“Democratic Media at the Crossroads”

Wally BowenMountain Area Information Network

Asheville, North Carolina

October 8, 2006

© 2006 Wally Bowen

Jurgen Habermaswinner, 2004 Kyoto Prize

“The Public Sphere”“Theory of Communicative Action”

20th Annual Kyoto Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Arts and Philosophy awarded to Jurgen HabermasJune 11, 2004

The 2004 Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy was chosen from the field of Thought and Ethics and awarded to philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Ph.D., 75, of Starnber, Germany.

Habermas received the award for achievements in social philosophy, in particular his establishment of the communicative action theory and discourse ethics.

Considered among the world's leading awards for lifetime achievement, the Kyoto Prizes are presented to individuals and groups worldwide who have contributed significantly to human progress in the areas of “Advanced Technology,” “Basic Sciences,” and “Arts and Philosophy.”

“In private life we associate with people who share similar outlooks and values. In public life we meet people from backgrounds unlike our own. The first principle should not be that we’re all the same — an assumption privileging dominant cultural groups — but rather that we are dissimilar. This leads to a recognition of the moral ambiguity of politics, the awareness that we cannot expect simply to impose our values.”

Harry C. Boyte, “The Pragmatic Ends of Popular Politics” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press (1992), pp. 351-52.

“The First Amendment . . . rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society. Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford non-governmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in ASSOCIATED PRESS v. U. S., 326 U.S.1 Argued Dec. 5, 6, 1944, Decided June 18, 1945

“In 1850, census data showed that 95% of all U.S. newspapers had a political affiliation … Traditional party journalism … eased readers’ participation in politics by creating an accessible political world.”C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, Princeton University Press (1994), p. 5.

“The province of men with money, the newspaper business generally represented their interests. That was why a region whose voters were roughly half Democrats and half Republicans had an overwhelmingly Republican press. The men who put up the capital, the Northern business class, were predominately Republican... Through the press, the well-to-do had the opportunity, largely unavailable to any other social group, to disseminate their conception of politics and partisanship and set the public agenda.”

“The Press Transformed” from The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 by Michael McGerr, Oxford, 1986.

“The public must be put in its place... so that we may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd... The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.” This specialized class of “public men” is responsible for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” “Manufacturing consent” is the means by which public opinion is directed in support of “the national interest.”

Public Opinion by Walter Lippman, Macmillan, 1922.

Christopher Hitchens, “Voting in the Passive Voice” Harper’s Magazine, April 1992.

“Opinion polling was born out of a struggle not to discover the public mind but to master it. It was a weapon in the early wars to thwart organized labor and in the battle against Populism . . . .

“. . . as all pollsters will tell you privately, the answers to poll questions are very greatly influenced by what has lately been defined as important by the television news. . .”

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations by Larry Tye, Henry Holt & Co., 1998.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

James Madison, architect of the First Amendment, from 1798 Report to the

Virginia House of Delegates

Evolution of U.S. Media

Unequal Protection:

The Rise of Corporate

Dominance and the Theft of

Human Rights

by Thom Hartmann, St. Martin's Press,

2002.

Media Orientations

Cited by Robert W. McChesney in Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935, Oxford University Press, 1993.

“Think of the speeches that may go forth. Wild and radical speeches listened to by hundreds of thousands. These wild men in their wild talks regardless of consequences, may reach the ear, possibly inadvertently, of your influential and trusted employee, who may be detracted from paths favorable to his employer’s success.”

From the March, 1926 “Midwest Employers Bulletin”:

“There is not room in the broadcast band for every school of thought, religious, political, social and economic to have its separate broadcasting station.”From General Order 40 of the Federal Radio Commission, cited by Robert W. McChesney in Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935, Oxford University Press, 1993.

The Sound Bite Society:

Television And The American

Mind (Four Walls

Eight Windows, New York : 1999)

by Jeffrey Scheuer

“Television, in nearly all its forms and functions, and for both economic and structural reasons, acts as a simplying lens, filtering out complex ideas in favor of blunt emotional messages that appeal to the self and to narrower moral-political impulses.

“For reasons that are inherent in the nature of ideology and do not impugn the politics of the left or right, simplication promotes, and epitomizes, political conservatism. Indeed, simplicity and complexity are the basic polar organizing principles of the political spectrum.”

Jeffrey Scheuer, The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.

Conservative agenda is minimalist:

• less government• less regulation• focus on individualism• democracy and market capitalism are

synonymous

This simpler, minimalist view of the world is more vividly and coherently portrayed via the commercial media's “sound bite” culture.From Sound Bite Society by Jeffrey Schnerer

Progressive agenda is more complex:

• bigger role for government• collaborative approaches to social ills• market capitalism and democracy are not

synonymous• democracy requires checks and balances

on corporate and government power

The more complex, nuanced progressive perspective requires context and detailed explanation. Commercial media is not structured to portray this worldview accurately.From Sound Bite Society by Jeffrey Schnerer

“The problem with public broadcasting is bias — programming that does not disseminate a common culture but imposes a partisan attitude... Remove Federal funds and you remove officials’ ability to influence the system... to make programming more truly national and better able to serve its legitimate unifying purposes.”

“How Not to Fix Public Broadcasting” by Leonard Garment, New York Times, Dec. 21, 1994.

Media Reform Movement

Public Media Movement

Public Sphere

Information Commons

Public Domain

Public Space

Creative Commons

Innovation Commons

“Architecture is politics.”

Mitch KaporElectronic Frontier Foundation

FASTLANE

Levels of Broadband Wireless

$$$$$$

$$$$$

$

PublicSecure

Managed(fee for service)

Municipal Applications

(inspections, police, meter reading, etc.)

Free Public Wi-Fi(unmanaged, not secure)

Broadcast "White Space"

and

Unlicensed Wireless

LPFM Status

"Enhance and Protect Local Community Radio Act of

2005"

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)

"Local Community Radio Act of 2005" (S-312)

(Senators McCain, Cantwell & Leahy)

Video Franchising

and

Public Access TV

Media Reform Websites:

www.main.nc.us

www.freepress.net

www.spectrumpolicy.org

www.prometheusradio.org

Protocols of the Internet and World Wide Web

TCP/IP: code of the InternetHTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Codes of the World Wide Web

HTML: Hypertext Markup LanguageGopher: Menu of options on an Internet

site FTP: File Transfer Protocol

Open Source Technologies

Linux — Network operating system created by Linus Torvalds and refined by thousands of volunteer programmers.

Apache Webserver — built by a collective of programmers committed to "patching" the original web server created by the National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA)

Perl — programming language that enables the high-power manipulation of webpage text.

BIND — Berkeley Internet Name Domain -- enables a domain name to link to an IP address number.

Sendmail — processes email routing.

“Democratic Media at the Crossroads”

www.main.nc.us/DMC