“Democratic Media at
the Crossroads”
Wally Bowen
Mountain Area Information Network
Asheville, North Carolina
October 8, 2006
© 2006 Wally Bowen
Jurgen Habermas
winner, 2004 Kyoto Prize
“The Public Sphere”
“Theory of Communicative Action”
20th Annual Kyoto Prizes for
Lifetime Achievement in Arts and
Philosophy awarded to
Jurgen Habermas
June 11, 2004
The 2004 Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy was chosen from the field of
Thought and Ethics and awarded to philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Ph.D., 75, of
Starnber, Germany.
Habermas received the award for achievements in social philosophy, in particular
his establishment of the communicative action theory and discourse ethics.
Considered among the world's leading awards for lifetime achievement, the Kyoto
Prizes are presented to individuals and groups worldwide who have contributed
significantly to human progress in the areas of “Advanced Technology,” “Basic
Sciences,” and “Arts and Philosophy.”
“In private life we associate with people who
share similar outlooks and values. In public
life we meet people from backgrounds unlike
our own. The first principle should not be
that we’re all the same — an assumption
privileging dominant cultural groups — but
rather that we are dissimilar. This leads to a
recognition of the moral ambiguity of politics,
the awareness that we cannot expect simply to
impose our values.”
Harry C. Boyte, “The Pragmatic Ends of Popular Politics” in
Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press (1992), pp. 351-52.
“The First Amendment . . . rests on the assumption that the
widest possible dissemination of information from diverse
and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the
public, that a free press is a condition of a free society. Surely
a command that the government itself shall not impede the
free flow of ideas does not afford non-governmental
combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that
constitutionally guaranteed freedom. Freedom to publish
means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish
is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to
keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from
governmental interference under the First Amendment does
not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in ASSOCIATED PRESS v. U. S., 326
U.S.1 Argued Dec. 5, 6, 1944, Decided June 18, 1945
“In 1850, census data showed that
95% of all U.S. newspapers had a
political affiliation … Traditional
party journalism … eased
readers’ participation in politics
by creating an accessible political
world.”
C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a
Democratic Press, Princeton University
Press (1994), p. 5.
“The province of men with money, the newspaper
business generally represented their interests.
That was why a region whose voters were
roughly half Democrats and half Republicans
had an overwhelmingly Republican press. The
men who put up the capital, the Northern
business class, were predominately
Republican... Through the press, the well-to-do
had the opportunity, largely unavailable to any
other social group, to disseminate their
conception of politics and partisanship and set
the public agenda.”
“The Press Transformed” from The Decline of Popular
Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 by Michael
McGerr, Oxford, 1986.
“The public must be put in its place... so that
we may live free of the trampling and the
roar of a bewildered herd... The common
interests very largely elude public opinion
entirely, and can be managed only by a
specialized class whose personal interests
reach beyond the locality.” This specialized
class of “public men” is responsible for “the
formation of a sound public opinion.”
“Manufacturing consent” is the means by
which public opinion is directed in support
of “the national interest.”
Public Opinion by Walter Lippman, Macmillan, 1922.
Christopher Hitchens, “Voting in the Passive Voice” Harper’s Magazine,
April 1992.
“Opinion polling was born out of a struggle
not to discover the public mind but to
master it. It was a weapon in the early wars
to thwart organized labor and in the battle
against Populism . . . .
“. . . as all pollsters will tell you privately, the
answers to poll questions are very greatly
influenced by what has lately been defined
as important by the television news. . .”
The Father of Spin: Edward
L. Bernays and the Birth of
Public Relations by Larry
Tye, Henry Holt & Co., 1998.
"Knowledge will forever govern
ignorance: And a people who
mean to be their own Governors,
must arm themselves with the
power which knowledge gives."
James Madison, architect of the First
Amendment, from 1798 Report to the Virginia
House of Delegates
Evolution of U.S. Media
Unequal
Protection:
The Rise of
Corporate
Dominance and
the Theft of
Human Rights
by Thom Hartmann,
St. Martin's Press, 2002.
