Democratizing the Mass Media:
An Assessment and a Proposal
copyright 1999 by Randy Baker

In the United States, the parameters of political "common sense" are established in large part by the corporate media. And the corporate media (including most public broadcasting, which is heavily corporate financed) depict "common sense" as a Fortune 500 way of seeing.

As a result, most public policy debate remains within the confines of a Fortune 500 agenda. Consider single-payer health care, a clearly superior alternative to our current health care system and enormously unpopular in the corporate elite. The corporate media depicted single-payer as an unworkable government boondoggle. While the proposal was extremely popular with the general public just a few years ago, it is now widely regarded as unworkable.

The idea of a post-Cold War "peace dividend," diverting much of the military budget to public goods, was also very popular in the early 1990's. This notion also was strongly opposed by the corporate elite. Virtually ignoring this alternative, the mainstream press produced a torrent of stories about "rogue-states" and the enormous legal, humanitarian and strategic value accrued through U.S. military attacks against them, the facts notwithstanding. Today, alternatives to the military-industrial complex and perpetual U.S. military intervention abroad are no more visible to the public than they were during the Cold War. The list of progressive alternatives buried under corporate media flack is nearly endless.

Under these circumstances, Robert McChesney's, contention that democratizing the mass media must become a central -- perhaps the central -- concern of progressives is hard to dispute. And progressives are increasingly focusing on this issue. Most of the focus, however, seems to aim at one of three approaches, none of which I believe is likely to substantially change the status quo.

The first approach is government regulation, i.e. break-up the media conglomerates and undo the Reagan era's deregulation of broadcasting. Certainly such changes would be helpful. It is undeniable that the breadth and depth of information available through the corporate media have shrunk significantly in the last 20 years.

Yet, it would be unrealistic to think that these reforms, really a return to the status quo ante, would yield a media open to debate beyond Fortune 500 perimeters. Even before the networks were owned by the behemoths that hold them now, and while they were subject to "public service" regulations, they were already owned by Fortune 500 corporations and their reporting was almost always from a Fortune 500 vantage point. One need look no further than today's New York Times, still owned by the same people who owned it 50 years ago, to see the serious limitations this approach.

Another set of proposals would restructure public broadcasting by ending corporate sponsorship of programming and insulating it from government pressure. This plan is more promising than anti-trust and re-regulation, because experience shows that it can work, at least to some extent. Not that many years ago, public broadcasting -- particularly public radio -- frequently provided a venue for information and ideas outside the Fortune 500 consensus. While it was still very heavily slanted to a Fortune 500 perspective, one could reason that if public broadcasting once did a half-decent job, maybe it is possible to make it a truly independent news organization. Maybe.

There are two serious problems with this idea. First, any such effort will be stigmatized as expanding "government bureaucracy." Such stigmatization will be effective, thanks to the extreme distortion of our political "common sense" produced largely by our corporate media. Second, such reform necessarily involves complex legal detail. Absent a highly mobilized public, this legal nuance will prove fatal to the reform. That is because, even if a reform proposal were somehow pushed through Congress, by the time it emerged, it would be so compromised through largely invisible but crucial details, such as allocation of discretion over senior appointments, that it would likely remain controlled by loyal allies of the Fortune 500.

Then there is a third approach, the new technologies approach, pirate radio, Internet, etc. Clearly, this approach avoids the problems of the first two. Content is freed from the constraints of government personnel appointments and corporate financing and ownership. There is no stigma of "government bureaucracy," since everyone can be his or her own Internet or pirate radio programmer.

Of course, there is the problem posed by real government bureaucracy, i.e. the FCC, the courts and the occasional SWAT team storming a pirate radio station. But, let's put that problem aside for the moment. The deeper problem with this approach is that it presupposes that to have a democratic media, we need only a mass media technology, which is affordable to all.

I think experience has conclusively shown this is not true. Printing technology has been widely accessible for a long time. Yet, it is the corporate controlled New York Times and Washington Posts of the world that dominate the attention of newspaper readers. Indeed, the corporate elite are quick to cite this as evidence that the public prefers its offerings to anything coming from outside the corporate consensus. Similarly, Pacifica Radio affiliates (at least used to) offer non-corporate alternatives in several cities, yet the corporate radio stations dominate radio audiences even in these venues.

The reason is money. The corporate media have it and the rest of us don't. New media technologies may be nice, and even wonderful, but unless there is engaging and/or informative content, it won't generate an audience. Producing such content requires hard work by trained reporters, editors, producers, etc. Moreover, to win an audience one must acquire a reputation for producing engaging and or/informative content, which means producing such content over time. Indeed, even the regular production of high quality content won't suffice without vigorous and effective promotion of that content -- otherwise nobody will know about it. Such promotion also requires hard work by trained personnel, and advertising space, mailings etc.

