Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism

Rating:
Summary: Freeing Our Press
Review: This book collects some stunning examples of U.S. media criticism from 1906 through 2003. The introduction is in many ways a wonderful work of analysis. The primary purpose it lays out for the book is establishing that radical criticism of for-profit media is not new or rare in this country, that, as in other countries, it has been around as long as mass media have. The book accomplishes this purpose admirably, providing key samples of what is clearly a long and rich tradition.

There is a rapidly growing media reform movement in the United States at present, one to which the authors of this book have contributed through their work for an organization called Free Press. Many could be forgiven for imagining that popular revolt over concentration and abuse of media power is something new, or at least that it is growing because the concentration and abuse have become uniquely extreme.

The review of history presented in this book suggests otherwise. While providing useful insights for the contemporary media analyst and opportunities for the drawing of lessons out of past failures and successes, this collection also provides a great deal of frustration. Here are all the familiar problems, in one form or another, stretching back for a century. Here are all the familiar solutions -- and even more radical solutions that we dare not dream of today. And here is an endless string of failures. This book is well worth reading, but requires a certain fortitude.

When Franklin Roosevelt ran for reelection following his first term, U.S. newspapers favored Alf Landon. But Roosevelt used the radio to speak around the newspaper editors, and he won decisively. (Will the internet ever perform a similar function?) More than one media critic cited this election as an indictment of the press's failure to follow public opinion. Indeed. But a reader today is more likely to see in this episode evidence of a glorious era in which the public was able to ignore the commands of the press.

At least one media critic excerpted in this book expressed concern in 1937 that FDR had won merely because he was a better speaker on the radio, thus revealing the danger that "a demagogue with dictatorial aspirations" might win some future election unless the newspapers gained the confidence of the public. The assumption here seemed to be that newspapers could provide more substantive content than any candidate could provide through what were not yet called sound bites.

Today U.S. newspapers avoid substantive content like the plague and devote much of their coverage to analysis of who delivers the better sound bites. An argument could be made that the broadcast media have succeeded so far in eliminating substance from politics that the newspapers now follow along.

However, FDR's fireside chats were not sound bites, but treatises, by today's standards. It is not at all clear that he won for superficial reasons. And the chief route by which substance squeezes its way through the media today is not in print but on C-Span, the cable network that employs camera crews mercifully devoid of commentators to transmit speeches and forums to viewers simply as the occur (though of course C-Span chooses which speeches to air and which not to).

The fundamental difference between the election of 1936 and those of the late 20th century and early 21st century is not the form or conduct of the media, but the presence of a candidate like Roosevelt as the nominee of one of the two dominant parties. Today's media would never allow a candidate who threatened corporate power to gain such a nomination. Ralph Nader is effectively marginalized each time he runs. Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton were shut out by the media in last year's Democratic primaries. We learned more about their hair styles, their diets, their childhoods, than anything important - other than the "fact" that they were "fringe" and "vanity" candidates who didn't actually intend to win. The media promoted Howard Dean (which helped to exclude Kucinich and Sharpton) and then turned on him so hard that his head is probably still spinning. Who wouldn't trade this system for one that permitted the nomination of an FDR, regardless of how the media then treated the nominee?