter-million people took action and sent a powerful message to Washington demanding that legislators curb the ability of a few giant corporations to control the bulk of the nation's media.

The fight now moves to the House, where a bipartisan version of the Senate "resolution of disapproval" (H.J.Res.79) needs your support. Free Press has set an ambitious goal of convincing 100 legislators to agree to co-sponsor the House version of the bill in the next 100 days. The Nation is joining the campaign and asking readers to support Free Press' efforts and sign your name to a new Nation petition calling on House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi to make passage of H.J. Res. 79 a top legislative priority as soon as Congress comes back from recess. (This petition will be delivered to Pelosi as soon as the House reconvenes after its summer break.)

Watch this video by Free Press' Alexandra Russell for a re-telling of how the recent Senate victory was achieved and what still needs to be done to secure victory in the House.

And see Free Press' StopBigMedia site for background on just why the stakes in this fight are so high.

Comments (28)

excellent news. the nation is really bustin it out lately. kudos!

monopolistic corporatism is not what mr. smith had in mind and government action is the logical (and only) response.

in terms of media the alternative is the potential of monolithic privately owned propaganda factories - not good for democracy...

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/11/2008 @ 4:39pm
Second, the big media are, as usual, doing their best to get the Democrat elected.

Posted by 2HAPPY at 07/11/2008 @ 4:39pm | ignore this person | warn this person

wha????? as usual? really?

bullshit. the mood/ideology of the country has slid leftward as a result of the bush/cheney fiasco and either some of the mass media follows or becomes increaasingly discreditted.

in 00 and 04 i saw just the opposite from the msm.

oh well. people all know what the deal is at foxnews and increasingly do not consider it to be a real news media organ.

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/11/2008 @ 4:49pm
Second, the big media are, as usual, doing their best to get the Democrat elected.

Posted by 2HAPPY at 07/11/2008 @ 4:39pm

Sure, we are just being flooded with hard probing stories on McCain. Like his backyard cookouts.

Posted by Hman23 at 07/11/2008 @ 5:29pm
I sincerely hope (halfheartedly) that the tide is turning on "big media" but frankly given that "big media" is kept alive by brainless consumers and, ultimately, the vast boredom of a population of couch potatoes, I don't think it is going to happen.

However, The Nation continues to fight the good fight, so that's really great.

Posted by Zero at 07/11/2008 @ 5:30pm
Big media = Lockheed Martin/GE and all the alphabet parasites, ABC, and propagandist Mecca: Fox and Clear Channel. You know, the same idiots that don't show our fallen heroes coffins despite their sacrifice for "Total Victory!" Billions worth of our assets handed over, not theirs - ours, our airwaves. In real estates terms = ultra location location, location. The best of public assets handed over in backroom deals for a pittance. Yep, corporate media has achieved Total Victory!

Posted by winyahn at 07/11/2008 @ 6:21pm
2Happy: there is no "major victory" of any sort available in a war of choice that was sold on a pack of lies and that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives (on a pack of lies) and that has ruined millions of lives (on a pack of lies) and destroyed a nation (on a pack of lives) and that has economically impacted negatively the entire developed world (on a pack of lives) and that has produced a geopolitically impacting regional security crisis that will continue for a generation (on a pack of lies). I heartily suggest to you that rush to a clinic and have your moral compass adjusted, it seems to have lost track of itself. I repeat: there is no "major victory" possible in this horrible, shameful disaster that never needed to happen and only took place because of the Machiavellian ambitions of a foreign policy lobby and its allies around a poorly chosen presidency.

