corporate media the threat to democracy and he has another one you wrote with mr herman called what was it other global media the new missionaries of corporate capitalism all right good enough and he's here in new york for the media and democracy conference being held now in the late october  and seventy and bob and jesse welcome very much conversations and to new york my pleasure to be here and i might say to our new studios in manhattan neighborhood that we're just here yeah it is good for the access world and that sort of thing i want to you can maybe you can share your own background a bit for us because i know you're interested in the media but could share a little you know maybe academic research i do not profess or at the university of wisconsin i teach in journalism and i'm been there nine or ten years and i've written several books and articles on media media issues the two you just mentioned and then i wrote a long history on the origins of commercial broadcasting united states that was published ninety three byock furred called telecommunications mass meaning democracy and what i did in that book aside there's been sort of a myth that corporate run commercially supported media of us of something inherent to america that we had sort of in our bloodstream or gene pool that we have to this type of media system and what i discovered was that when commercial broadcasting came along that you twenty's and thirty's there was widespread opposition to it from across the political spectrum in this country  organize to try to set up a nonprofit noncommercial system you know will keep you in suspense that last year it was still very interesting to me as they had another part of the world they set up that kind of a system haven't they many parts of the world of the u s you know anomaly at the time yeah it was virtually every other country in the world the rationale was presented for that kind of system as opposed to a commercially oriented kind of one that seemed to emerge in this country well at that time the rationale was that there's a scarce amount of space for broadcasting there was room for a few broadcasters in any given country and that it would be unfair to lead to some private situation have the access to the public mind like that the other be run publicly on some sort of democratically accountable mechanism rather than a commercial my commision beholden only to owners and advertisers and that that significant extent in many countries of the world although it has been under strong pressure especially in the last decade to shift to a purely market driven commercial system right ok now we have a communications or they have we have we have patterns  the anything where you say this is a band with spectrum and there's a shortage and so forth economics in a certain sense is the allegation of scarce resources that's the theory of what economics is about so steel automobiles petroleum these kind of things are going to be able to exploit these things and economic data because you're allocating scarce resources in the case of communication i don't know when back up before broadcast communication but we had printing presses and we did set up postal systems in the world which is original kind of  you know communications system we have a we don't have a private sector postal service in this country we've set up a government use of for communication in the postal system some of those were the some of the background to seeing do we see communications differently than we do the normal patterns of economic development and other aspects of the economy well one of the interesting things about american media history is that we have an image that especially is given to us by the p r agents of the corporate media that they were sort of build up through the hard sweat of entrepreneurial leaders without any government interference when in fact really going back even before the time of independence our media firms our major media have received massive direct indirect grab from subsidies and in fact their only complaint government involvement is when it might impede profitability they've been wildly favor of government involvement when it would help them subsidies the post office for mail and were crucial to the success of the all fields and people would say that it's better in the private sector for the profit motive is going to be more effective and efficient people make that argument in a capitalist mode well you know i think what will happen with the media in the society is that it's only in the th century that it's seen as a purely corporate driven profit motivated commercial enterprise purely in fact at the time of the st amendment was drafted and passed the seven hundred and ninety one in the st really fifty years of this country's history we had a press system to be unrecognizable by contemporary standards it was a partisan press system yes almost all the newspapers were subsidized by political parties the word out to make money st and foremost in fact many of the papers received subsidies from the government for printing contracts so you actually had a government subsidized  press system in this country for the st fifty years and then even in the late th century our newspaper system was commercials run by capitalist trying to make money those are vastly more competitive system that we have now and really quite different than what we have today so when our modern day press lords the time warner's in the viacom's and the news corp sees enormous twenty billion dollar year conglomerates that own all the myriad of media interest when they claim to be the natural heirs of the st amendment it's really a bogus the investors are interchangeable their house least is making money but they'll use that argument to their own event obviously