The Internet is only one player is our complex media environment, and it's not the major player. More Americans get their news from local television than from cable, newspapers, radio, and the Internet combined. When the insurance industry was afraid that the government might actually come up with a plan to reform health care they didn't spend a lot of money on an e-mail campaign, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on those Harry and Louise television ads . . . Television is where you go if you want a voice in the public debate today. And it's major use will not be to acquire important political information or participate in the public debate, but to entertain ourselves.
All minorities combined have federal licenses for less than three percent of TV stations.
This, I think, does not bode well for the digital divide in the future. I will return to this theme in a moment, but let me come at this from another angle, with another set of statistics. Black men and women over 20 had an unemployment rate of over twice that . . . Whites under 20 were unemployed at a rate of 10.6 percent, blacks under 20 . . . One quarter of all young black people looking for work cannot find jobs.