Posted by Zero at 07/11/2008 @ 7:35pm
2happy: great to know that you don't have the responsibility of going and fighting in the "major victory" underway, eh? It's just amazing how many people amongst the (tiny) minority that still believes in this disaster are people who themselves would never actually have gone to the disaster zone and risked their lives and taken the lives (needlessly and brutally) of so many people.

we're talking about little babies getting blown up by bombs and bullets here, for no reason whatsoever except the cynical ambitions of a foreign policy lobby and its allies around a poorly chosen presidency, and you're talking about "major victory". there is no "major victory" attainable. It's lost. It's a disaster. It was a moral and strategic and humanitarian disaster from the firing of the first shot. There is no hope or joy to be taken from this disaster, not even joy in finally seeing it end. This has and continues to be a dark period in history, where the capacity for the greed and ambitions of a cynical powerful few outweigh all the costs of mass homicide and destruction and torture and all the rest, and the experience we are all having does not teach us to have hope for a better future.

you can feel free to be "conservative", you can vote for your "republicans" or your "democrats", you can make your money on wall street, but don't ever pretend for one tiny moment that the Iraq War - which was a depraved and unconscionably cynical act driven by a small handful of blackhearted rogues and loonies - offers any of us a lesson in anything besides man's capacity for cruelty to men.

Posted by Zero at 07/11/2008 @ 7:42pm
You can't argue the hard fact that most journos are Leftists, just like most college faculties, most especially in the liberal arts colleges....like journalism.

Posted by 2HAPPY at 07/11/2008 @ 5:27pm

And you can't really argue that the vast majority of media companies are OWNED by gigantic corporations, the same kind of gigantic corporations that (GEE!) may just benefit from having a money lover like George Bush and the GOP running the white house.

If you think the JOURNALISTS are the ones making the decisions in the world of "the news" you are even crazier than I originally though.

Posted by madlib at 07/11/2008 @ 7:48pm
Happy - You mean the largest entitlement program expansion that forbids the government to negotiate for lower prices on medications? The one for which the House vote was kept open for 3 1/2 hours while active arm-twisting was going on on the floor by the then majority Republics? The one with the donut hole right in the middle? That one?

Get real.

As for the media left-wing bias - compare what the media has exposed about Obama's life and about McCain's. Every last detail, Obama's church, his school, his job history, his former pastor, has been held up for scrutiny. I don't even know where McCain grew up, let alone where he went to school. The fact that Phil Gramm made a slip this week is on the news, but not that Gramm engineered much of the deregulation that brought on the sub-prime crisis, not to mention the Enron loophole. And what does it mean that Gramm is McCain's main economic advisor? I do not hear the in-depth analysis of this on the MSM, do you? I'm a bit of a political junkie, and yet the only reason I know about it is because David Corn, formerly of the Nation and now of Mother Jones, appeared on Democracy Now - of the alternative media.

Posted by ramara at 07/11/2008 @ 8:31pm
happy: arguing that "most journalists" are "leftists" is kind of silly. What you really mean is "most journalists vote Democrat" and the reality is not that journalists are part of some Democratic conspiracy. The reality is that the *great* majority of people who hold college degrees vote Democrat. So its not just journalists. Its engineers and scientists, lawyers, doctors, journalists, psychologists, you name it. Most college-educated people vote Democrat.

The majority of Republican voters, conversely, are a) not urban and b) less educated.

This is reality. You need to accept it.

Posted by Zero at 07/11/2008 @ 9:10pm
This left-wing media thing is simply not true. McCain for the most part is getting a free ride. Bob Schieffer acted as an advocate for McCain in the entire interaction with Wes Clark and how long did we have to live with just one out-of-context quote? Phil Gramm is one of McCain's principal economic advisers. He made a gaffe this week and that has been repeated, but no one has been publicizing that he was one of the main architects of our current housing crisis with his deregularation of the banking and credit industries, not to mention the Enron loophole that led to the California energy crisis and the eventual Enron scandal.

I have heard nothing of this on the MSM, except for an allusion by Rachel Maddow on Countdown - and I'm a bit of a news junkie. I know what I know about it because David Corn, formerly of the Nation and now of Mother Jones, appeared on Democracy Now, which is the bastion of alternate media. Nor do I hear much analysis of McCain's economic plan.