The only way to secure sustained hard work from trained personnel, for news content or promotion, not to mention ad space, is with lots of money for salaries and expenses. Pirate radio and the Internet, as such, don't produce money -- at least not for non-corporate programmers. So, valuable as they might be, it is improbable that these new technologies will break the corporate media's vice-grip on the parameters of public discussion -- although one hopes they will open it a crack.

If lots of money is needed to democratize the mass media, where do progressives get large amounts of money? Since progressives are rarely members of the corporate elite, we don't have it ourselves. There are, of course, labor and some progressive foundations. They certainly could devote more money than they do to forming an independent media. I think, however, that the various internal politics and concerns of these entities make any substantial diversion of resources (and labor's resources are hardly limitless) to a progressive media improbable.

Moreover, while labor unions and progressive foundations are eminently more hospitable to progressive ideas than the corporate elite and the corporate media, a communications media beholden to them would undoubtedly have its own sacred cows and double standards. Accordingly, even if labor and progressive foundations would fund a non-corporate media, those entities would likely not be the sort of "unfettered" communications media that we really need.

Dean Baker, an economist at the Preamble Foundation, has offered a proposal which could solve this money problem. Under Baker's proposal, the government would grant every adult citizen an entitlement to direct the U.S. Treasury to direct a specific sum of money (let's say $150 per person per year) to a non-profit communications organization, or portions thereof to organizations, of his or her choice. The allocation could work something like the current taxpayer check-off to political parties, except that non-taxpayers would be entitled to participate as well as taxpayers -- just pick-up a form at the post office or at the ballot box, fill it out, and hand it in.

Such a policy would make in excess of 30 billion dollars per year available to the non-profit media. The potential impact of such an infusion of money on journalistic, intellectual and artistic freedom and on the breadth of public discourse could be revolutionary. Large corporations, small corporations, advertisers, governmental appointees, Congress, foundations, etc. could be entirely removed from the process of selecting, evaluating, writing and distributing information, ideas and images. The purse strings of the media would lie in the hands of their audiences, which, given the alternatives, would not be such a bad thing at all.

Paying for this proposal would be fairly easy. A .5% (1/2 %) securities transaction tax could do the job. Such a tax was proposed by certifiably mainstream economists Lawrence Summers, currently Secretary of Treasury (formerly at Harvard), and Joseph Stiglitz, now at the World Bank and former Chairperson of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Baker has calculated that such a tax would raise well in excess of $30 billion per year. Moreover, Summers' and Stiglitz's analysis shows that such a tax could actually benefit the economy by reducing unproductive speculation, and thereby rendering securities' markets more stable -- a benefit many might appreciate in light of the renewed volatility of securities markets.

Even when pension funds are considered, only persons whose incomes place them in the top 3-5 percent of earners, would pay any significant amount towards the tax. So, the burden of the tax would fall on those with incomes over $150,000 per year. Despite the corporate media pundits' claims to the contrary, increasing taxes on the wealthy is generally quite popular.

As to the non-profit requirement, it does provide some wedge for government control. However, absent such a requirement, large private firms -- like Disney -- might use their tremendous marketing power to bring most of the funds back into their own pockets. Moreover, as it stands, an extremely wide range of social, cultural, educational and activist organizations have satisfied these relatively easy and non-discretionary IRS rules. So, at least for the present, it seems the risk posed by a non-profit condition is minimal and the benefit substantial.

Notwithstanding initial knee-jerk opposition (part of our corporate "common sense") to a new spending measure, this proposal has enormous political potential. First, it accords no authority to "big government" and would be financed by money which doesn't come from most people's tax dollars, but rather from a new tax on the wealthy. Second, the increasingly crass commercialism and frivolousness of the corporate media has caused substantial numbers of Americans, most of whom do not identify with the left, to conclude that the corporate media (particularly the corporate news media) are no longer serving their needs (perhaps the President and Ms. Lewinsky are owed some thanks here) -- and to desire an alternative.

Moreover, it is not just the corporate media which have lost credibility with the general public. There is now a widespread distrust and resentment against corporate power in general, and polling data show this disaffection runs all the way people who vote Republican. Commensurate with this disaffection is a similarly broad range of support for serious limitations on large campaign contributions, and rapidly growing support for public funding of elections.

People know, in other words, that you can't have a democracy if only the rich get to vote -- or if only the rich get to choose who has enough money to run for office, which is almost the same thing. Well, you can't have a democracy when only the rich own and control the mass media either, because then the rich get to choose which ideas and alternatives secure enough public visibility to become policy.

