In late 2024, I posted an announcement regarding my plan for these resurrected Chicago Media Action newsletter dispatches. I felt at the time that I didn't have much more to write about, and I had thought that I would wind things down, and that the dispatch scheduled for today -- February 2, 2025 -- would be the last. Alas, I discovered three more newsletters in me over the past three months, thus postponing my plan to wrap up these monthly newsletters and then begin the process to transform them into a published book. (I may continue writing dispatches in a different form in the future after these newsletters conclude; I'm still mulling that over.)

But this month, we return back to the original plan. As announced, what follows marks the first of a two-part lengthy essay -- an updated version of a presentation I first gave (text, audio) in 2011 about the history of media activism in the United States. This would be the version I would include in the book to put the work of Chicago Media Action in a broader context, possibly as the first or an early chapter of that planned book.

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The title of this presentation is "Corporate Media Control and Media Reform Struggles", so I will provide a capsule history of media in the United States, focusing on the corporate control of media in the United States and the struggles to counter that, running through the present day. The presentation is divided roughly by medium: print and newspapers, the telegraph and telephone, movies, radio, television, what I call "cross-media concentration", and the internet, with some concluding remarks at the end. I will keep a roughly chronological flow in this presentation though I reserve the right to time travel, jumping on occasion from the past to the future and back again.

My goal is to share a sampling of the work on struggling for a better media in the United States, to empower you with this story, and hopefully inspire you to join in this work, especially given the central role media play in all struggles for a better tomorrow and the successes that we have won, with hopefully more successes to come.

We begin our story with the founding of the first national media network in the United States, though many people today don't consider it a media resource, yet it was incredibly critical for forging an open and diverse discourse in the early United States for the better part of 70 years. I'm referring to the post office. Most of the post office's traffic before 1840 was newspapers; the percentage of postal traffic that was newspapers grew from 70% in 1794 to over 90% in 1832. Indeed, in the early days of the American republic, it was given that a democratic society required as wide a realm of discourse as possible, and that the post office should be subsidized by the government to encourage that discourse. Some even thought that all postal traffic should be free, but a relatively modest tax was implemented to provide a subsidy. Indeed, many social justice movements of the early 19th century, including the growing abolitionist movement, credited these post office subsidies for their growth of their own efforts. That the government subsidized the relatively open medium of the post office lies in stark contrast to the history of the telegraph, which we'll discuss later.

For much of the 19th century, in the larger American cities, a great many newspapers were published, making for a vibrant media scene. A city the size of St. Louis circa 1880 had as many as ten daily newspapers, and the barriers to entry were comparatively low so that it was possible for new newspapers to launch and succeed. I remember seeing a presentation some years back about Chicago newspapers circa 1910, and which showed a sampling of five Chicago socialist newspapers published in Polish, and that's just the narrow subset of Chicago, socialism, and the Polish language, never mind other cities, other languages, other political points of view. Indeed, one of the most popular national newspapers of a left persuasion, a Socialist newspaper from Kansas called Appeal to Reason had two million subscribers at its peak. But the newspaper industry would face two changes -- the involvement of commercial advertising, and the widespread adoption of nonpartisan reporting. With the reliance on commercialism, the costs for maintaining a newspaper rose, reliance on sources of wealth grew as did corruption and outright lying, and newspapers that couldn't find those sources of wealth or refused to swim in this sordid sea stopped publishing. Most American cities by 1920 became one or two newspaper towns. (It has gotten worse; since 2004 the country has lost a quarter of its newspapers, and two-thirds of counties in the United States have no daily newspaper; we'll get back to that.)

There's a big connection with the 19th century newspaper industry and the telegraph, which we'll see momentarily. The modern electric telegraph, most everyone knows was patented in 1844 by Samuel Morse. What's not so well known was that Morse was a professional portrait painter whose wife Lucretia had died and was buried while he was away on a business trip. Shortly thereafter, Morse threw himself into the then-infant field of telecommunications, and with the help of advances in the science of electricity and other technical advances, was able to perfect the single-wire telegraph, allowing for far faster communications than before. But the fate of its widespread use, unlike that of the post office, wasn't slated for nationalization by an indifferent Congress in 1844 and the growing power of capital in 19th century America, exemplified by the burgeoning and increasingly corrupt railroad industry. Instead, the telegraph was itself subject to market whims and consolidation; more 50 different telegraphy firms ultimately consolidated into a single firm, Western Union. The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould wound up through some clever stock maneuvers seizing control of Western Union.

