Last month, I published the first of a two-part (long!) essay, based off a presentation I gave in 2011 about the history of media activism in the United States. This essay would begin the a hoped-for book I want to write, putting the local activism in a wider context in both time and space.

This month, I publish the second part of that essay.

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Radio in the 1950s was the sideshow to the main media phenomenon -- television, a medium long hyped with positive potential. My favorite quote is that of David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, who in 1939 said "It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation." And there was some struggle over the direction of TV, but from which industry would call the shots -- would it be the radio industry who had the leg up on one-to-many broadcasting, would it be the movie industry which was versed in the visual oervre? The public was barely involved in the decision, and the result was shamefully corrupt: In 1946, FCC chair Charles Denny (a Democrat!) pushed for a plan giving near-monopoly control of TV to NBC and CBS; six months later Denny left the FCC to become an executive and general counsel at NBC, tripling his salary.

But efforts to chip away at that monopoly control continued in the coming years, including ironically from the FCC itself. Newton Minow, FCC chair under President Kennedy and Northwestern University alum and later faculty, gave a 1961 speech entitled "Television and the Public Interest" to the National Association of Broadcasters, where he decried television as a "vast wasteland." (TV producer Sherwood Schwartz later admitted to naming the S. S. Minnow from the show Gilligan's Island as a jab against Minow the FCC chair.) Minow pushed through a mandate that all TV sets receive UHF signals, thus opening the possibility for more stations. That, as well as the burgeoning social movements in the 1960s, and a critical 1967 report by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, helped break the resistance of the NAB to the establishment of public broadcasting in the U.S., resulting in the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, only 45 years after the establishment of a public broadcaster in Britain.

But the independent financing potential of public broadcasting in the U.S. was muted when a proposal to fund public broadcasting using an excise tax from the sale of TV sets wasn't included in the final act. Public broadcasting thus became the ugly stepsister to its commercial brethren, getting that programming that the commercial broadcasters can't make any money off of. Some of that potential was ultimately realized with the establishment of public access broadcasting on cable TV which did accord more independent funding and thus greater autonomy (this is of particular interest to me since it was a public access TV show in Michigan that awakened my own involvement in media and media policy). And cable TV, along with satellite television later, widened the number of ostensible TV channels available to a wider public. But concurrent with that trend there occurred another trend from about 1980 on of the shrinking of ownership across the entire media landscape -- to the point that (quoting from a USA Today article) just "seven companies -- CBS, Disney, Discovery, Fox, NBC Universal, Time Warner and Viacom -- account for about 90% of all the professionally produced video that people watch."

As we've seen, there was media concentration before the 1980s but for the most part that concentration was restricted to a small number of players within a given media industry. In the 1980s, companies started to build conglomerates across media industries, so that it wasn't just a TV producer or film studio or newspaper publisher -- it was a TV producer and film studio and newspaper publisher, and much more besides. The raison d'etre was, as usually is, profit -- more profit can be generated by producing content once and then redistributing it across all one's channels, so then a race was underway to consolidate media across industries, aided by zealots in government subscribing to supposed "free market" principles but instead aiding and abetting the greatest media monopolies heretofore seen.

The greatest chronicler of this new consolidation trend was Ben Bagdikian, former editor at the Washington Post and dean emeritus at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 1983, Bagdikian published a book called The Media Monopoly which noted that just 50 companies commanded the lion's share of American media and that the trend was to consolidate further, perhaps to as few as six media companies. The book was republished in updated editions seven times in the next two decades to chronicle the continuing changes in the American media landscape; by the time the seventh edition came out in 2004, Bagdikian was wrong in one respect: it didn't get down to as few as six media companies, in that book he listed just five.

Bagdikian and many others also chronicled the negative consequences of such concentration: increased commercialism, less journalism, less independence from the bottom-line, more conflicts of interest, fewer diverse perspectives, and even life-or-death situations, as was the case in the city of Minot, North Dakota, which in 2002 saw a chemical leak from a train derailment cause hundreds to be hospitalized and when local police tried to get on the radio to alert the public, they found six of the seven Minot radio stations controlled from a single ClearChannel office which was unstaffed at the time of the leak.