yeah right i do and they do and they but the whole democracy in contempt is something we have no interest in what so ever except to protect the bottom line heinz interesting to th up the idea of put it we're in political kind of finance reform now and they're saying that they want to vouchsafe the giving of money to political parties in the name of the st amendment that's an argument it's going to probably come up in the public dialogue and well i think that you know the st amendment regrettably has either important i think the distinction there is there are important distinctions but if you look at their media systems today you look at it from the vantage point of people owner media system and our owners own everything we don't have pure newspaper companies or pure broadcast companies anymore we have a media system that has shrunk from fifty dominant firms which was a scandal then in the early one thousand nine hundred and eighty s after fifteen years of mergers and acquisitions to ten firms really dominating our entire media culture in this country is maybe another ten firms rounding out the dominant positions twenty at the outside but shrinking and shrinking in the dominant firms a firm like time warner disney this doesn't just have isn't adamah player one media sector take time warner for example they're among the channel company they've got all those turner channel c n n h b o turner network television they've got amusement parks they've got retail stores the nd largest movie theater owning company in the world this is the modern media corp this is this is the truth of our free press the enormous transnational firms that are out to make as much money as possible with a myriad of interest sometimes in the cases of companies like disney or general electric there are companies that have vast non media interest as well that are only loosely related if at all to media their major corporate players in the global economy with distinct self interest in the outcome of the most important issues of the day on trade taxes regulation and they they really dominate our journalism and our entertainment yeah that's becoming increasingly important in terms of the the national consciousness on issues some people say it's like a th branch of our government process in fact is more important people being so involved with the media and sort of the shaping public opinion is an extremely important part of the governance  ends of this economy and a view of the world isn't well i think it's almost a self evident point that it's not a recent point i mean at the time of independence it was well understood that the foundation of protests were democracies having a viable press system that informs people helps them a pace so that's something that all democratic theory is taken at the assumption level on this no different today i think what's different today from that era and for many other era is that the media plays such an incessant role in our life on the one hand they surround us and engulf us and secondly those media are owned by fewer and fewer people who are primarily interested in carpet bombing us with commercial messages and they do and they think of a different and they think of television programming as commercials in which they put some programming we tend to think of programming as around which commercial but the other way around in that you'll have all about it's all about carpet bombing us with commercials and they're doing it and they're doing it increasingly and incessantly as you say this concentration ben back dick in his written so well on that he wrote i think the media monopoly and he sees tracked this very very well bless him and so what this increased concentration do you think is more concentration of the media some people to back off a little to the broad political patterns there is a tendency for there to be a concentration of ownership of the capital assets of this gap system in fewer and fewer hands in general i think it's probably five percent of the population ten on an individual basis to own the capital assets that make up our economy is it worse in the media than it is in the economy in general do you think i really don't know ok good question i don't know this though i mean approx one percent of our population owns roughly fifty percent of the financial wealth you know modern eighty percent of our population and six percent of the financial wealth right and i think it's safe to say that the primary owners of these ten largest media firms come from that one percent of the bottom eighty percent right and i think it's safe to say that they're for you'd logically expect these firms to represent the have the world view and represent the interests of the owners of this country not the workers of the country or the rest of the country yeah so it's really a matter of those at the top  really running things in a well in a way and they're beginning to become global now in their out resemble we hear now about there were emergence of the global economy and these entities are beginning to get a double overview in terms of communications and so forth so that's part of the pattern as well i well in fact what it is is that the globalization of the world economy that we often talk about globalization the media as a central part of it in fact seen in the last ten or fifteen years of the global basis has been the rise for the st time of a fully global integrated commercial media market and it's really dominated by nine or ten firms that's what herman and i write about in the global media yes these are the mostly u s based not exclusively u s based firms and in their central to the whole process of a global economy because the primary element of it is global commercial television which is really the exploding area of media and