Critics feared that a monopoly of the telegraph could lead to unfair advantages in stock transactions. But another problem regarding corporate control of the news also would emerge, starting from a coalition of five New York newspapers who pooled their funds in 1846 to share the costs of telegraph time for the transfer of urgent news. This group called itself the New York Associated Press, which grew over time to encompass the entire country, dropping the "New York" part of its name, becoming the Associated Press and working out an exclusive arrangement with Western Union to becoming the only newswire service in the United States.

Perhaps the most noted example of the power that Western Union held regarding news in the presidential election of 1876; Western Union, a pro-Republican company, supported Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden. Western Union telegrams reported uncertainty in the electoral votes in three states, though the popular vote suggested a Tilden win. But with newspapers and public sentiment following the Western Union lead, Hayes held the upper hand, and ultimately won the White House. A later Senate investigation (headed by a Republican) found that the key telegrams were never reviewed by Democrats but ultimately returned to Western Union and destroyed. Tilden supporters would punnily referring to the AP as the "Hayessociated Press".

From 1880 to 1910, calls for nationalization of the telegraph began to grow, as part of the general populist movement efforts in the United States around the same time, raising calls to break the "infernal bondage" between the AP and Western Union. In response, some seventy Congressional bills were introduced between 1866 and 1900 calling for telegram reform, often calling for nationalization. Western Union lobbyists defeated all seventy of those bills, and newspapers, especially those aligned with the AP, refused to acknowledge the question of nationalizing the telegraph, understandably so given the dependence on the telegraph for news. Around the same time, a new medium, one not primarily restricted to big newspapers, stock traders, and other effete groups, would extend to a greater portion of the population than the telegraph ever did. That medium ironically enough stemmed directly from attempts to advance the telegraph, one of whose pioneers was a professor of phonetics at Boston University named Alexander Graham Bell.

Bell (and particularly Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who had far more of a nose for business than Bell did) wound up winning the patent wars for an advance for what was referred to as the harmonic telegraph -- the idea of transmitting multiple different telegraph signals, or "harmonics", across a single wire. But those harmonics can also carry individual sound frequencies, like those of the human voice, and the resulting known as the "telephone". By 1877, the Bell Telephone Company and its successor in the wake of a number of intervening mergers, the American Telephone and Telegraph company (or AT&T;) would become itself a behemoth thanks to the monopoly control of that patent.

But after the telephone patent expired in 1894, many many aspiring telephone groups and cooperatives entered the fray -- "the independents", as they were called, would go on to expand telephony service across the country, particularly in rural environments which were often ignored as not being enough of a lucrative market. The independents held some 40% of the overall telephone market at their peak and were starting to do something that AT&T didn't do: innovate. By 1908, AT&T was in trouble. That's when AT&T president Theodore Vail (whose career ironically included a stint in the post office) began to act -- he deployed a PR offensive with a slogan touting "universal service", buying out some of the independents and "sublicensing" with others for technical preference. That, and a growing unease with "dual service" (note that the phone lines by AT&T and by the independents were incompatible, thus requiring two separate phone lines for each household) helped to turn the tide. By 1920, AT&T controlled 66% of the market, by 1932, it held 81% of the market and wouldn't look back until the 1980s when an antitrust settlement finally broke the AT&T monopoly. We'll get back to that.

During the early 20th century, both the growing telephone industry and shrinking telegraph industry were facing another rival that could do something neither industry could do: show moving pictures. The movie environment in the days of the silent film era from 1900 to about 1920 was markedly wide open, where neighborhood theaters and nickelodeons sprouted up and the cost of producing short films was rather low. Thus many people entered the arena of producing and showing films, including a great many political activists making films related to various causes such as labor activism, women's suffrage, and political radicalism. As it happened, Chicago was a major hub of the early film industry, being the home of major motion picture companies like Selig Polyscope (which produced a 1910 silent film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz) and Essenay (which included Charlie Chaplin on its roster of stars).