The response to this trend of media concentration crystallized arguably the most dynamic, successful, and inspiring media reform effort in a generation: the media ownership uprising of 2003. The trend towards greater media concentration was critically enabled at the federal government, spurred to greater heights (or depths, as it were) through the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the FCC of George W. Bush, headed for four years by market zealot Michael Powell (son of former secretary of state Colin Powell). The Telecom Act required the FCC to review its media ownership rules every four years, and in 2002 the FCC to little fanfare announced that it would likely amend a number of critical media ownership rules in part of its continuing effort to "deregulate" the media, which would have made the trend of consolidation seen thus far look tame by comparison. And with key pro-big-media Republicans in key points in the government, the major media virtually mute so as to cash in big, and a considerable history of media reformers' hopes dashed from one medium to the next, the fix looked to be in.

It was this fight where I first cut my teeth on media reform struggles, but what happened wasn't just me and didn't just happen overnight -- it was the efforts of scholars and activists, well before I joined the fray, going back decades. But I arrived when this fight found a moment to crystallize. Small groups throughout the country including here in Chicago started organizing; five of us in Chicago met a week before the FCC announced its media ownership rule revisions. This coincided with the formation in Chicago of the group Chicago Media Action and efforts like a Halloween walking tour of Chicago, helping to organize an unofficial hearing at Northwestern University, sending a team to Richmond, Virginia, to the only public FCC hearing on the matter, getting on CAN TV and in community newspapers to discuss the issue, and of course using the internet, without which the effort to stop the FCC may never have happened at all.

After months of nonstop outreach and activism, what did it amount to? On its face, the FCC nevertheless to little surprise voted 3-2 on June 2, 2003 to its proposed rule changes. But the public outcry was palpable, breaking FCC public comment records by orders of magnitude, as the issue ranked as the second-most popular news issue of 2003 (trailing only the launch of the War in Iraq), and the corporate media were caught flat-footed, facing losing votes in Congress and on September 3, 2003, an emergency court order stayed the FCC decision, just one day before the rules were slated to go into effect. That court order remained in effect for seven years, and it's no exaggeration to say that it prevented a bad media system from becoming far worse. The Tribune company, which gambled its future on the media ownership rules, whined on its editorial pages over the outcome. Indeed, that stay indirectly resulted in a shareholder revolt forcing a change of ownership leading to local billionaire Sam Zell taking charge and later running the company into bankruptcy. The Tribune broke up in two, which got bought up by other companies (Alden Capital in the case of Tribune publishing, and Nexstar in the case of Tribune Media Service).

But the whole episode was revealing and inspiring. Activism works, even on something as seemingly abstruse as media policy where seemingly few outside of those who stand to profit from such policies seem to understand or care about such policies. The key to victory has been, ironically enough, the very thing that make the media unique on this issue -- they're the only ones who command the ability to debate their own politics. As a result, those politics are immensely corrupt, so bringing wider awareness to them, by any and every means at your disposal, turns out to be an effective tactic (sunlight really is the best disinfectant).

The lessons learned by media reform activists in 2003 came into play again in 2006 during what's called the Net Neutrality wars over the internet. That struggle came in the wake of a number of policy decisions involving the internet -- including what some scholars deem to be a key 1990 invitation-only gathering of government and tech firms at Harvard University which apparently resulted in the government privatizing part of its internet backbone. The Michael-Powell-led FCC took another step in 2002 by reclassifying the internet in such a way that weakened common carriage provisions of internet content. And when a court challenge to undo that reclassification failed at the Supreme Court in 2005 in the famed Brand X case, corporate ISPs salivated at the chance to pass legislation in their favor to establish a "two-tiered" internet as it's called.

That legislation came in 2006, entitled the COPE Act, and not only would have changed the internet as we knew it, it would also irreparably affected public access television through the establishment of a single national cable franchise. The bill sailed through the House, aided to no small extent by Illinois' own Bobby Rush, the bill's first Democratic co-sponsor (who it was reported got a $1 million gift from SBC to establish a community internet center in his district -- a center that was never built). Nevertheless, awareness of what was going on started to build and widen, mostly using the internet itself and the then-burgeoning blogosphere. Plus, protests were gaining more and more attention, including a national series of protests in May 2006 which began in Chicago called the National Day of Outrage.