this is necessary to create global markets of advertising to sell goods and that's really where the expansion is across the world right now you know so there hand in hand let's say in this country i mean it's a roading that they import but what about on the world passes we still have the b b c was still have some examples or are they in retreat to this juggernaut if that's the right word of the globally a global media entit than public broadcasting did in the us i mean we've never really had public broadcasting in this company country and we've company that's you know a company this company town right but at the same time today we have nothing even close to public broadcasting and n p r and p b s because they get roughly fifteen percent of their funds from public money in the rest comes from government or sushma corporate handouts the viewer listener donations so it's really rich not public broadcasting the traditional sense of the term they used a public broad petroleum b so in countries like britain and germany and canada the dominant public broadcaster saw its mission of serving the entire society yes in this country that was never and that's the way it has to be for public broadcasting to be viable successful it can't just be in its service  in this country and other have since the commercial interests are able to dominate in expelled nonprofit broadcasters who pioneered the medium it's worth pointing out interesting since they were able to expel them when nonprofit broadcasting came back it could only do the stuff the main guys could make money on they weren't allowed to do broadcasting for the entire population they were only allowed to broadcast stuff that the commercial just couldn't make any money off of doing they were allowed to do the educational stuff and stuff there wasn't much of an audience for yeah if they tried to do the stuff that the big time broadcasters n b c and c b s did then they get in political trouble washington the commercial break has the what do we have these guys competing with us for with government subsidy so public broadcasting this country was handicapped at the outset of sort of a no win situation that had to do the stuff there wasn't much of an audience for right and then though never wanted to programming it's sort of like the same kind of argument for a quality newspapers opposed to tabloids in that people really in a democratic participatory democratic nation you give them a choice and they will read you know the tabloid will not look at you know no i think you're going and it's a leap  and it was built right in the system obviously if you only do the stuff you can't make money off of what the public broadcasters in this country with and put in the position well said well what can we do we can't do the stuff that there's in the audience for where the logical thing to do is to do stuff that was misleading to say the public broadcasters by definition were a lead us there might have had that component or paternalist might be a better term and even today with widespread commercial competition the public broadcasting systems in countries like britain us for our commercial broadcaster this country we have you believe anything except general electric on and things as darkness at noon and you know who logs and rasam ations and all that sort of yeah yeah yeah i know would they and those public services up in scandinavia or wherever they have been able to do that are they able to compete on a world scale with let's say if we bring intuit movies so we bring into it the whole full range of entertainment and so what it seems to me that the american product every one of our largest products that we export to a world that except sit on the terms of what they have available to them they put all kinds of movies out in indian egypt and so forth that they can go and see but the overwhelming source of some people call it cultural imperialism and so forth but is that the people accept rambo and other kinds of things that come out of hollywood and out of the entertainment industry in the united states is fair given their druthers then why don't they get it yeah the market is so much easier american companies have a domestic market a stablished commercial market of two hundred and fifty or two hundred and sixty million people then they make a film can go overseas ten million or fifteen million people then they're going to try to go out and compete quickly ghost of the most powerful firms that's where u s firms tend to dominate you know you know you don't think it's the argument of the people in the film industry and that sort of thing would be that we make product that people want to see we don't more than the argument is that if they're trying to do that but in that competitive marketplace the people here would argue for the industry as it exists the multi i you know the large court conglomerates who make product and so far like that they'll argue that we make product we put it out on the market and the reason people go to see rambo is because that's what they want to see they don't want to see thank you very much programming that perhaps some elite group of culturally advantaged people think they ought to see it that argument is your mr dr you shifting the argument the system gives the people what they want that on end of things is what i it's the main myth or half truth that really girds the system it's it's ideological underpinnings because if you accept that argument and if you think it's credible then you can't hardly blame the global media giants are we getting it's our fault if the stuff we're getting is garbage minute i think it's important to talk about that you know that's a really central issue of media criticism or do the media giants are they forced to give the people what they want