Fighting for Air
How has corporate consolidation of local media impacted American political and cultural life?
That’s the question explored in the new book Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. Author Eric Klinenberg found that the past decade of media consolidation has done serious damage to American democracy.
Klinenberg will discuss Fighting for Air with Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott on C-SPAN 2 this Saturday, Feb. 3 at 9 p.m. EST and Sunday, Feb. 4 at 6 and 9 p.m. EST.
Fighting for Air looks at critical communications breakdowns like the chemical spill in Minot, North Dakota to illustrate the harsh consequences of a corporate media system that privileges profit over the public interest. From preprogrammed radio shows, to empty news stations and copycat newspapers, Klinenberg shows how Big Media giants have crushed the quality and diversity of our local media.
As Klinenberg writes:
“The 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet of stale news is crushing creative and independent voices, destroying the rich American tradition of local reporting, and clogging the informational arteries that make democracy work.”
Listen to a discussion of Fighting for Air at the National Conference for Media Reform.
Too late for me to have heard, I missed it. Does anybody know if he replied to Slate’s Jack Shafer over this column?
http://www.slate.com/id/2157395/
As I read it Shafer’s article is pretty devastating to Klinenberg’s argument. He leaves out just about every salient fact that points away from media consolidation as the culprit. Sounds to me like Klinenberg went in with his assumption and ignored any evidence that indicated something else was going on.
I work for the NAB in DC, so I’m not what you’d call disinterested. Actually, I’m very interested.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:37 amThanks for stopping by, dagNABit.
Before judging Klinenberg’s book by its, er, coverage, I’d suggest reading Peter DiCola’s “learned” (to quote Shafer himself) response to the article here:
http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=18686383
Then get yourself a copy of Fighting for Air, where you can learn any number of fun facts that Shafer overlooked, like the UCLA study cited on page 72 that found “the larger the station’s owner, the less diverse its play, both internally and relative to its peers.”
To save you the “Washington read,” NAB is cited on pages 32, 71, 204, 247, 251-53, 255-59, 270, 281 and 294.
I’m sure you’ll be very interested in that.
February 11th, 2007 at 6:56 pm