In the United States 17 years ago, government regulation prevented one company
or individual from owning more than seven TV stations, seven AM radio stations
and seven FM radio stations across the country.

Today, thanks to deregulation by politicians elected with the help of campaign
donations from the media industry, one company now owns 1,200 local stations.
That company is called Clear Channel. Its ethics are not that different than
the once-powerful corporation, Enron. But Clear Channel will never go bankrupt
if it stays a media company, because as the old saying goes: "Having a TV or
radio license is like having a license to print money." Total morons can make
profits with a US broadcast license, and Clear Channel has 1200 licenses -- and
it uses standardized formats and content to cut costs and risk even more than
McDonald's Hamburgers.

Days after Sept 11, executives at Clear Channel sent out a memo to their local
stations with a list of 150 songs that they suggested should not be played on
the air because of "questionable lyrics." The list contained anti-war songs
including one called "War Pigs," peace songs by John Lennon and Bruce
Springsteen. Also on the list: "all Rage Against the Machine songs".

The concentration of media power, opinion-shaping power, in the hands of a few
corporations, leads quite easily and naturally to censorship and conformity of
thought and culture.

Happy media consumers or active active citizens?

The owners of today's big media -- and the politicians and commentators they
hire -- argue that there is no need for media regulation, or restrictions on
ownership, or even any need any longer for non-commercial public broadcasting
because we now inhabit a glorious multi-channel world where the consumers are
king and queen. Media owners are not the kings; they're the servants, the public
servants. We the consumers are the new royalty because we control the system: we
get to search through 57 different channels on cable TV, or even more channels
on satellite TV, and vote every minute of every day with our remote control
devices from among all the diverse, wonderful choices.

One rebuttal to this argument was sung by Bruce Springsteen, in a song titled
"57 Channels - and Nothing's On."

The best rebuttal not in a song came from Vladmir Pozner, who was a top
executive in Soviet TV during the Gorbachev era. Pozner points out that in the
old Soviet Union, there were more daily newspapers to choose from in Moscow than
in New York or Washington DC, and that there were dozens and dozens of different
magazine titles as well. The problem, Pozner said, was that all the newspapers
and magazines and TV channels came from two nearly identical sources, the Soviet
State or the Soviet Communist Party. Pozner's critique is aimed at the new
corporate media commissars.

To answer the question of whether a media system is democratic, you don't look
at how many different channels or magazine titles there are. You look at how
many different sources, different owners or different social institutions and
classes control those channels and speak through those channels -- and whether
ordinary people and their representatives can speak through those channels.

In the US, whether your system has 57 or 157 TV channels, most of the channels
are owned by a shrinking number of interlocked corporations. The number is
five: 1) AOL-Time Warner, which owns CNN; 2) Disney; 3) Viacom, which owns
MTV; 4) Rupert Murdoch's News Corp; and ) GE/General Electric which, besides
being a major military manufacturer, owns all the NBC news networks and along
with Disney, owns the History Channel. Not only do the Disneys and GEs control
the presentation of news of the day, but history as well.

So the key isn't how many channels there are, but who controls them. These five
TV companies are partners with each other overseas to expand their satellite and
cable TV reach into other countries, so they can make the consumers of the
Americas, Europe and Asia kings and queens. Murdoch boasts that his TV systems
and networks can reach 75% of the world's population. That's too much opinion-
shaping power in the hands of a single person.

The concentration of news media into the hands of a few corporations, mostly
entertainment conglomerates, has shifted mainstream US discourse in recent years
in two directions -- toward the right and toward diversion.

Today, corporate media turn news into an entertainment format, stories become
soap operas, with only soap opera type news covered in depth: so the U.S. public
become experts on O.J. Simpson's murder trial, Princess Diana's car crash,
Monica Lewinsky's White House affair. But most people in the U.S. don't know
what WTO stands for. Prior to Sept 11, many mainstream news outlets functioned -
as they usually do during peacetime - as weapons of mass distraction. Since Sept
11, they are functioning -- as they usually do during times of war - as weapons
of mass distortion and hysteria.

The shift rightward in US news has been profound. There are more TV news
channels and more news talk on radio, but because of media
ownership/sponsorship, it's rare for corporate critics to be heard. And whole
issues are censored.

The censorship is sometimes difficult to see because US media culture prides
itself on presenting debates, or what look like debates. The media system often
looks vigorous and open and fair because debates are regularly served up,
especially on issues of gender, gay rights, race, the misconduct of celebrities.
One of the biggest debates lately involves the soap opera of the American
Taliban, Jihad Johnny Walker as he's known: What should be done with the
traitor?

But big economic issues are generally not debated, for example, corporate
globalization, or the growing gaps in wealth and income in the US. Growing
wealth gaps in the world are never covered - (because other countries usually
only get covered when US military forces are at war with them.) Most foreign
and military policy is not subject to debate: e.g. the killing of Afghan
civilians by US bombing.

Thanks to corporate control of the news, if you look at the 50 most visible
commentators who debate the issues, they may split roughly 25 to 25 on debates
over certain issues of gay rights, but on issues of say, the World Trade
Organization, the split is 48 to 2 in favor of the WTO. On the war in
Afghanistan, the split is 50 to 0 in support of the war. In other words, no
debate.

