The human face of media consolidation

What is the real life impact of media consolidation? Journalist Eric Eric Klinenberg has some powerful stories to tell in his book Fighting For Air.

Listen to this interview with Klinenberg on WILL's Media Matters (listen to Feb 11th episode) hosted by Free Press cofounder Bob McChesney. In the interview he tells some compelling stories and tells how media consolidation has destroyed a competitive media market in most communities in America.

After listening to the interview. Checkout his book. Here is an excerpt.

There have been dramatic transformations in the U.S. media ecosystem during the past decade, but the process of shaping a new media landscape for the digital age is by no means complete. In the next few years, the future health of the nation’s media ecosystem will be determined by interactions among and between all of these players: Big Media conglomerates, upstart chains, locally owned and operated outlets, government regulators, elected officials, citizen journalists, public-interest organizations, and grassroots activists fighting for reform. Until recently, the most important contests between these groups took place behind closed doors, in the corporate backrooms and federal agencies where ordinary people have little access or influence. But today that is changing, and for one simple reason: Americans know how much is at stake.

Fighting for Air tells two overarching stories that would be common knowledge were it not for the crisis in communications that they address: first, how Big Media companies parlayed bold political entrepreneurialism and the federal government’s blind faith in the power of markets and technology to win historic concessions from Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, which they used to dominate local markets from coast to coast. The pattern is now familiar: just as Starbucks knocked out independent coffee shops and Wal-Mart killed the corner store, media conglomerates have devastated locally produced newspapers, television stations, and radio programs throughout the country. But with media the stakes are higher, because both cultural diversity and democracy in America require a rich and varied supply of news and information in the public sphere, where communities, large and small, debate policy options, determine where to invest public resources, and decide how to protect the vulnerable or defend themselves.

We already know the hazards of replacing home-cooked meals made from farm-raised meats, fruits, and vegetables with a steady diet of Big Macs, supersize fries, and extracrispy wings from the fast-food chains that saturate America’s highways and byways. The second big story in Fighting for Air is an account of how citizens and civic groups discovered that the twenty-four-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet of stale news is crushing creative and independent voices, destroying the rich American tradition of local reporting, and clogging the informational arteries that make democracy work. Concerned citizens may disagree over whether the media are biased (and, if they are, whether they tilt left or right); whether coverage of the war in Iraq is sanitized to promote its popularity or dramatized to undermine the campaign; or whether Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert offer more penetrating analysis than Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly. But they share one widespread conviction: that the distinctively local voices, personalities, and sources of news and entertainment that used to animate radio, television, newspapers, and alternative weeklies have been crushed by an onslaught of cookie-cutter content. Media conglomerates, they believe, are estranging Americans everywhere from the sights, sounds, and cultural styles that once made their hometowns feel special, like home.