p16
Today fewer than 10 multinational media conglomerates-Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Viacom, Sony, Seagram, AT&T/Liberty Media, Bertelsmann, and GE-dominate most of the American mass media landscape.
p22
The closer a story gets to examining corporate power the less reliable our corporate media system is as a source of information that is useful to the citizens of a democracy. And on issues like the global capitalist economy, the corporate media are doubly unreliable, because they rank as perhaps the foremost beneficiaries of Wall Street-designed trade deals like NAFTA, and of the machinations of the three multilateral agencies developed to shape the global economy to serve corporate interests: the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moreover, almost all the favored mainstream sources for coverage of global economic affairs are strident advocates for a corporate-driven vision of globalization. Thus, corporate journalists-even those low enough on the pecking order to be dispatched to stand in the rain on a Washington street corner-generally will find arguments against the status quo incomprehensible.
p24
The news required for a functional democracy - the news that empowers citizens to act in their own interest and for the good of society-is discarded [by the corporate media] to make way for the trivial, sensational, and salacious.
p27
Alan Schroeder
"Media is not an issue, but that's because the media frame the topics of discussion-and, obviously, they're not going to put that on the list of issues that have to be discussed."
p28
In our American democracy the issue of media barely registers. The structures of our media, the concentration of its ownership, the role that it plays in shaping the lives of our children, in commercializing our culture, and in warping our elections ...
p29
Congressional approval of the [1996] Telecommunications Act, after only a stilted and disengaged debate, was a historic turning point in media policy making in the United States, as it permitted a consolidation of media and communication ownership that had previously been unthinkable.
p30
The problem with concentrated media is that it accentuates the two main problems of commercial media, hypercommercialism and denigration of public service.
p31
We have a media system set up to serve private investors first and foremost, not public citizens.
p32
Those media that depend upon advertising for the lion's share of their income-radio, TV, newspapers, magazines-are, in effect, part of the advertising industry.