Second Riff off Max Weber.

By Sara

My first Max Weber Riff was last summer when I detailed my Utopian Reform of Campaign Finance.  Remember, it had to do with the constitutional authority of congress to coin money, and I proposed creating Election Dollars to be equally distributed among registered voters at the beginning of even numbered years, and that only Election Dollars (E$) could be used for any campaign expense.  All this would be done electronically, it would shorten campaigns, make them much more dependent on local parties and volunteers, and it would make folk equal in the value of the vote plus the value of the contribution. 

Well now we have another need for a Weber Riff -- how to reform the media.  Jane and Marcia are out there talking about how profoundly corrupted it all is -- most of us agree, but we are not getting reform proposals or agendas that make sense.  In my mind too much of it is personal, the bad Timmy, the sins of judy judy judy, and all the rest, and all I see about these guys is that they conform to the dominant corporate paradigme.  Good lord, folk conform to the requirements of their institutions.  So -- what's needed is different institutions. 

I really begin with two premises -- Media should be locally owned and managed, and -- all media ought to be non-profit.  My idea of media is essentially a distribution system.  Local TV, local press -- I would point out that the Guardian in GB and the Observer, part of the Guardian, both were once family owned for-profit papers -- the Observer was the property of the Astor Family, famed as the owners of Cleveden where once all the 1930's Appeasement advocates weekended with Nancy Astor and Neville.  What the Brits call "death taxes" required that the Observer either be donated or sold off, and the Astors linked up with the owners of the Manchester Guardian (you all remember reading that on tissue paper) and put the weekly into a trust.  What we would call a 501(c)3.  (Oh -- by the way, Bill Gates currently owns Cleveden as a hotel-conference center, with rooms beginning at about $1000 per night.) 

My point is that the British Government made it possible for family owned press to become non-profit (Trusts) foundations -- and today we admire both the Guardian and Observer because they survived and still do real journalism.  They take advertising, they operate as normal press entities, they only thing they do not have is stockholders.  No one, as Wall Street is doing, is demanding 20% profit or better.  If they do well, they can just re-invest and hire more reporters, or get a better webtech.  If their output is bad, they may have to cut staff.  But none of it is dependent on the "shares Market." 

Media in the US have gone in the opposite direction.  They have combined so much stuff that no one knows motivation.  Apparently for instance, the Washington Post's profit center is Kaplan -- which not only tutors kids for college, it actually offers classes on line for degrees.  Recent word is that Murdoch is trying to buy a 1/4th interest in the LA Times -- which looks like it might be controling interest.  Could we not just say halt, that local interests should own local media and fix our media ownership and tax law to that end? 

My own sense of it is that above all we need a means by which the wealthy who own media stock can contribute it in the same way that they can designate fine art to a museum.  Not really appreciated value, but more like purchase price plus a little, but there is no other real market for it.   

What Congress needs to debate is the essential value of a free press with "free" meaning that all sorts of wild hoologians have access to put their point across.  Yes, they need to comprehend the problem of the Chicago Defender -- a great -- Historic -- African American paper that lost inheritance matters because the sole owner did not understand the necessity of making arrangements for the death of the owner.  Given the Defender's mission, one can well understand why the owner held on to control.  Think for a time on the Pullman car workers who dropped a few copies of the Defender in this or that Mississippi town when that was life threatening dangerous.

Can we ask Congress to make the free press something protected from the crap game of the market and at the same time, something totally open to the innovations of new technology?  How do we state that as an issue for candidates?   Should "free press" really mean something that is on auction on the stock exchange?   

 

Comments

[John Forde]

The thing that made humans the dominant species on earth is the opposable thumb. We can GRASP things.

Our television system is designed to poison our rational minds. It is 99.7% privately financed.

We need a real public TV system funded at about 20% of the private system. It would allow us to GRASP concepts -like the treason of using a forgery to start a war.

Expensive? It woulda saved about a trillion dollars & a half million lives.

[jwp]

You have correctly spotted the problem, of course.

Bureaucratic routines are fate.

Journalists do the type of job that they do because it IS their job, and because of the demands of getting ahead in their institution.

Your proposal is not all that is needed, in my view, but I think it is helpful.

Many helpful proposals is the general approach we need.

Good start.

[Lyle Mitchell]

"Ah!" in an awakened tone, exclaims Co-operation, who can see the right thing when lucid intervals occur, "I suppose you mean the scheme which the co-operative printers of Manchester have lately adopted-that of giving 5 per cent to loan capital, because it is withdrawable, and 7.5 per cent to share capital, because it is not withdrawable, and dividing the remainder of the profits in three equal proportions, one to shareholders, one to workpeople, and one to the customer-is something like what you have in your mind."

