But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.

The number one lobby that opposes campaign finance reform in the United States is the National Association of Broadcasters.

An informed public democracy means rule of the people. A media system is absolutely essential to that process, if people are going to be political equals, they to have to have the information and tools so they can actually be participants. That's liberal democracy 101.

Very rarely are you going to see the large shareholder or CEO of a corporation march into a newsroom and say, "Cover this story, don't cover that." It's a much more subtle process. The professional code adapts, but what we try to see, is how commercial and corporate pressure shape both the professional code and the sorts of things that are considered legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism.

If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.

When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn't setting the terms of the competition.