We’re living through an age of massive media paradox, Robert McChesney warns us. On one hand, Internet technology puts customized information, vast research engines, in the hands of any user; the machinery is here to make every man, woman and child a broadcaster to the whole world. On the other hand, sitting atop this golden web, is a shorter and shorter list of unimaginably rich global media empires-like AOL/Time-Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation and AT&T–delivering a less and less diversified menu of news and entertainment to the peoples of the world.
It’s that big media that’s winning, McChesney says, and that any sane citizen has to worry about: the giantism and hypercommercialism and then the denigration of journalism and public service. Concentration of media, in his equation, is a poison pill for Democracy. Robert McChesney’s alarm bell for the Information Age is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Robert McChesney, author of “Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times.”