The broader public came to understand that democracy required that people without property, African-Americans and women have the right to vote. Given the current awareness of the power of money over politics today, there is a real possibility we can make this principle, which is the predicate of this funding proposal, broadly understood as well.

One immediate source of potential support would be the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of persons who work on non-profit newsletters, web sites, radio programs, films and videos, public access television shows, etc. This group would have a tremendous incentive to support the proposal, since it could increase, and even explode, their revenue base. Moreover, since this segment of the population is by definition relatively influential, notwithstanding its presumably widely varying political inclinations, it would be a valuable political ally.

This points to another advantage of the proposal, which is that it would help narrow the gap between professional culture producer and citizen in the sense that virtually anybody could become a journalist, producer and persons and institutions now at the margins of culture production could move into its mainstream. That is, they could produce on a regular basis for a significant audience.

If a person could persuade even 100 fellow citizens to direct their $150 (or 200 citizens to direct half their $150) to his or her newsletter, for example, that newsletter would have a $15,000 annual operating budget. That may not be enough to live on, but it could cover significant expenses and yield some compensation for the journalist. Given the number of community and non-profit organizational publications and websites already in existence, such a policy would almost certainly yield an explosion of these institutions. Thousands of actual and aspiring I.F. Stones could emerge, and this could do much to move us away from corporate society and towards democracy.

Moreover, it is easy to imagine revenues for independent outlets such as In These Times and Z Magazine, which already have significant audiences, increasing several hundred percent were this proposal enacted. This would almost certainly vastly expand their reach and thereby also materially contribute to the opening of public discourse.

Of course, it will not just be muckrakers and progressives who would benefit from this proposal, conservatives and extreme reactionaries would also receive funds.

While this is not a pleasant thought, it does not discredit the proposal. First, the right and the extreme right, and their mass media, are doing very well as it is. Indeed, racism, xenophobia etc. have been increasingly entering "mainstream" political discourse and receiving commensurate attention and respect in the corporate media. Consider the respectful and extensive attention given the latest psuedo-scientific efforts to impute the inferior social position of African-Americans to defective genetic endowment.

Second, the far right already has an enormous mass media. Virtually fascist blather is regularly broadcast to millions on right-wing religious television programs.

Third, increasing accessibility to the media is not necessarily good for the right. The right is far from homogeneous and it is also far from democratic. The proliferation of "right-wing" media outlets might actually clarify many of the differences within the right, which are now glossed over by the centralized right wing media. The result of such an opening of discussion may well be that some people who had been looking right for solutions may find that, they actually have more in common with the left -- that they are more populists than authoritarian.

Fourth, it is only a slight exaggeration to characterize the left as being so far down it has no where else to go but up. Put in other terms. Public discourse is essentially saturated with discussion between the corporate center, the corporate right and complete reactionaries.

Even on the pessimistic assumption that 95% of the 30 plus billion made available by the proposal went to these same sources or to relatively apolitical news outlets, and only 5% went to progressive or muckraking types, the marginal increase in resources for the mainstream and the right would be perhaps 40-75%. Conversely, the marginal increase in resources for progressive outlets would be -- very conservatively speaking -- several thousand percent! Progressives, in short, could secure an explosive increase in their visibility.

Conversely, given their complete domination of public discourse as it is, it is questionable whether the additional monies would enable those on the far right, right and center to experience much of an increase in visibility at all. In fact, for the reasons mentioned, the increasing diversity of publicly visible sources from these political groupings might actually undermine their strength.

One may still ask, what justifies taking $30 billion for the media when there are scores of urgent problems, such as health care, education and housing on which those funds could be spent? Well, the answer is they cannot be so spent -- at least not now. Such monies cannot be spent on those problems, because progressives lack the political power to cause the funds to be so spent.

Progressives may, however, be able to build the political power to direct the funds to finance something on the order of this proposal. And since our broader political ideas and proposals are far from utterly incredible and/or unattractive, a dramatic expansion of our ability to be seen and heard would likely result the redirection of resources to many of these currently unaddressed urgent needs.

Clearly, with average annual income exceeding $300,000 per year for the upper 3% of the population, and tax rates in this stratum as low as 20% -- not to mention the fabulous military budget -- there are many hundreds of billions of dollars available for such purposes. What we need is the political power to redirect these resources.

In order to build this political power, however, we must first acquire the ability to talk to ourselves without having that talk filtered by the three percent which now controls the resources we need to solve our problems. Advancing a proposal such as this may be one of the most effective means to realize this goal.