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.
Robert Waterman McChesneyYou 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.
Robert Waterman McChesneyA 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.
Robert Waterman McChesneyCopyright protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomeratesm encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.
Robert Waterman McChesney