through competitive pressures and that's the central issue is that true and if they don't have out of business they'll say that's right you know there's tremendous pressure on them in certain ways and i've been a media publisher no publisher producer thinks they are trying to satisfy their audience and honestly i don't care what the audience i think they see themselves as an incessant competition to do that but in fact though the system doesn't necessarily give the people what they what they're really a lot of basic holes in that argument ok for one thing the notion of the market being one where the demand dictates supply an economic principles that's a purely competitive market we have anything but a purely competitive market we have a market in which the suppliers have tremendous influence over the content of the price to the economic terms which is one where basically they can really dictate to demand so they can base a big give the people what they can make the most money off of with little concern about too much competition forced them to do thing else and then when the people consume what they tell them they're getting what they want yeah right so really it's a ses laws say all rights demanded yeah right right right right yeah but it is and that's one of the reasons why this is so much stuff that doesn't make money because the prison stuff they think will make lots of profit the audience doesn't want it yeah you think of these guys were so expert at meeting audiences and taking their commands and they'd be producing smash smash after smashing but there are lots of other problems let's just muck about the serious idea of the market so this magical democratic enterprise that give the people what they want particularly interesting to introduce a law because some people for example good any magazine rack in the vast majority them repitch the top twenty or thirty percent of the population that by market because that's monday one dollar one cent vote one person one right right right right and you know we had revolutions in this country in many other countries to overthrow the principle of one dollar one cent vote property based rights and to have democratic rights so it's a very undemocratic mechanism viewed in that way as a one dollar one cent vote moreover the media giants will give us what we want but only within the range of what's profitable for them to produce which is oftentimes a much narrower range that people might actually want and then nine hundred and thirty dollars s there's no doubt from historical evidence that no americans wanted advertising a few merican wanted advertising on radio but the private firms couldn't make any money giving   and so it's really you give the people if they want within the range of what's possible produce not within the range of what they might actually want in one thousand nine hundred and five the ed in the street did a survey and discovered that two thirds of americans want to know advertising on the internet now they're supposed to be giving the people what they want we wouldn't have any ads in the world wide web today obviously they can't make a the money giving people what they want them to just forget what the people want when they get make money off bury it put it in the bottom drawer and have them what you want to make money off of and then when they consume it you tell them you're giving them what they want could we come in with the idea of if you don't have as you don't have a way of getting income and then how is the enterprise of communications going to in a certain sense an economic sense make an investment that is going to pay for itself and make progress and  media especially in broadcasting i think we should need to have public money to subsidize things and i would say there's dead various ways to generate that i'm personally a major fan of having a tax on advertising and having all that money set aside to go directly into supporting nonprofit noncommercial media of a whole different number of varieties including public access television and community radio in addition to mash and all public radio and t v so if you get all the corporate interest and all the right wing guys in congress are costly withing  public media out of the way and really have a stable and viable nonprofit noncommercial sector do you think we could have a we could have a private sector a profit sector of media major mainline media we could have a tax perhaps on that or the i'm not done with that off our world i'm stuff i do with those guys i wouldn't let those guys be all you would not not at all i think i think it's absolutely indefensible to allow this level of concentration in media industries when the united states occupied japan and germany in hundred and five it instituted policies in both countries and then occupation to discourage media concentration is set at the time that concentrated media was not only anti democratic it promoted fascism i think we have to take a dose of around medicine i think we've got to come up with a newspaper publisher a magazine publisher owns a television network film studios book publishing right on down the i mean break it up this is another reason and this would apply over into internet and computers and so i think it was very we want to see what we want to competitive marketplace you know not you know we've had on this country in our media we not only have a noncompetitive oligopolies stock market place many dominated by him full of firms it's even it's even more insidious than that but we could say we have an which is owned by west and if you take those nine largest firms and you look at them what you find out is the average to have six joint ventures with the other eight firms that means with the other eight firms of the st group of nine each of them