> generally, your facts are correct, carrol, but they have nothing to do
with
> media monopolies, or concentration. the changes you believe are for the
> better occured largely due to social movements in the 1960s
Of course. That's also why Nixon was the most progressive president we've had in the last 30+ years.
> and were due,
> among other things, to people who fought concentration of media ownership.
Nonsense. I doubt that the rioters in Watts or West Chicago gave a thought to "media concentration." The point is that the media has always been capitalist, and concentrated or not concentrated, pretty much reflects the current consensus of capitalist politics. You are mistaking a symptom for substance.
Carrol ^^^^^^^^^ CharlesB: I'm not sure on the basic issue in dispute, which seems to be, "should we spend any activist time opposing the greater and greater monopolization of the media ?" However, it occurs to me that on the historical evidence that might be brought to bare on that question the social movements of the 1960's themselves may have come into existence because the media was less concentrated in the 1950's and before. In other words, it wasn't, for example, that the rioters in Watts or West Chicago opposed media concentration, but that the media was less tightly controlled (because less concentrated) before the 60's. It was less tightly controlled and thereby did not prevent the reporting of events that influenced peoples' consciousness to make the social movements and riots of the 60's - news film of dogs attacking civil rights demonstrators in the South, news film of the Viet Nam war in everyone's living room, etc. So, reverse cause and effect a bit. It was not that the media was less concentrated because of the riots, but that there were riots because the media had been less concentrated. Today the equivalently disturbing images would never make it to the masses of televisions, etc. , in part because tighter control of content goes along with greater concentration of ownership ( although , perhaps that is part of the issue in dispute on this thread)
Of course, it is also probably true that the owners and CEO's, etc., of the media learned from gaps in their control from the 50's and 60's that they had to tighten up their censorship, and regardless of concentration or not, they would not today allow the media to play a role in fomenting mass discontent the way it did in the '50's and '60's. The myth that the U.S. has a "free press" is one of the biggest lies of the demogogy au current ( like everybody here didn't know that)