These are a few examples. I'm sure others can think of more.

Posted by ramara at 07/11/2008 @ 9:28pm
Hey Peter,

As an old school leftie, maybe you can enlighten me on this whole movement by the left in the past decade to start labeling every industry they go after as "Big". Suddenly it was big tobacco, big oil, big telecoms, big media, etc.

Is it that you did a study and found an emotional response to the word "big"?

Just curious how the left came to this conclusion to utilize that word as you do.

Posted by lvliberty1 at 07/11/2008 @ 9:52pm
Total Victory!

Brave men and women in uniform!

Iraqi Freedom!

Liberate! Live, love V liberty! X

Democratize! Capitalize!

Liberty & justice, the pursuit of happy

Happy! Happy1! Happy2!

Shiny happy heroes!

Fired up at ground zero!

Have a Cuban for Total Victory! Limbaugh lovin' bible thumpin' eagles!

Super whiney ultra socialist leftie commie gay wuss lazy big-government-dependents fear life!

Loser lefties need logic enemas, truth infusions!

How fun for superior, conservative warrior patriot heroes to bust out a can of whip ass and impale these whiney ultra socialist leftie commie lazy big-government-codependents with clever hero posts.

Posted by winyahn at 07/12/2008 @ 12:11am
Phil Gramm, reasonable?

That's a hot one.

Phil Gramm, fraud.

Until becoming a multimillionaire shill for big corps, he spent his entire life on the public payroll, including the day he was born, in a military hospital.

A leech.

Posted by sloper at 07/12/2008 @ 12:19am
Oh yeah, the drug companies & all that R&D. Have you repugs watched TV lately? Enough ED stuff to even turn a televangelist's face red. Reproachful & Disgusting?

Posted by Sorelish at 07/12/2008 @ 12:29am
2Happy: I appreciate you getting back to me - I am in a rush, however I'll briefly try to reply.

a) was our security threatened in WWI? In a deep way, yes. It was a world war. Korea? No, and to be blunt I don't the US should have involved itself in Korea. Finally, comparing Iraq - a pure war of election and greed, connived up on nakedly fabricated media capaign - to any other war we've been in including Vietnam, is a stretch. Iraq never should have happened. Period. It was a shameful moral, humanitarian, and strategic disaster, and there was such a lack of compelling reason for the invasion and occupation that the powers behind it had to literally fabricate charges against Saddam, and vastly overplay these charges in the national media, and change up their charges and rationale at every point they were exposed.

b) Why the constant complaining about rich, evil Republicans? Because rich, evil Republicans are big problem. FYI, I complain about rich, evil Democrats, too, who are basically similar or identical in many ways to rich, evil Republicans.

c) Would I not take joy in seeing the Iraq war come to an end? Well, I certainly want to see it come to an end, however, I can imagine easily a pile of hundreds of thousands of bloody, mutilated corpses buried across the landscape in Iraq. And we accused Saddam of mass graves? Look what we've done. No, there is no joy, this period of history is a black period of history, blacker than any of us really are forced to face here in America because we live in a mass-consumer fantasyland propped up to this date by easy credit and the former strength of our currency.

I appreciate you getting back to me, again. Be as "conservative" as you want but by all means try to understand that wrt the Iraq war there is no silver lining, and try to imagine living as one of those poor wretches over there. It probably isn't very good.