averages six equity the competitors and kill each other and then make a deal or we can make our deal st yeah well the rational thing is you make your deal for us so they'll have a cup of coffee in a brand in the back room so why go in some two billion dollars kamikaze run right milton friedman happy yeah oh right right you're there to make your shareholders yeah and they are and this is the we only have so many car manufacturers in the world i mean that narrows doubt that that's the natural way in which business operates we don't have two hundred and fifty car manufacturers we have three in the united states and well i mean that's sort of the know what i would say to them in terms of the media capitalist wants competition they do everything in their power to avoid it sure they want everyone else to compete like in dickens and they want of a monopoly the reason why bill gates is worth thirty billion dollars is because bill gates has had a virtual monopoly in the last fifteen years and the guy has got a competitive hotdog and it made a film in one thousand nine hundred and four that i'm sure a lot of the viewers are familiar with called the line king sure the lion king was one of the greatest hits in cinema history of the box office it did in the global box office somewhere between six dollars and seven hundred million dollars in business as you know that's that's  money by having do lion king paraphernalia merchandise the sell the five hundred to six stores they have all the king rides for their amusement parks lion king cd rom's lion king books and comic books lion king show for the disney channel the lion king show for their a b c network  was at the box office by the earlier standards and two hundred million dollars globally yeah you know how much profit they're probably going to generate for disney another year or so now i don't know i don't know man one million volunteers and all those other revenue streams right now the reason why this important stand this you can't compete with disney you just simply are going to get investors so the only people who can compete with them are going to be news corp or time warner who got all those other streams that's why the independent media firm doesn't survive you know got to be linked up to one of these chains or you just don't have a  future that's where the profits could and then we logic of this market yeah we had that we had robber barons we had you know teddy roosevelt came along in the progressive and i trust kind of things and other aspects of the economy and what is are we had a great depression we had this great depression back in the twenty's into a whole lot of things that came out of washington in the sense that a lot of people who are free market you know who you know free marketers and so were a little exception to securities exchange commission and all these regulatory thing to federal communications commission so we're putting all these government regulations upon system where does all that fit in your bed as i told you how they really don't care about competition and they don't really care about free markets either that's that's also more mumbo jumbo they spoonfeed it's an election time so vote for their politicians in fact these firms as we said fact the major media giants all of whom on commercial television stations and networks are getting the recipients of digital spectrum to digital broadcasting six megahertz of spectrum that is valued anywhere from ten or fifteen billion dollars at the and the reason they don't have to pay for it isn't because there's any reason for it there is no defensible reason the reason simply is they have the most powerful lobby in washington the wall street journal the seventeen days ago for member taping this it's front page called the commercial broadcasting industry the most powerful lobby in washington really lost their teeth with politicians underpants they own these guys and they basically rule in washington and they're getting this massive gift of government property for for doing nothing in return and  it's a true scandal and this is the fruit so they don't care about the free markets and they're actually a handful of politicians in washington are upset about this john mccain has you know a couple as well for the most part of this lobby is so strong that no politician dares mess with them because it's political suicide so where's it all heading well in what sense in the sense of the communications future of this country in the world well i think the current trajectory we have of the highly corporates concentrated commercial system yeah it's negative journalism we see what that looks like it's a two dollars tier level of journalism on one hand you get a fairly sophisticated journalism aimed towards the business class and the upper middle class sort of what you get in the wall street journal in new york times or business because it's cheap it's extremely cheap putting a camera in the o j courtroom doesn't cost a thing going out having ten journalists go out and could do some investigative work cost a pile of money and if it's any good it's going to piss off someone in power and if you're running a business you want to keep your cost so you don't want to piss off people in power so journalism is just a nonstarter go put in take press releases that come in from p r firms that account for forty to seventy percent of our news take those press releases then go put a mike in front of a politician's mouth go cover a crime story get off the satellite cover loraine about a few ghost stories involve marvell but that's stuff you know it's cheap it doesn't cost much it doesn't piss off anyone in power and if people watch it then you're giving the people what they want but it's really supply side driven  stuff was really expensive it