Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

Deregulation is a popular term that's used across the political spectrum. And it's one of these terms like "choice," that corporate interests have used because they know their focus-group buzzword testing makes it sound like a popular word. Because, who can be against deregulation? Being free, having liberty, not having someone tell you what to do, being deregulated, hey, that sounds great. But deregulation is a non sequitur in the realm of media policy or media regulation. The issue is never regulation versus deregulation; our entire system is built on media policies and subsidies.

Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.

Even if someone wanted a purely free-market, competitive media system, it would require extensive government regulation to set up those markets. All our largest media companies are based on the grant of explicit government monopoly privileges and licenses, or franchises, or subsidies. The government didn't come in after the system was in place, it built the system in the first place.

And understand that scarce spectrum is used today for example for cell phone operators, they have to pay for the airwaves they use, for their services.

In the last two years we've seen a sea change in the United States on media issues. Two years ago, people would have read this, then opened the window on the ledge of the 18th floor and jumped. They would have said, "Okay, it's over, there's nothing I can do, it's just getting worse." But in the last two years, what we've seen is that millions of Americans have gotten aware of the issue, they've organized on it, they've risen up, and we're seeing the beginnings of a burgeoning media reform movement across this country.