Coverage of Iraq has plummeted, because people in power no longer want to talk about it suddenly. Journalists should be over there demanding front-page coverage, lead-story coverage every day. They should be demanding that no politician running for federal office can go to bed until they say what the hell they're going to do about Iraq and what how accountable they are for it.

The whole process of getting licenses to broadcast, which took place decades ago, was done behind closed doors by powerful lobbies, and wealthy commercial interests got all the licenses with no public input, no congressional input for that matter.

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

The commercial broadcasters have tremendous influence in Washington, D.C., for a couple of reasons. First, they're extremely rich and they have lots of money and they have had for a long time, so they can give money to politicians, which gets their attention.