wouldn't be down there yeah it's into there because it's cheap yeah period it doesn't piss off anyone to power don't forget that anybody you know this system is predicated despite all this mumbo jumbo they feed us about these big corporations being concerned about government they don't want to antagonize powerful people around the rochas they need them to help set them up and subsidize them to right now we've got in the case of the global media company like disney which in a rare bout of doing something decent was releasing a film is releasing a film that's critical of china's takeover of tibet on the next month and disney has done everything in its power to assure the chinese leaders that will never make that mistake again of releasing a film critical of china  that is hired him a little sensitive hired henry kissinger to go to china on behalf of disney to represent its interest to assure them that disney will will never mess with the chinese government again because the chinese market is when they're desperate to get into all the media giants are on day or something for whatever it is they do in the name of labor to get income and you got to you know one point five billion dollars people work for two or three dollars a day and that there's going to be a convergence of wages is going to be a pressure upon wages of people in the developed world it's going to create political difficulties is going to create political anxiety and anger in a time where everything's going well now this moment but given downturn is something there's going to be a great deal of anger and so forth you don't think within the normal operating political or economic operating system of the country that somebody would be able to come in and tap into the banks to that where there's at a political or at an economic level and make it be a winning proposition in terms of the capitalist system in order to address the outrage or the upset either in political or economic terms of a mass number of people who are going to be disadvantaged in a very serious way by the normal operation of the thing it goes to the extent of its limits and it reaches some limit beyond which it goes and then you're in your year into a new it's very difficult to predict what's going to that was going to happen in a situation like this you know i think that we're in a situation now where the dominant firms are in power that they they enjoy yeah suitable influence politically and they're the main beneficiaries of the current global  economic situation a company you know it's not a coincidence that the largest media firms are strong advocates of the sort of trade deals like nafta and gatt in the creation of groups like the world trade organization right because they're the primary beneficiaries of it and therefore it's not a pure surprise that our media system is a really atrocious job of really covering that sort of issue giving it balance and giving back grounds of people can have an informed decision on it in one thousand nine hundred and four for example the washington post  that if get past the washington post would be the beneficiaries of a one billion dollars in new business because of its telecom service that would benefit but right resumes big incentive and when they approached the editor of the washington post said you realize you're you guys are going to benefit by or if there is an alternative that can come along other than this dismal pattern that we see now we spoke earlier about you know a commercial and then maybe a noncommercial kind of element and so forth where is the leadership for that going to come is it going to be able to have any a possibility of being other than  just hopelessly out outgunned david against a gigantic goliath or you can have to make allegiances with people that have some sort of a link with that system that are in that system and use that system in order to do it which had barbara ehrenreich here earlier she was saying we need to generate  a sense of war against the institution of war itself would have a you didn't say i want to print say how how how do we address the system in a way that's going to benefit the people of this country in the world and you view if you want to change the media and make it more democratic intention i think it's going to be part and parcel of a broad movement to change the course to sins of our society ok ok i thought that media is not a strong enough organizing principle to generate poppy you cannot make it we need a new economic rationale i think it has to be part of like really reforming our whole political economy yeah to make it more egalitarian more fair more just and more saying right environmentally sane and i think that if we look around the world at the people who are trying to change and having some success changing media who are they they tend to be groups that are not isolated media activist groups that there are groups that are linked with religious groups labor civic organizations feminist environmental groups creating broad coalitions of people whom their media want to be their most important issue but there are still some but they don't have a form of media nothing they're working can ever be success right because yeah right and what we're seeing along those lines around the world in countries like new zealand and sweden and india and canada is that there's a whole group of democratic left electoral parties than one thousand nine hundred that are emerging that oppose the sort of free market quote unquote ok a neo liberal policies and what's interesting about these parties as of they're making reform of the media one of their central issues something i mean it's not something way down the list and in this country unfortunately the equivalents of those groups are very small to begin with or barely