You will never ever, in any circumstance, win any struggle at any time. That being said, we have a long way to go. At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

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?

Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

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.

So the competition isn't once you got the license, running the station; it's getting the license.