Posted by Zero at 07/12/2008 @ 12:38am
2HAPPY

i can explain and document the rise (and hopefully the fall, eventually) of the rightwing attempt to take over the media and use it to promote their ideology but its way too late even if it is friday. it involves nixon (ironically america's laast great liberal president, policywise) going down and a conservative reaction to the hippy age. a number of very wealthy rightwing businessmen began funding the development of an alternative media in the 70's, which included print media, radio, and mailings. initially they lost assloads of money but so what? their bankrollers had plenty to burn.

to combat the percieved liberality of higher educational social sciences they also established gobs of pseudo-scholarly think tanks which paid mercenary minds (and gave them "fellowships") in order to counter academic conclusions with which they disagreed.

they also lobbied reagan, bushI, and yes, clinton to disassemble federal regulations on media ownership, allowing them to buy up more and more of the media and use it as they pleased.

the culmination was FOXNEWS and the fawning, ball dropping, righjtwing ass kissing media that jumped on the neocon adventure-in-oily-hell bandwagon and fail to ask tough questions, challenge the official neocon government line, and do their best to look as patriotically "FOXy" as they could.

now that the jig is up some have changed and in fairness to them the current illegal administration did pressure them to take their knees and keep their lips pressed firmly...

but now that the pack of incompetant, evil, fascist assholes are swirling down the potty of history and everybody hates the bastards...

some msm outlets are doing their job again.

sorry it doesn't agree with your ideology, but neither does reality.

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/12/2008 @ 03:27am
The Iraq War has had a huge turnaround and there is even real talk of Iraq setting up the framework of our withdrawal, meaning Total Victory is actually within grasp, how has the MSM treated this major story? You think they want to honor our 4,100 dead soldiers who made this possible and likely?

Posted by 2HAPPY at 07/11/2008 @ 5:38pm | ignore this person | warn this person

and at what price? good. glad to hear things are so rosey. time to go!

never needed to go into it, could have used the money and lives lost in it, need to get out as soon as possible.

kudos to the military, asked to fight a second needless bloody expensive land war in asia in a half century.

and i dont care what we have accomplished - it was not worth it. i hope it all stays together once we leave, but i have my doubts.

nope - not worth all the money, blood and ill will. but kudos to the military. and all the haliburtons...THEY made the real killin.

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/12/2008 @ 03:46am
Dear "2Happy,"

Evidence, evidence, evidence! That's what your claims need! Start backing them up.

Perspective, perspective, perspective! That's what your world-view needs. You need to look at the general context, not point to little sunny spots in the economy and Iraq and pretend that the general gloom, both here and there, doesn't exist.

Really, you're not fooling anyone here.

Posted by JakobFabian at 07/12/2008 @ 08:58am
Here's an example of Reagan/conservatives' ACTUAL belief in capitalism. Here's the challenge: find the best person black, hispanic, asian or white for "a series of political and White House jobs".

Let's see how their capitalist values in action...

In a written statement, Nancy Reagan described McCain as "a good friend for over 30 years." But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain's decision to divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans, and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona beer distributorship.

The Reagans rushed to help Carol, finding her a new home in Southern California with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.

Posted by winyahn at 07/12/2008 @ 10:15am
Sunnis & Conservatives & Dixiecrats look out for their own!

Posted by winyahn at 07/12/2008 @ 10:49am
Given that we Americans have institutionalized stupidity, it's only fitting that our emptied heads be 'washed' out. A consolidated media wait to oblige.

Posted by felicity at 07/12/2008 @ 12:07pm
He was unwaveringly conservative at the principals table, but like all good servants of the government and the president, when a decision was made, he fell in line and became an advocate for the president, not for Tony Snow. It isn't hard to conclude that he was one of the best presidential press secretaries of all time, if not the best.

Posted by 2HAPPY at 07/12/2008 @ 12:01pm

That pretty much sums up your mentality, no?