The spectrum of debate in US media generally extends no broader than from
General Electric to General Motors, from GE and GM. Timothy Leary, the advocate
of LSD and psychotic drugs, once commented that watching debate programs on CNN
was like watching right-wing.left-wing. I've come to believe that's the most
sober observation Tim Leary ever made.

Because right-wing voices are so dominant in the US media and genuine left-wing
voices usually missing altogether, mainstream debates about media bias are
sometimes ridiculous. Debates question whether the mainstream media are biased
against big business or too sympathetic to racial minorities or not supportive
enough of the Afghan War or of Israel. I took part in a recent TV debate, I'm
not joking, where I had to respond to a right-wing author who accused the US
media of being overly sympathetic to Arabs.

As bad as things are, they'd be much worse if we hadn't started FAIR in 1986.

Importance of mobilizing against exclusion in current media system, in building
toward movement demanding more democratic media structure

FAIR is a media watch group that monitors news bias and censorship, and
mobilizes activists to fight for pluralism and real debate. Our activists come
from the feminist, labor, environmental, civic rights and peace movements.

Before FAIR, these activists were expert at protesting against governmental
agencies and business - and then grumbling among themselves about the lack of
news coverage of their issues, or lack of accurate coverage. After FAIR, these
activists have gained experience protesting against media institutions
themselves. FAIR demonstrations are often colorful: when major dailies were
attempting to bury evidence linking the CIA and Nicaraguan contras to cocaine
trafficking, FAIR helped lead a demonstration at the Los Angeles Times, where it
never snows. So we brought a Hollywood snow making machine to the newspaper's
office and manufactured snow -- and we called the event a "Stop the Snow Job"
protest. I've read about protests led by the Brazilian Workers Party outside
broadcast headquarters.

FAIR collaborates with working journalists in mainstream media. FAIR has
repeatedly gone to the defense of mainstream journalists who were fired or
censored - not for inaccurate reporting, but for stepping on powerful economic
or political toes.

FAIR is best known for its studies of who gets to speak as an expert in national
media -- and who doesn't. FAIR has documented a pattern of political, class,
gender, and racial bias and exclusion. Our studies of TV news often get big
coverage in mainstream dailies, because if there's one thing that newspapers
like to cover, it's television. After FAIR exposed biases in guest selection at
the most influential daily TV news show, a show called Nightline, a mainstream
columnist started referring to the show as "Whiteline." Elite journalists easily
ignore criticism when it's only in "alternative" or left-wing outlets, but they
find it painful to be criticized in big, mainstream publications.

The embarrassment caused by FAIR's studies sometimes pushes news outlets to
interview progressive experts they would otherwise have ignored. Noam Chomsky
almost never appears on US TV. After one of our studies shamed a particular news
show, he got a rare invitation. We wrote it up in our magazine afterward:
"Chomsky Appears on the NewsHour: Western Civilization Survives."

FAIR disseminates its critiques through special reports, a regular magazine, our
web site at FAIR.org, and a weekly radio show, "CounterSpin," which is on 110
non-commercial stations in the US and Canada. FAIR's main method of
mobilization is our email list serve that sends "Action Alerts" once or twice a
week to 24 thousand people. It can generate over 1,000 email messages to the
news outlet being confronted over bias or censorship.

At this forum over the next days, I hope to meet with people who are engaging in
this kind of media criticism and mobilization, and with people who want to
launch groups like FAIR in other countries.

Democratization of the media structure

While FAIR sometimes succeeds in broadening mainstream news coverage, our main
success has been in delegitimizing the corporate media system and in helping to
build the beginnings of a movement that seeks structural reform of the media.

Major areas of reform are: 1) demonopolization 2) saving and strengthening
public service broadcasting systems 3) winning set asides for non-commercial
media on every information pipeline, and 4) shifting resources and public funds
to non-commercial media.

There are finally members of the US Congress ready to propose that limits be re-
imposed on media ownership so that a single company can't own more than a few
stations.

Media activists are fighting to restructure public broadcasting to return it to
its original mission of giving voice to the voiceless -- and to prevent
corporate takeovers of what were once non-commercial public TV and radio
stations.

In Washington, successful battles have been waged to set aside space on
satellite TV systems for non-commercial channels. And at the local level,
activists have succeeded in getting city and town governments (for example, in
Vermont) to demand that, in return for extending the cable franchise to Time
Warner for 10 years, that 10 percent of the cable channels be set aside for
public access or educational use, with good studios and cameras provided by Time
Warner.

A new proposal to help fund the non-commercial media sector -- promoted by
Professor Robert W McChesney -- would allow each taxpayer to take $200 out of
their taxes and direct it to the non-profit med outlet of his or her choice -
for example, the Independent Media Center of New York. Another source of funding
could come from the sale of electromagnetic spectrum. My favorite way of funding
non-commercial media would be from a 1% tax on TV and radio commercials.

The importance of gatherings like the World Social Forum is that we can spread
the word about independent media successes or media reform victories from
country to country. We are resisting a common enemy that respects no borders: a
global media system that uses the rhetoric of choice and openness as it
extinguishes real diversity. It tells us we are the kings and queens as it
amasses more power and wealth, and takes away from us our own public resource:
the airwaves.

* Comments formulated during the Conference: "Democratization of communications
and the media", held on February 3 2002, at the 2nd World Social Forum.