Adam Thierer explains how the Golden Age of Media (the one we are living in) will go away if the Left has its way.
The argument from the Left is two pronged. The first prong is that there's too little media diversity. Proponents of this prong constantly harangue about the "corporate ownership of the media" and that only a handful of very powerful voices are getting heard.
Thierer deflates this by pointing to the sheer number of outlets available for media consumption today versus 40 or 50 years ago. He calls this group of liberals the "scarcity critics."
On the face of it, the scarcity critics have a tough case to make. According to FCC data and various private reports, America boasts close to 14,000 radio stations today, double the number that existed in 1970. Satellite radio—an industry that didn’t even exist before 2001—claimed roughly 13 million subscribers nationwide by 2007. Eighty-six percent of households subscribe to cable or satellite TV today, receiving an average of 102 channels of the more than 500 available to them. There were 18,267 magazines produced in 2005, up from 14,302 in 1993. The only declining media sector is the newspaper business, which has seen circulation erode for many years now. But that’s largely a result of the competition that it faces from other outlets.
Throw the Internet into the mix and you get dizzy. The Internet Systems Consortium reports that the number of Internet host computers—computers or servers that allow people to post content on the Web—has grown from just 235 in 1982 to 1.3 million in 1993 to roughly 400 million in 2006. At the beginning of 2007, the blog-tracking service Technorati counted over 66 million blogs, with more than 175,000 new ones created daily. Bloggers update their sites “to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second,” according to Technorati.
But the scarcity critics have a rejoinder: the apparent diversity isn’t real, because a handful of media barons—hell-bent on force-feeding us their politically reactionary pabulum and commercial messages—control most of it (even before any FCC ownership rule changes). “You can literally say you actually have more voices, but they are the same voices increasingly,” says New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta. Even the Internet isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The Consumer Federation of America’s Mark Cooper, author of Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age, lambastes the Internet for failing to serve “the public interest,” for being too commercial, for not helping local communities, for hurting deliberative democracy, and for failing to enhance citizens’ ability “to define themselves and their place in everyday life.” Who knew that the Internet was so harmful to modern society?
The argument about the internet, in particular, seems to be a bit disengenous, given that more liberals are online activists than conservatives.
Thierer rebuts the argument by pointing that the abundance of media outlets--from television, radio, newspapers, and magazines to the internet--is only possible if different viewpoints are being expressed. While liberals see no difference between Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, each show offers different things to their audiences, even where those audiences overlap. And if the viewpoints presented really weren't diverse, liberals should complain that the Daily Show, Bill Maher, and Keith Olbermann are all saying the same things. Of course, they don't mind those shows.
The second prong of the argument is what lawyers call "arguing in the alternative." Basically, this term means "even if you don't believe that argument, you should believe this one." In this case, the alternative argument is that there are too many outlets for news and information, and therefore we have lost the communal sense of the "universal campfire," at which we all learn the same things from the same sources. The argument states that having soooo many choices leads to "extreme social fragmentation, isolation, and alienation, and could lead to political extremism."
I'll admit there are a lot of loons out there who believe some crazy things (mainly from the Left), but that doesn't mean there are "too many" media outlets. It means that far more people are expressing themselves through these outlets (for example, MySpace).
And as Thierer points out, there are entire businesses built around managing the new information explosion. Google, Technorati, Memeorandum, and others provide ways for users to sift through all the information available to find the information they want.
The underlying link between these two prongs, according to Thierer, is simple elitism.
Media abundance (which the scarcity critics must implausibly wave away as a mirage) has meant more room for right-of-center viewpoints that, while popular with many Americans, the critics find completely unacceptable. The fact that Bill O’Reilly gets better ratings than Bill Moyers perturbs them to no end. It’s just not fair!
Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction. Scarcity-obsessed Dennis Kucinich has recently introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that’s defined. A new Fairness Doctrine would affect most directly opinion-based talk radio, a medium that just happens to be dominated by conservatives. If a station wanted to run William Bennett’s show under such a regime, they might now have to broadcast a left-wing alternative, too, even if it had poor ratings, which generally has been the case with liberal talk. Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could impose “electronic sidewalks” on partisan websites (the National Rifle Association’s, say), forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be forbidding, even if it somehow proved constitutional. How many links to opposing views would secure the government’s approval? The FCC would need an army of media regulators (much as China has today) to monitor the millions of webpages, blogs, and social-networking sites and keep them in line.
It all comes back to the marketplace of ideas. As Thierer points out, the marketplace allows those ideas that best fit the desires and needs of the consumer to flourish. This means that there are winners...and losers, something touchy-feely liberals hate. Their ideas bomb on talk radio, so they want to stifle talk radio. They hate FOX News, so they have to attempt to delegitimatize it by cowardly refusing to have their debates broadcast there. Basically, they can't compete in the game of free speech, so they want to manipulate the rules.
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