Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 16:08:46 -0400 From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) Subject: Duncan Frissell On Empire of the Air To: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)
[Note from Matthew Gaylor: Duncan is a Lawyer, Cypherpunk, and member of the literati in NYC.]
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 10:16:06 -0400 From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com> Subject: Empire of the Air Reply-To: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
I'm grateful to Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri, of the scial satire "Empire" for reminding me of a *very* inconvenient fact that the foes of Media Monopoly hope we'll forget.
On the WBUR (Boston) program "The Connection" after talking about the initial promise of radio as a liberating medium he said:
"The way radio and television have developed have been ways in which democratic voices have been excluded systematically and have been controlled by the forces of capital -- the ones who own these media."
See: http://www.theconnection.org/archive/2001/07/072a.shtml
Listen: http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/w/b/wbur/connection/audio/2001/07 /con_0723a.rm (quote appears just after 16:00).
What he hopes the rest of the world will forget and Americans will never know is that from the dawn of broadcasting until the last few years almost all of the Earth's radio and television were owned and operated by the various national governments.
Read the history of the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline if you want to see the lengths to which governments went to secure their monopoly:
http://www.radiocaroline.co.uk/history/index.htm
With all of the different channels into our brains (many of which didn't exist 25 years ago), it is hard to argue that electronic media is less competitive than it was when most of it was controlled by governments.
DCF ---- When I was growing up, three white guys in NYC determined everything 90% of Americans saw on TV. Most towns had no more than two newspapers. Radio was exclusively Top 40 format. Yet, today, with 6 broadcast networks, 1000 newspapers available online, netcasting costing $39.95/month, and 5 Gigs of webpages extant, those commentators who themselves favor monopoly *government* complain that a Media Monopoly exists. There are more media outlets than ever.
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