existant ranging from the new rd party groups like the greens in the labor party the new party to the progressive caucus in congress but still those groups even the small ones small so they are barely have any understanding of the importance of media it doesn't even certain view tony blair's coming along with him over the idea of privatization this kind of thing do you think the context within which political decision making and economics editor level of economic theory is sufficient or that gives us a basis for a context of understanding that is sufficient for us to change in some sort of a fundamental way in a way that we're going to be able to address these problems or do we need some sort of a new system of economic thinking that perhaps could i have an idea that we really need to have to spread some you know a viable holdings and owners rather than doing away with owners and we have to spread ownership of technological systems to people in order to give them an alternative way to have income other than just their labor input as labor becomes less and less relevant to a productive process as technology takes over by every system of economics but do we need some sort of a new economic system or do we have it within the context of a leftist or traditionally socialist party could the capitalist rebooting kind of thing or what do you see at a theoretical   an irrational system it's makes no sense and it has no future viral mentally and socially every sign points to disaster down the road as not a very well thought out a very rational system so i mean i think we need to make it a much more democratic economy i think we need to somehow take resources and investment and so that having it be the province of one percent of the population we've got to somehow get the employees the workers the consumers involved in the process of deciding where investments going to go and how it's go but do we want to in that view do we want to do away with private property as a system undergirding of an economic system or do we want to perhaps spread ownership instead of being one percent or five percent owning it if you had one hundred percent  owning the capital assets of an economy as a way of distributing income is there any value in trying to think of spreading ownership and then you know having created once we agree on the principle of the current system isn't working in that we want to more fair a gala tarion a democratic system i think we can have a great debate and a lot of people to talk about various ideas right i'm open for that discussion i don't really have the answer to that but i do think it's doable i mean i think the big lie of our times that overwhelms everyone in our society is the idea that this system is is locked in writing that we could we could make an economy that serves yabba serving those of on the country right in a by b way might be that we can become those who own the country that's what i was getting at in a certain sense rather than having the system of economics somebody make an investment they make an investment it pays for itself out of its future earnings for five years out and they've just got a thing where the it just keeps building up the income and people don't have that they only have a labor and then the other thing with the globalization process is one big development is going on you also have a potential technological displacement th coming where the technological systems of super automation and super mass production of mass produced goods and services don't require human beings merely to agree they have so as a system of distributing income based upon labor input to a system that's becoming technological might need to have some sort of a rethinking of it through and those on the left have been tied to dialectical seeing labor against capital and long understand what i'm so i was there a sense that i think you might be right about the fact that labor is less of a factor production in the long term but it's certainly still an awfully important factor in action and i think all the evidence we still have today shows of the conflict between labor and capital has still right at the heart of the system because as long as you're trying to make profits the less to pay labor the more profit you're making you're competing with people who are doing the same thing it's built right into the system there has little as possible what about this capable what about the thing yet we've got somebody on the on the right as you would say george gilder's going around talking about the wonders of the of the microprocessor and so forth but he takes the idea and lucky for us to do it as well that we got and we come into a situation where we are in the used to talk about cable we spoke about cable here briefly we talk about is the cable as a system of abundance rather than of scarcity and that that's why you  well no but i would talk to it that you have more and more channel value convergence you have the possibility of digital new channels developing you've got that m t s right down the line coming and so forth but the idea that we're transcending in a band with sense or in a telecommunications sense scarcity itself is the reality that we can have a great many different channels of capacity and is there a possibility and that that there would be a realm for the opening up of the expressions of the human spirit that don't fit into the  commercial pattern but there's a realm where the real activity of human beings and human activity would take place maybe like in public access or public theater or something like that is they would go there saying mass produced a world over here that we could have an ownership of has been going to buy the stuff that they turned out and then we could be free to do things that are really