"Yes." exclaims the pertinacious consumer, "that looks a little nearer the right thing. That scheme does recognise the consumer, and co-operation will find that it will pay to recognise that querulous creature. But printers were always in advance of mankind. All the cleverness of the world passes through their hands into type; and if wisdom is not born with them, they catch it from their copy."

Logic of Co-operation. G.J. Holyoake 1873 Co-operative Printing Society 1873

[emptypockets]

I think there may be two separate but intersecting issues here.

One is about ownership, and whether the programming answers to a plutocracy of shareholders or to a democracy of listeners (who are hectored by weekly pledge drives and have some influence on programming by voting with their dollars).

The second is about programming control, and what fraction of content is produced locally compared to centrally. (I am thinking mostly about radio here, but I think it extends easily to tv & press.)

The two are largely interrelated but there is still some wiggle room between them. For example, I don't have such strong objection to privately-controlled media if all of its content is produced locally. I think by its very nature it will tend to reflect the ideas of its audience.

This issue extends beyond the political to the realm of public safety and national security. Last month the NYT magazine ran a piece on central control of radio

In the early morning of Jan. 18, 2002, a Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside Minot, N.D., spilling roughly 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia into a woodsy neighborhood on the outskirts of town. The resulting toxic cloud grew to some five miles long, two and a half miles wide and 350 feet high, enveloping the homes of approximately 15,000 people. Confused and afraid, thousands of Minot residents turned on their radios to get public warnings and instructions on how to stay safe.

Yet no such information was available. Minot's six nonreligious commercial stations, all of which were owned and operated by the nation's largest radio company, Clear Channel Communications, were broadcasting prerecorded programs engineered in remote studios. Police dispatchers couldn't reach anyone in Clear Channel's local offices: the town's new emergency-communications system failed to automatically issue an alert, and no one answered the phones at the stations. What ensued was horrific: as one man died and hundreds became ill from inhaling the poisonous gas, the airwaves were filled with canned music and smooth-talking D.J.'s.

Here the problem was not just the corporate control -- I have no doubt that locally-operated private stations would still have given over airtime for the emergency -- but the centralized, non-local nature of the programming that grew out of corporate efficiency.

I think trying to convert national media to public ownership is somewhat more daunting than the very hopeful efforts being made by local groups to develop strong, community-based alternatives. For example I learned recently of Prometheus Radio which is trying to push for more local low-power FM stations.

The power of locally produced and distributed media has become apparent in the blogging world, and I think it would be nice to extend that more effectively to radio, TV, and press. Most communities have public access TV stations but the content is terrible. Perhaps with increased media consolidation & public frustration with centrally-produced media, there will be a greater motivation to produce higher-quality content for the public stations that already exist. A system for helping to foster this, perhaps something grown out of the blog activist community, might be worthwhile.

[janinsanfran]

Pacifica can be atrociously self-referential, but those of us who have access to it need to try to keep it.

[emptypockets]

here in nyc we have WBAI which is part of the pacifica network, and is my radio station of choice although they get pretty far far out there sometimes. I like not only the content but the style, it feels local with real voices not "radio" people and a little -- well, a lot -- unprofessional, which makes it feel more authentic.

They also were the only way I could have listened to things like the Alito & Roberts confirmation hearings, which I found a really valuable resource. I may be alone in this, but I wish C-SPAN had a radio station.

[Sara]

I wanted to make another point from somewhat ancient history, we did, at one time, eliminate vertical integration in media, as a result of a mid-1940's Supreme Court Decision that found it an unlawful monoply for the Hollywood Studios to own and control parts of the distribution system. The Studios were forced to sell off their first run theatres and the film distribution channels. This (as well as TV which was just arriving as this decision came down) opened the way for Independent Production, and it eliminated the old closed studio system, where actors, writers, etc, were "owned" by the Studios. The simple fact that vertical integration was once broken up in the Motion Picture Industry because it was an unlawful monoply may be a powerful argument to use in asking Congress to address the need for a better business model.

[Coral]

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media by Eric Klinenberg gives a pretty good history of these issues, plus some practical ideas on how things can be changed.

http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Air-Battle-Control-Americas/dp/0805078193

[majbeen ali]

dear sir o madam. i need info on marx weber sub-cultuares,the media ,labour etc.

thanx u

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