Despite influences from the internet, today’s major press and television media are no longer as free or open to competition, and they remain owned and editorially controlled by capital and a handful of mega-corporations. This new media estate calls for new legislation and/or professional interventions to deal with a far more monopolized, globalized, and factor-imbalanced media.
Where a mostly private, corporate, media environment exists, and editor hirings and firings remain the exclusive province of a handful of owners, the potential for plutocracy and denial of democracy is near complete. Clearly, no effective democracy or salutary socio-economic balance can then exist where information and media are so monopolized by either "factor" to the socio-economic equation – be it capital or labor.
Yet exactly this condition of imbalance, and one-factor monopoly of media, now serves to distort our society, economy, and democracy.
In contrast to the media estate at the founding of the Republic, today’s for-profit media now spans the globe. Its ever-increasing concentration of ownership allows a handful of owners, and their hand-picked editors, to shape debate, and spin or disappear dissent. In this setting, a "five-hundred channel" environment and unread internet sites mean nothing if all major radio and television media channels are controlled by capital, and set to its for-profit purposes.
As commercialization and back door cleansing of the internet continues the people increasingly have little or no control over the content of their informational life-blood... particularly within our major media organizations. Instead, a handful of owners, editors, and news agencies control the facts and opinions flowing to ever-greater numbers. Thus, the impact of the editorial powers of a handful of private concerns, and a few men like Rupert Murdoch, grows to global proportions.
In effect, a once freer, more representative and local, press has been replaced by a one-factor-owned and increasingly global "fourth estate" - with but one dogma and infallible agenda. But whose information is it?
As for-profit mega-media acquires ever greater global influence, the problem with employee-editor relationships is that the public has no way to protect editors, or the public interest, from a handful of owner’s ideologies, political preferences, and retributions against dissident editors or journalists. Major media owners remain free to treat editors as at-will employees, and manage opinion and content as their private preserve. This is an intolerable state of affairs in a democracy.
In fact, capital alone now controls "our" economy, media, central bank, campaign finance system and so, in effect, our democracy. In practice, the vast majority of wage-earning citizen’s concerns and interests are denied and disappeared. As a result, only capital’s ideas, values, and concerns reach the public and our legislators.
While, in theory, politicians may threaten media owners with license review or anti-trust action, it is media owners who appear to possess the greater weapon today – i.e., one useful against incumbent politicians and aspiring candidates fearful of bad press, lack of access, and endorsement of opponents. Exactly this sorry, quid-pro-quo, relationship leads to media corruption and grid-lock benefiting a ruling, corporate, class.
It is time to free the press and enact an Editor Freedom Act.
Kent Welton,
EditorFreedom.com
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