human and humane in another realm of things as a developing you know i don't want to guess going to happen ok why because it's not a technologically driven society even of the technology holds that potential  d it's whoever controls the technology owns us is going to really be the one who develops that television is the classic case in point with digital broadcasting in us where we currently get in the new york you probably get sixty seven channels over the air t new owners in addition to the current eight current eight owners or seven whatever it is in new york or it's going on ten stations e g that's what's going to be so you're not that yeah that i don't can't hold and i think also the internet we're seeing there that the commercial interest in the corporate interest in the past year they were scared by the threat of the internet have been able to use their immense market power to neutralize the threat of the internet and i think increasingly bring it right inside the heart of their empires so it will not undercut them but they can use it to gird their as we do that what we talk about is breaking up these largest media firms antitrust talk about really establishing a fully funded public broadcasting system that includes national system a network that local stations controlled locally public access and community i think it means having decent regulation of commercial broadcasting which mean no ads to kids having ad free kids shows and no ads and news programs i don't think there's any defense for commercially run news programs i mean television journalism and commercial broadcasting this country is nothing short of a scandal and we need real journalism so those are the sort of things we can start with right there that we want to do that would build a mass movement in these kind of things you used to have nucleus of that we have some assistance from things that are going on over seasons of what and there's discontent within the society experiences or i've been in this room and i think this tremendous openness to these ideas some people talk about them and the problem of course is where people learn about criticism of the media except in the media where it's not covered yeah as a liberal they are and that's the official opposition but when i talk to people and they they get an explanation for why they're getting carpet bombed with ads for why the news stinks and they sort of study it and listen and talk about it then  sort of stuff i'm suggesting and probably on the surface seems outlandish breaking up these big firms public broadcasting no ads to kids they seem perfectly rational thought point he'll say you know that makes perfect sense going to break what's stopping them going to break up these big companies and so forth through governmental intervention into statistics and say i think the very good idea to break these firms off really they'll say that right yeah if it was the facts yeah you have to a stranger in the street right now so they and i trust media they look at you like you were speaking greek or stuff because they know nothing about it where are these issues being discussed adequately we've got national public radio things come up we do have a little bit and they seen things with these access cable you appreciate and encourage access cable television and so important and you know people at the voluntary level issuing the spectacular growth of media activism in this country in the last ten years ago something a conversation like this would have been impossible on our media ten years ago a group like fairness and actually reporting didn't exist today it's an enormous respected media watch group the public has a terrific magazine called extra ten years ago you didn't have an organized labor movement that people really interested in maybe issues you just had a bunch of you couldn't care less yeah ten years ago you didn't have local media watch groups and some of the largest cities of this country a moderating the what's going on the media ownership the public stations trying for fairness and now we've got that new york and chicago in the twin cities and denver and seattle in los angeles and there's lots of other cities this is all a recent phenomenon so there's a real momentum building you know it's a dramatic change ok think historically it's very positive so yeah that's really good and we did have this you know we have these islands of capacity within access to talk a cable access there that we did have this nascent kind of thing with deep dish i wonder is going to be any possibility of beginning to try to link some of that together with satellite technology  think what is it a matter of economics primarily somebody who knocks premier li because the people who do this great stuff like you know are invariably working crazy right schedules of not getting paid much and you just don't have the resources to do that right but i mean it's going to come i think the logic of making these alliances is there are alternative an independent media so a stronger network some better product for people to experience a good deal as people get more alienated people are going to listen and they hear this and read your books and everything will be more and more  pleasure the perceptions of robert chesney's a professor at madison i guess i'm a university of wisconsin a writer on these issues and somebody who gives us a view of these things is really very very very very good for us to have thank you very very much for coming on and for the program appreciate it very much my pleasure ok we are on conversation see again next week will be back again next week that's been our pleasure to give you his views and we invite you to an in again next week at same time thank you very much until next time all right ok and i would just get i got