The house passed the COPE Act, but when it got to the Senate, internet freedom advocates with the wind at their backs were able to egg some Senators on to ask critical questions about the COPE Act, which led to a famous rambling response by the Senate's lead shepherd on telecom policy, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, in which he called the internet a "series of tubes". Note that Stevens actually achieved his goal -- he got the COPE Act out of committee in the Senate, yet his remarks (which were made after the hearing ended, and only recorded when a public policy activist kept recording after everyone else had stopped) led to a PR fiasco which made the legislation too volatile to bring up to a full Senate vote, and the COPE Act died through inaction in the end. Remember though that we saw the same recipe for victory with the COPE Act as we did in 2003 with the FCC's media ownership rules -- building public awareness to build public involvement when public awareness and public involvement are lacking, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Over the next two decades, net neutrality became a political yo-yo, as it switched its status from legal oblivion to confirmed law and back again. The FCC passed half-hearted attempts to enshrine net neutrality without firm legal footing, only to see them unsurprisingly swatted down in court. But the popular efforts for net neutrality continued, and in 2015 former telco lobbyist Tom Wheeler, who chaired the FCC during President Obama's second term, cast the deciding vote to enshrine net neutrality on firm legal footing -- only to see it undone in Trump's first term by telco-attorney-turned-FCC-chair Ajit Pai. The effort to restore net neutrality during Biden's term was stymied for three years as corporate lobbyists stymied Biden nominee and longtime public interest advocate Gigi Sohn from getting a seat on the FCC. In 2024, the FCC finally got the votes to re-approve firm net neutrality, only to see that blocked, perhaps permanently, by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overrode the FCC in the wake of the infamous Loper Bright ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At first, the internet proved a boon for social justice, as it helped with organizing social justice movements from the anti-corporate-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle, to the protests in 2011 around the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, to Black Lives Matter protests (which galvanized in 2020 after a single teenager, Darnella Frazier, recorded on a cellphone the murder of George Floyd). But the internet has also spurred the growth of right-wing echo chamber whose size and reach now exceeds the major media (which has taken a hit in size and profitability largely due to the internet, reducing journalism and the number of news outlets). Plus, the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s has largely been undone as the cellphone and telephony industry re-consolidated so that now telephony is an oligopoly of just three main companies.

At this writing in March 2025, prospects don't look good, for media or really for much else. The institutions that engendered what the YouTube series "Honest Trailers" aptly called "the capitalism-to-fascism pipeline" have reasserted itself eighty years after we fought a world war to revert that. People will fight on, the fight won't be easy, but it seldom is. The struggle on this will continue, as it always does. If there is some consolation, I think we remain in a "critical juncture" where dramatic changes are still possible, hopefully changes for the better, which means the work we do now is critical for what is to come.

So now that I have debauched your mind with learning, what are some of the "big picture" points that can be raised? Let me suggest five lessons.

Lesson Number One: The problems with the media that people complain about are problems are nothing new. Consolidation of the media, the creeping influence of commercialism, exclusion of whole areas of debate and of communities to have a say -- people were worrying about all of this in 1869 as they were in 2025.

Lesson Number Two: American media don't just fall from the sky. They're the result of a number of factors -- most critically, the policies that help to shape the media. While the major media would like you to believe that the media spring from "natural" processes, there's nothing natural about them; they're often very bitterly fought.

Lesson Number Three: People can affect those policies, and I'm not referring to high-paid well-connected lobbyists -- everyday normal people can affect those policies. Indeed, a number of defeats that we had seen in points of the media reform struggles were by narrow margins and if things had gone slightly differently those losses could have been wins. On the other hand, a number of reform wins that we can claim, especially in recent years, came when those efforts had no right to do so, but because people were willing to do the work in organizing, outreach, smart planning, and in a word, getting involved. The more people get involved in shaping those media, the better our chances for success.

Lesson Number Four: Don't dismiss the power of media and media policy in whatever activist work you are interested in; very often, the connections are just begging to be made. That labor leaders who dismissed Patrick Murphy's proposal to turn America's labor temples into a movie distribution chain were wrong: media work is real work. Indeed, so many social justice efforts hinge on public awareness and involvement for their success, so media work may be as real as any issue ever is.

Lesson Number Five: We have to work to change institutions that affect media but aren't media. We seem to be stuck between two obsolete institutional frameworks that have affected media and much else for centuries -- a single government, the state, in the political sphere, and a single market, spawning corporations, in the economic sphere. Much of the struggle for a better media have meant struggling in one, sometimes both, spheres. In order to ensure a better media, and much else besides, those institutions must be changed, at the very least rethought. There has been a rich tradition of thinking on this front, and a great many new theoretical developments, much of which has been maligned as heretical understandably by those with power. But I think that a better media requires better political and economic institutions. What those might look like, how the media would look and operate in that front, and how such institutions can be achieved fall outside of the scope of this presentation. But it is a question I have devoted increasing time and energy on, and we do ourselves no favors to ignore the question forever; indeed, by tackling this, we may well be on our way to far greater successes tackling corporate media control and winning in media reform.

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