Liberal Media Conspiracy?

But most of those channels are owned by about five different companies. Same with your radio dial - over half of those stations are going to be Clear Channel-owned. Same with your newspapers; most of those are going to be owned by, or own, your local TV outlets.True, the internet has ushered in an age of "information overload" - for the people that have their own access to the internet. Change it to a channel owned by the same company? How does that solve anything?The "diversity" of media is deceptive; there's a lot less choice than there would appear to be. Information oveload, yes, but we also live in an age of media conglomeration, with significant barriers to access to all but a handful of media elites.It's a strange quandary; I'm not certain that I know what to do about it, and I don't yet think that government-mandated "fairness" is the answer. At any rate I'm a lot less interested in "fairness" in the media than I am in accuracy or truthfulness in the media, which is in short supply these days.Our Constitution puts us in a bit of a problem, I think. In 1776 the biggest threat to personal freedom was an overbearing, authoritarian government that had not even a token responsibility to its citizens, and the Constitution is designed to protect us from that. These days, the greatest threat to our personal freedom comes not from the government but from private enterprise, and the provisions of the Constitution make it very hard to defend ourselves from, essentially, ourselves. Somewhat off-topic - Thinkgeek.com sells a keychain widget that spams the IR codes for "power off" for about a bazillion different TV brands all in the space of a few seconds; you just point it at TVs in random locations and press the button to deactivate them. Ingenious, if you ask me.

Thanks. I guess I don't really have anywhere else to go with it, though - nobody's challenged the point or anything. I mean I guess I could try to work in an anti-Bush angle, referring to the decisions of former FCC chairman Michael Powell that facilitated further conglomeration of Big Media. But that's taking us off-topic.

Probably not. I'm certainly not aware of any collusion to advance a specific agenda; it's certainly the case, though, that cable and broadcast networks are motivated by a need to sell advertising, not inform the public truthfully. That to my mind only represents a "conspiracy" in so far as there's a concerted effort by conservatives to ensure that the most attractive means of generating profit by Big Media is to move to the right and avoid challenging leading Republican figures.I don't think there's much we can do about it except complain as loudly as possible, again and again and again, when Big Journalism abandons truth for the fake balance.

I appreciate your post. Thanks.