Posted by madlib at 07/12/2008 @ 12:08pm
Well someone needs to regulate the MSM as it is easily manipulated and the fewer that compete to expose their own flaws the more obvious flaws emerge and the least truth comes out. MSM then serves as an extension of the dic'tatorship and not 'we the people':

"For me, a competent investigation would have to look at who is trying to make it look like Condit did the impossible, kidnapped and murdered a woman that we didn't know whether she was dead or kidnapped in the first place while he was meeting with the Vice President, and why. That would have been her parents and the law firm they hired to get the news media stirred up about her disappearance. And since her parents loved her and were in California when she disappeared, we can rule them out as suspects. So that leaves who was responsible for the PR campaign, the law firm Blank Rome, one of the biggest in the nation so we know they not fools yet they were leading a serious investigation into the whereabouts of a young girl in a seriously flawed direction when no one had any idea what truly happened to her. But we have no evidence they had anything to do with her disappearance or motive to cover up the truth either. So we're left with what Condit was doing at the time she disappeared as the only source of information for why they would try to lead the investigation in an all too obvious wrong direction.

But the thing about that is it's hard to look into what transpired between Condit and the Vice President because Cheney still refuses to give up the records on his meetings regarding his "energy task force" that included some with Enron officials, which we know how at that time, Enron was begging President Bush to bail them out of the trouble they'd gotten into that lead to the company crashing a few months later. So even without the minutes of the meeting between Condit and Cheney, I am looking at evidence that something about Cheney's energy task force was dark and mysterious because he has fought so hard for so many years to keep anyone from knowing what he was doing. And with the state of energy policy in this country now, I can only imagine what he was talking about in all his secret meetings.

But the mere idea that Condit was in a secret meeting with the Vice President at the time of Chandra's disappearance where would never have known who he was much less where he was when she disappeared if someone wasn't trying to make it look like he had something to do with what happened to her. From my perspective, the shadiest character in the room when looking for suspects in Chandra Levy's murder at this point would be Cheney. So I would want to know what Condit had to do with these shady dealings with the Vice President. It's been my experience that where there's smoke, there's fire. And there certainly seems to have been a lot of smoke coming from Pennsylvania Avenue at the time Chandra disappeared, we've just never been told what was burning, although a lot of people are wondering now that gasoline is over four dollars a gallon and the nations is falling apart.

So what are the facts we do have regarding Cheney and his secret meetings. We know Enron has something to do with whatever Cheney doesn't want anyone to know about, that it's central to what he's trying to protect from public scrutiny because he's most viscous in his attempts to keep his energy task force records confidential when it comes to the Enron meetings. And we know Enron contributed more money to Bush's presidential campaign than any other single source over the prior election year and wanted him to bail them out of all the trouble they were in.

This is important because at the time Chandra went missing, there were what was called "rolling blackouts" going on back in Condit and Levy's hometown distract in California that we now know were being caused by Enron's energy online traders who were gaming the energy market driving the price of their products up so they made billions of dollars they had no right to think they deserved while putting California through extremely harrowing times to steal it. So of course you would expected Levy and Condit communicated closely over the issue being in Washington DC so far from everyone they cared the most about who were going through something that perhaps Condit was the only person that could do anything about.

...

Both Democrats and Republicans as well as environmentalists had supported MTBE being added to gasoline. It was the brainstorm of Halliburton, Ken Lay of Enron, and old man George Bush. Its use was forced on us as a mandate in the Clean Air Act of 1990. By 1999, everyone was happy with it because it was said to have gotten rid of smog. So the fact that it polluted groundwater wherever it was used, and even where it wasn't because it came done in rain polluting regions fortunate enough to have escaped it leaking from underground storage tanks, the truth about it was systematically ignored being by everyone we trust would have warned us about that kind of problem and done something about it.

...

The thing you have to understand is that if it weren't for the state of California making so much noise about MTBE polluting groundwater, in particular coming most loudly from Condit and Levy's districts, even more so, from Condit himself who was actively sponsoring some of the most damaging MTBE legislation in the country at the time. This was certainly discussed at the meeting with Cheney, and between Condit and Levy before the meeting as a matter of mutual concern. That along with the rolling blackouts going on at that same time being caused by Enron paints a much darker picture of that meeting and why Cheney won't allow the records of those meeting to be released. See Enron was trying to steal money from California to try to pay their bills for pretending to be using MTBE when it wasn't being used, which of course they chose to do this to California because if it weren't for Californians being so vocal about MTBE, hardly anyone would have known what it was.

