The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective.

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.

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.

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

The current public television and radio system in the United States, while it's better than nothing, that's about the best you can say about it. It's nowhere near the standard it needs to be for our society, and we've got to make a commitment to rethink the system altogether. You know, just giving more money to what exists on PBS now would be not great; we've got to have a new vision of PBS.

You know, a left-winger, the barrier to success if you're on the left in commercial radio is a mile and a half higher than it is if you're on the right.

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