McChesney also notes that most broadcast innovation has taken
place in public radio and television, not commercial. FM radio w as
public until it started making money, then it became private. T he
internet is a dramatic example today—it w as designed, funded and
run in the public sector as long as you couldn’t make money on it,
but as soon as it show ed a potential for profitability, it w as handed
over to megacorporations.
T w o Academy Aw ard-w inning documentaries, Deadly Deception
(about General Electric) and The Panama Deception, and a film
about you, Manufacturing Consent, w ere hardly show n on public
T V.
T hings used to be even w orse. I spent a couple of w eeks in
Indochina in early 1970. At that point I w as pretty w ell know n in the
Boston area, w hich is home to NPR’s flagship affliliate, W GBH.
W ith great reluctance, W GBH’s big liberal leader, Louis M. Lyons,
agreed to interview me—extremely hostilely—for a few minutes.
T hat w as probably the only time I w as on local public radio back
then.
I’m not a great admirer of today’s media, but I think they’re w ay
better and more open than they w ere thirty or forty years ago.
People w ho w ent through the 1960s are now in the media and are
w riting—at least partially—from more humane points of view.
W hat w ould the media look like in a genuinely democratic society?
T hey’d be under public control. T heir design, the material they
present, access to them, w ould all be the result of public
participation—at least to the extent that people w ant to be involved,
and I think they w ould.
Some of the media in this country w ere once more democratic.
Not to be too exotic, let’s go back to the 1950s, w hen eight hundred
labor new spapers, reaching tw enty or thirty million people a w eek,
w ere devoted to struggling against the commercial press, w hich w as
“damning labor at every opportunity,” as they put it, and “selling
[the] virtues of big business”—driving the mythology into people’s
heads.