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

The problem of how to make the Internet advertising friendly bewildered and obsessed Madison Avenue for much of the 1990s. Advertising won.

Also, the commercial media in a superior position, really, to any other corporate lobby, because where would people hear about commercial media or corporate media criticism, where would they hear criticism of them other than in the commercial media?

In the US, commercial interests stole the airwaves early on, before public broadcasters could get a stab at it. And the deal that was made with public broadcasting was, "Okay, we'll allow there to be a handful of public stations to do the educational programming that commercial broadcasters don't want to do, but the deal is they can't do anything that can generate an audience, anything that's commercially viable." Anything they do that could be commercially viable could be considered unfair competition to commercial interests and should only be on the commercial stations.

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

Copyright protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomeratesm encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.

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