When I was in college, I read the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and I thought to myself that maybe someday someone should make a movie based on the book. It so happens that someone did make a movie based on the book; the All Star Feature Corporation made a silent film adaptation of the book The Jungle -- in 1914! -- which included a cameo by Upton Sinclair himself. If you're hoping to see the film today, I'm afraid you cannot; there are no copies of the full film known to exist. But it's an exemplar of the range of films available to filmgoers about 100 years ago. To be sure, nearly half of all films during this time were melodramas, but many political films, even of a very radical character, were certainly part of the landscape.

The first factor in the change of this environment was the Edison Trust, an effort to monopolize control of American film stock. But the Edison Trust was stymied by independent film efforts, the growth of new longer feature films, and the continuing growth of theaters to show those films. The victory over the Edison Trust was total; not only was the trust ultimately terminated by a court in 1918, by 1925 all of the companies comprising the trust went out of business (that included both Selig Polyscope and Essanay, which as it happened both stopped production of new films on the very same day: December 31, 1918). Those independents would from 1920 to 1930 become the new status quo, with an influence far greater than the Edison Trust ever held; we now them today as the Studio System.

What became the Studio System began by an orphaned Hungarian emigre and furrier named Adolph Zukor. Zukor and his business partners opened a chain of film arcades along the East Coast of the United States, then organized a film production company (the Famous Players Film Company), then signed a distribution contract with Paramount and through various maneuvers secured control of all avenues of making movies -- production, distribution, and theaters -- far more than the Edison Trust ever held. Zukor's involvement with Paramount lasted clear through to the day he died in 1976 at the age of 103.

That formation of Paramount spurred a trend of consolidation within the film industry in the 1920s. And many of the main players in what would become the Studio System came from hardscrabble backgrounds like Zukor: Harry Warner, a founder of Warner Brothers, was an emigre clothier from Poland who got into films when a nickelodeon opened near his store and did better business than his clothing store. William Fox was another Hungarian emigre who got into textiles and sold a textile company to start his first nickelodeon. They and a handful of others like Carl Laemmle and Harry Cohn from Germany, and Louis Mayer from Russia, were among those who stood atop the eight film companies from the ensuing consolidation: the Big Five as they were known (Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Radio-Keith-Orpheum (or RKO), and Loew's [the parent of MGM]) as well as three other "majors" -- Universal, Columbia, and United Artists.

As part of their effort against the Edison Trust, the independents used the production of longer feature films, which by virtue of their length cost more and required more film. That among other factors resulted in forming barriers to entry in the film market -- films that could be produced for perhaps $1,000 in 1920 would by 1930 cost upwards of $40,000 (followed by the new requirements for sound in films -- The Jazz Singer in 1927 cost $500,000 to produce). Plus with the creation of elegant movie palaces by the Studio System across America, the ante for costs raised further still. And labor unions and radicals simply couldn't afford to compete with such higher costs, compounded by the markedly reduced ideological range in films coming from the Studio System, meant many radical and oppositional filmmakers struggled to survive, and many did not.

Mind you, in 1928, this could have changed dramatically despite these attacks; a proposal by a single movie electrician, Patrick Murphy, could have turned America's labor temples -- then about 1500 in number -- into the largest movie distribution chain in America. But labor leaders at the time were dismissive; they regarded this proposal as "secondary" to the work of "real" organizing efforts, not sympathetic with the potential of movies to inspire and encourage activism, and with labor rank-and-file not willing or able to force the matter on the table, the Studio System was triumphant (at least until the 1940s and 1950s when the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of production and theater chains). Ironically, Upton Sinclair who ran for governor of California in 1934 narrowly lost his election thanks to no small part because of a series of rigged newsreels produced by MGM and directed by Hollywood "boy wonder" Irving Thalberg.

It was around the same time when a new medium caught the attention of a nation and a movement for media reform struggles. The struggle over radio in the 1920s and 30s may have marked the high-water mark in media reform struggles in American history. Radio stations were once licensed by U.S. Department of Commerce, headed in the early 1920s by Commerce secretary Herbert Hoover (who later became U.S. president). Radio in the early 1920s was dominated by hundreds of nonprofits and universities, but a court ruling in 1926 invalidated all radio licenses since there was no Congressional authority to grant radio licenses, which led to a free-for-all of the radio spectrum. Congress in response hurriedly passed the Radio Act of 1927, which authorized a government commission, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), to authorize new radio licenses.