Media Orientations
From the March, 1926 “Midwest Employers Bulletin”:
“ Think of the speeches that may go forth. Wild
and radical speeches listened to by hundreds
of thousands. These wild men in their wild
talks regardless of consequences, may reach
the ear, possibly inadvertently, of your
influential and trusted employee, who may be
detracted from paths favorable to his
employer’s success.”
Cited by Robert W. McChesney in Telecommunications,
Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S.
Broadcasting, 1928-1935, Oxford University Press, 1993.
“There is not room in the
broadcast band for every
school of thought, religious,
political, social and economic
to have its separate
broadcasting station.”
From General Order 40 of the Federal Radio Commission,
cited by Robert W. McChesney in Telecommunications,
Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S.
Broadcasting, 1928-1935, Oxford University Press, 1993.
The Sound Bite
Society:
Television And
The American
Mind
(Four Walls Eight
Windows, New
York : 1999)
by Jeffrey Scheuer
“Television, in nearly all its forms and functions, and
for both economic and structural reasons, acts as a
simplying lens, filtering out complex ideas in favor of
blunt emotional messages that appeal to the self and
to narrower moral-political impulses.
“For reasons that are inherent in the nature of
ideology and do not impugn the politics of the left or
right, simplication promotes, and epitomizes,
political conservatism. Indeed, simplicity and
complexity are the basic polar organizing principles
of the political spectrum.”
Jeffrey Scheuer, The Sound Bite Society: Television and the
American Mind, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.
Conservative agenda is minimalist:
• less government
• less regulation
• focus on individualism
• democracy and market capitalism are
synonymous
This simpler, minimalist view of the world is
more vividly and coherently portrayed via the
commercial media's “sound bite” culture.
From Sound Bite Society by Jeffrey Schnerer
Progressive agenda is more complex:
• bigger role for government
• collaborative approaches to social ills
• market capitalism and democracy are not
synonymous
• democracy requires checks and balances on
corporate and government power
The more complex, nuanced progressive
perspective requires context and detailed
explanation. Commercial media is not
structured to portray this worldview accurately.
From Sound Bite Society by Jeffrey Schnerer
“The problem with public broadcasting
is bias — programming that does not
disseminate a common culture but
imposes a partisan attitude... Remove
Federal funds and you remove
officials’ ability to influence the
system... to make programming more
truly national and better able to serve
its legitimate unifying purposes.”
“How Not to Fix Public Broadcasting” by Leonard
Garment, New York Times, Dec. 21, 1994.
Media Reform Movement
Public Media Movement
Public Sphere
Information Commons
Public Domain
Public Space
Creative Commons
Innovation Commons
“Architecture is
politics.”
Mitch Kapor
Electronic Frontier Foundation
FAST
LANE
Levels of Broadband Wireless
$$$$$$
Public
Secure
Managed
(fee for service)
$$$$$
$
Municipal
Applications
(inspections, police, meter
reading, etc.)
Free Public Wi-Fi
(unmanaged, not secure)
Broadcast "White Space"
and
Unlicensed Wireless
LPFM Status
"Enhance and Protect Local Community Radio Act of
2005"
U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)
"Local Community Radio Act of 2005" (S-312)
(Senators McCain, Cantwell & Leahy)
Video Franchising
and
Public Access TV
Media Reform Websites:
www.main.nc.us
www.freepress.net
www.spectrumpolicy.org
www.prometheusradio.org
Protocols of the Internet
and World Wide Web
TCP/IP: code of the Internet
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
Codes of the World Wide Web
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
Gopher: Menu of options on an Internet site
FTP: File Transfer Protocol
Open Source Technologies
Linux — Network operating system created by Linus Torvalds
and refined by thousands of volunteer programmers.
Apache Webserver — built by a collective of programmers
committed to "patching" the original web server created by the
National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA)
Perl — programming language that enables the high-power
manipulation of webpage text.
BIND — Berkeley Internet Name Domain -- enables a domain
name to link to an IP address number.
Sendmail — processes email routing.
“Democratic Media at the Crossroads”
www.main.nc.us/DMC