It's the Media, Stupid

Out of stock. will be reissued in the September 2002, updated and expanded under the title OUR MEDIA NOT THEIRS.It's the Media, Stupid outlines the current media crisis in the United States, explains how this crisis has undermined basic democracy, and provides readers with the tools to battle from the school board level to the Congress for more diverse and responsible media. Nichols and McChesney begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to carpet bomb the population with commercial messages. They reveal how journalism, electoral politics, entertainment, art and culture have all suffered as a result. Nichols and McChesney also explain how that the Internet, which many once argued would open up the media system to a cornucopia of new voices and creativity, has been lost for the most part to the corporate communication system. It's the Media, Stupid contains proposals for making our media system more responsive to the needs of the citizenry and less dominated by the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. The authors look at how political parties, grassroots movements and popular performers in other democratic nations increasingly have made media reform a political priority in the 1990s, in response to pressures to make their media systems more closely resemble the U.S. model. The authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform activities in the United States in recent years, and outline measures to improve the media system. Their vision for change emphasizes: * building a grassroots movement that seeks immediate change at the local level (for example, media literacy courses in the schools) while building the base for democracy that, for too long, has been constrained by the titans of what is; * recommendations for new rules and regulations that would limit the power of commercial media, such as no paid TV political advertising, and no TV advertising aimed at children under 12; * providing creative public subsidies for an independent nonprofit and noncommercial media sector, as well as developing a world-class, noncommercial multi-layered public broadcasting system; * genuine public hearings to determine how the digital media age should develop in the public interest, rather than the secretive and corrupt corporate slugfest that led to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader says in the book's introduction, "You hold in your hands a key to unlocking the corporate media chains that have shackled real freedom of the press and real democracy in this country for all too long. Use it!"