Empire of the Air

[Duncan Frissell]

I'm grateful to Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri, of the social 
satire "Empire" for reminding me of a *very* inconvenient fact that the 
foes of  Media Monopoly hope we'll forget.

On the WBUR (Boston) program "The Connection" after talking about the 
initial promise of radio as a liberating medium he said:

"The way radio and television have developed have been ways in which 
democratic voices have been excluded systematically and have been 
controlled by the forces of capital -- the ones who own these media."

See: http://www.theconnection.org/archive/2001/07/0723a.shtml

Listen: 
http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/w/b/wbur/connection/audio/2001/07/con_0723a.rm 
(quote appears just after 16:00).

What he hopes the rest of the world will forget and Americans will never 
know is that from the dawn of broadcasting until the last few years almost 
all of the Earth's radio  and television were owned and operated by the 
various national governments.

Read the history of the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline if you want to see 
the lengths to which governments went to secure their monopoly:

http://www.radiocaroline.co.uk/history/index.htm

With all of the different channels into our brains (many of which didn't 
exist 25 years ago), it is hard to argue that electronic media is less 
competitive than it was when most of it was controlled by governments.

DCF
----
When I was growing up, three white guys in NYC determined everything 90% of
Americans saw on TV.  Most towns had no more than two newspapers.  Radio
was exclusively Top 40 format.  Yet, today, with 6 broadcast networks,
1000 newspapers available online, netcasting costing $39.95/month, and 5
Gigs of webpages extant, those commentators who themselves favor monopoly
*government* complain that a Media Monopoly exists.  There are more media
outlets than ever.