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.

An informed public democracy means rule of the people. A media system is absolutely essential to that process, if people are going to be political equals, they to have to have the information and tools so they can actually be participants. That's liberal democracy 101.

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

In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times.

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.

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.

And they've got to be held accountable; our broadcasting system has to be made accountable; and unless it is, it's going to be very hard to change anything else for the better in this country.