...

So as I watched how the investigation into her disappearance was unfolding where there was a media frenzy nationwide for months on end about facts that when put together made absolutely no sense while it should have been plainly obvious to people even other than me that there might be a connection to what happened to her and Condits business with the Vice President. My opinion was that she was still alive at the time, or Condit was made to think it because he failed to stand up for himself over the obvious misplaced focus put on him having anything to do with her disappearing, which his silence was only leading everyone to think he was guilty even though he couldn't have been because he was with the Vice President when she disappeared.

So I played a little game with the law firm Blank Rome here in Washington DC who her parents hired to oversee the investigation into finding their daughter. It just so happened that they also represented the interests of the MTBE industry lobbying for it to be added to national gasoline supplies in 1990 by discreetly supporting the notion that future MTBE lawsuits over polluted groundwater could be mitigated by keeping federal testing standards from ever being done. They continue to do to this today where as recently as last year they published an article titled "Public Nuisance in MTBE Litigation: An Attempt to Expand Tort Law beyond Its Historical Parameters" In it they describe people who have been made sick by MTBE as not being able to even prove that MTBE made the(m) sick calling them a nuisance to big industry. It's true however that we can't prove what made us sick, but that's because they've never done the required testing that would afford us being able to substantiate that their product is indeed poison. Of course we can assume that they've done the testing themselves so what their article does is simply mock people MTBE destroyed the lives of for not being able to prove what they already knew all along.

...

But before I could take this new direction in my efforts to expose the whole truth about MTBE, after over four months of hearing pretty much nothing else talked about in Washington DC except Chandra Levy, on September 11, 2001, 4 jet liners were highjacked and flown into two of the World Trade Centers in New York City, the Pentagon, while a fourth plane heading for the White House was retaken by heroic passengers and flown into the ground.

...

Look at what just came out yesterday. Actually it came out in March but we didn't know who was behind it then. California applied to the EPA for a waiver on federal emissions standards so they could write their own stricter rules because their cities suffer from such horrible pollution. One of the areas they wanted to beef up was in how they regulate low level ozone forming pollutants which ethanol being added to gasoline the way it's being done now would be threatened if they were allowed to follow the direction they wanted to go. So they were denied their request while there was evidence that someone in the White House was working very hard to hide the truth about how bad low level ozone is for human health and plants growing in the environment.

It was known that the Bush administration had systematically undermined the protocols the EPA follows for such requests by personally changing or deleting information in the EPA's report to try to justify why they were denying the request where the consensus at the EPA before this White House interference was that there was no justification for not letting California have what it wanted in reducing ozone pollutants. "

http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/content/view/445/27/

Posted by hsuBfools at 07/12/2008 @ 1:58pm
2HaPPy or 2MaNic? McCain, Bush, their spokesmen, Limbaugh, Happy, LV all agreed on one thing: the use of the word "war" for the invasion/occupation of Iraq.

I disagreed and opposed the use of the word at the time of the invasion, and continue to.

Is the word "war" really appropriate when the so-called opponent hasn't attacked, hasn't threatened to attack, has no air force, is in shambles, no WMDs?

This was never a question for the neocons. It was a huge question/topic in Europe - again, at the time of the invasion.

Posted by winyahn at 07/12/2008 @ 3:02pm
sorry it doesn't agree with your ideology, but neither does reality.

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/12/2008 @ 03:27am

a keeper.

Posted by frosty zoom at 07/12/2008 @ 10:12pm
Posted by frosty zoom at 07/12/2008 @ 10:12pm | ignore this person | warn this person

yo frosty! sup?

Posted by ibbleblibble at 07/12/2008 @ 10:46pm
hey dude!

just trying to wade through the time warpage here in the rabbit hole.

Posted by frosty zoom at 07/12/2008 @ 10:50pm