Media and Democracy

<clips>

I am often asked why, as a journalist, I keep coming back to the story of media and democracy--how newspapers, radio stations, television and cable are being swallowed up by huge conglomerates. One answer comes from the former Yankee pitching star, Jim Bouton, who told me in an interview this week exactly what can happen when there's only one newspaper in a town and it's owned by a media conglomerate far from home.

Bouton, you may remember, jolted the baseball world back in 1970 with his truth-telling diary of a season in the big leagues. Lo and behold, as Ball Four revealed to a shocked--shocked!--America, the "boys of summer" were just that--adolescents with overstuffed hormones who, when they weren't making double plays, home runs and leaping catches, liked to drink, smoke and run around with, ahem, "girls who do." Ball Four may well be the best baseball book ever, but it's more than that: The New York Public Library recently chose it as one of the 100 "Books of the Century." Whatever is meant by the word "classic," Ball Four fits.

Now Bouton is back with another truth-teller that deserves to be a bestseller. Media conglomeration, like baseball after Bouton, will never be the same. Turns out the newspaper in the town near where Bouton lives--Pittsfield, Massachusetts--wanted to use $18.5 million of taxpayer money to build a new baseball stadium on property it owns. Turns out the property is polluted, although the newspaper didn't bother to disclose the fact, and that the new stadium was a way of passing off the liability to the public even while enhancing the value of the newspaper's property. Turns out the newspaper, which Bouton thought was locally owned, is owned by MediaNews Group, based in Denver, Colorado, which counts among its 100 "media properties" the Salt Lake Tribune and the Denver Post.

When Bouton and his partner went to the local publisher with a proposal to renovate the existing--and historic--stadium at no expense to the taxpayer, they were told: Out of our hands; check it with Dean (Dean Singleton is the mogul who runs MediaNews). They tried; Singleton didn't bother to answer, even when Bouton sent him a signed copy of Ball Four. Turns out the conglomerate wanted its own stadium, on its own property, at public expense, despite the fact that the public voted down the proposal--three times! But, hey, what's a little democracy when the only daily newspaper, the largest law firm in town and--hold on to your hat--General Electric (yes, that GE, which has title to its own media universe) want the indulgence of taxpayers for their little profit-making schemes. The local newspaper publisher, Bouton tells me, "was being controlled by his boss in Denver. And the local politicians were being controlled by the local publisher. So there was a sort of puppeteer controlling the decisions that were made by the local government."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&s=moyers

try to hide most of this crap anymore; it's the idolotry of the almighty dollar and the adoration of the free market system; that's what makes America, America...the ability, nay, the right, to screw whomever you can in order to make millions, it's the American Dream, hey....
They want to run the world and they make no secret of that either...

It is NOT the American dream to "...screw whomever you can...", it is, however, a piece of human history. The bloodiest part.

The American Dream is a melting pot of people working together with individual rights for all, and all with the idea that as "I do better, you will too". It really bends my fender when people ascribe the wrong attribute, as you have done, to the American Dream.

Just because the bus is being hi-jacked by vandals doesn't mean the bus is corrupted. Please take your seat while the bus is in motion.