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.

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

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

But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.

In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants.

If you're running for reelection in the House of Representatives race, you know, it's very important to you that you be on fairly good terms with the local affiliates in the largest market in your area. I mean you don't want to antagonize them.

What I've found is that there is a tremendous interest in these issues, across the political spectrum, sort of left-right terms we used to describe people don't really hold here exactly.