The FRC was dominated by commercial interests related to radio manufacturers, and its general counsel was Tribune Corporation attorney Louis Caldwell. Even so, there was a wide distaste for advertising on radio, and skepticism that advertising on radio could even provide a viable funding base. Nevertheless, the FRC worked together with the trade association of commercial broadcasting, the National Association of Broadcasters (which was founded in the Drake Hotel in Chicago in 1922), along with two incipient radio networks -- the National Broadcasting Company (the result of RCA buying AT&T's broadcasting properties), and the Columbia Broadcasting System (bought and nurtured by a Chicago-born cigar manufacturer's son, William Paley) -- to craft with almost no outside involvement a 1928 reallocation of radio licenses to give the choicest frequencies and strongest broadcast strengths to commercial broadcasters.

For the next seven years, a coalition of civic groups fought back, and included educators (like the Payne Fund and a coalition of educattors founded in Chicago in 1930, the National Coalition for Education on Radio), as well as organized labor (exemplified by WCFL, a Chicago radio station owned and run by the Chicago Federation of Labor) along with religious groups (exemplified by the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle of New York, better known as the Paulist Fathers, who ran their own station WLWL). They were all inspired by the positive potential of radio and examples of national nonprofit radio broadcasters like the BBC in Britain and the CBC in Canada.

The U.S. commercial broadcasters responded back fiercely -- undercutting the opposition, setting up front groups, granting broadcast time to politicians, seeing their audience widen while the opposition's audience shrank, winning the critical support of the newspaper industry, and defeating efforts in the early 1930s on Capitol Hill for broadcast reform. Efforts by reformers nevertheless continued, which including a surprising grassroots lobbying resurgence which led to a 1934 amendment which would have allotted 25% of all radio frequencies under nonprofit use and which came very close to becoming law; in fact, if it weren't for the efforts of a single senator, C. C. Dill of Washington state, that 1934 law would have passed. Once that bill was blocked, the commercial lobbying blitz was able to defuse any follow-up efforts, including the use of a rigged 1934 hearing and the 1934 Communications Act which replaced the FRC with a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and which placed as sacrosanct the commercial bias of broadcasting. The coalition of civic groups unraveled, some disbanded, and the dream of national nonprofit radio was dead.

But the complaints continued and the FCC in the 1940s was shamed to some reform actions. An FCC Report on Chain Broadcasting resulted in NBC spinning off one of its radio networks to become the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The FCC published proposals for public service requirements, most notably the FCC's Blue Book outlining public service responsibilities for broadcast licensee and the Mayflower Doctrine mandating "full and equal opportunity for the presentation to the public all sides of public issues". Both the Blue Book and the Mayflower Doctrine faced fierce opposition by the commercial broadcasters; the Blue Book was ultimately scuttled, and the Mayflower Doctrine was replaced by the weaker Fairness Doctrine. Another reform action was the allocation of a portion of the new FM radio band to noncommercial broadcasters; that's how the Pacifica radio network began in the 1940s by Quaker pacifist Lew Hill and would serve as a beacon for improving radio and ultimately broadcasting. But as focus turned from radio to television, the relative influence of radio shrank and radio stations starting gaining more local autonomy but still remained for the most part commercially biased.

The 1980s saw the emergence of low-power FM radio (LPFM), thanks to the reduced cost of radio broadcasting equipment, and to noted radio activists like Free Radio Berkeley founder Stephen Dunifer, and a blind activist, Mbanna Kantako, who used a one-watt radio transmitter to broadcast to his public housing project in Springfield, Illinois. The FCC cracked down on the burgeoning unlicensed (so-called "pirate") broadcasters. But it was too easy to start a new LPFM station and the FCC found it increasingly harder to crack down, so the FCC ultimately proposed a licensed LPFM service which passed Congress in 2000. Even so, thanks to a sneaky lobbyist maneuver enacted literally in the dead of night, the number of potential stations was reduced from thousands to hundreds. Nevertheless, LPFM supporters were undaunted, despite two subsequent failed attempts to restore those stolen LPFM stations over a decade of struggle. Finally, success! On December 18, 2010, the commercial lobbyists' back was broken, and Congress approved the long-overdue expansion of LPFM, signed into law by President Obama. In Chicago, that resulted in a number of new community radio stations including CHIRP Radio based on the north side and Lumpen Radio based on the south side.

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