The left's drive to control the media you see

Adam Thierer:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press's advent, information spread at a snail's pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society--or so you'd think. But today's media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what's shaping up to be America's Golden Age of media could be over soon.

Back in 2003, a somewhat free-market-minded Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Republican Michael Powell, proposed to revise the arcane policies governing media ownership, which, among other things, limit how many newspapers, television stations, or radio stations a single entity can own in each community. "Americans today have more media choices, more sources of news and information, and more varied entertainment programming available to them than ever before," the FCC observed. Allowing slightly more cross-ownership, it reasoned, would simply clear out the regulatory deadwood that artificially limited the ability of older media operators (broadcasters and newspapers) to compete with all the new media alternatives. Such a measure would do nothing to harm media multiplicity.

Despite the moderate nature of the FCC's proposal, all hell broke loose on the left, and things haven't really died down since....

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The circuslike "town hall meetings" that followed proved even more overheated. Pushed by Democratic FCC commissioners and organized by MoveOn.org, Free Press and other leftist advocacy groups, these sessions gave anyone with a gripe against a media company a chance to vent. Some grumbled that TV and radio featured too much religious programming; others argued that there wasn't enough. Everyone said that local radio broadcast nothing but garbage--but everyone defined garbage differently. And many aired long lists of complaints about the multiple radio stations, television channels, and newspapers in their areas, only to conclude that their local media markets were insufficiently competitive!

The critics did agree on one thing: Government had to take steps to reverse our current media predicament--whatever it was. A variety of advocacy groups then took the FCC to court and got the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to put the whole media ownership revision on hold.

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The liberal scarcity worrywarts thus ignore a recent history of stunning technological innovation and marketplace evolution that has made us as information-rich as any society in history. But this is where a second group of leftist media critics enter the picture.

What information consumes is rather obvious," Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon remarked in 1971: "the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Thirty-six years later, confronting a "wealth of information" that Simon could never have imagined, a growing group of left-wing critics warns about its destructive consequences. The titles of recent books by Todd Gitlin and Barry Schwartz--"Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives" and "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less," respectively--capture the anxiety felt by these opponents of media multiplicity. It's just too much.

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There is much more.

What is clear is that at their core liberals are control freaks. Their Stalinist tendencies are exposed with the arguments they are making on this issue. You can see it in their desire to shut down Fox news. They cannot stand competing points of view being aired. They view talk radio the same way. In the market place fo ideas they want no competition.