Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [57]
Who exactly is to represent the public interest or the common good in this Darwinian world of corporate predators that just happen to control the defining symbolic essentials of civilization remains moot. Few even raise the question. The multiplicity of broadcast and cable spectra has made the old fairness doctrine obsolete and just about put the F.C.C. out of business. A modest regulatory bill cognizant of the new technologies was left twisting in the wind (along with a lot of other legislation) in the 1994 Congress. Even that bill, sponsored by Senator Ernest F. Hollings, was as much about curtailing as initiating regulations pertinent to the establishment of the new information highway and even the Baby Bells (local phone companies) who would have been subject to its regulations were disappointed in its failure since they were depending on it to legitimize their entry into the cable television and long-distance business.
Yet legislating on behalf of the public weal in telecommunications has become almost impossible. The change from earlier years is palpable. When New York’s classic music radio station WNCN tried to convert to rock in the 1970s, enraged listeners found a friend in the F.C.C. and the station was constrained to retain its classical format. When in 1993 it again jettisoned the classics, the F.C.C. was nowhere to be found, and WNCN’s proprietors were able to make the absurd argument that two classical stations in a city with scores of stations and millions of listeners “saturated” the market, and that one alone would serve. What then will take the place of the F.C.C. or government oversight or democratic regulation and accountability?15 Is there any hope for what Fred Friendly a dozen years ago called an “electronic bill of rights” in an era where a new Republican Congress is moving to abolish or privatize public broadcasting and dismantle what remains of the federal regulatory apparatus? How can the public be represented by markets that privilege individual consumption, taken consumer by consumer, but have no way of representing public goods—what individuals share and thus what makes them more than consumers? Where are the market incentives to protect public interests?16
These questions suggest that, after looking at the four distinctive elements of film, television, books, and theme parks and how they have become at once both internationalized and Americanized, we will need to take notice of the new merger and acquisitions frenzy in the information sector—a vertical integration frenzy in the name of free choice and free markets that could result in a monopoly more perilous to liberty than any dreamed of by mineral and durable goods megamonopolists like John Rockefeller, Sr., or Andrew Carnegie.17
6
Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology
TO WHOM OR to what belongs this expiring century? Is it the American century? Perhaps. The century of world wars and holocaust? Certainly. The science century? Undoubtedly. But I nominate celluloid and its baby cousin videotape: for more than anything else this has been the Movie Century, an epoch in which film and video and the images they mediate have replaced print and books and the words they once brokered as the chief instrumentalities of human communication, persuasion, and entertainment. Information has been digitalized and computerized and the pace of communication has been accelerated, but sound and pictures are how what passes as “knowledge” gets “communicated” to most people around the globe. The news has moved from print to video so that even newspapers emulate television formats. USA Today, for example, is television in tabloid form while even the venerable New York Times has gone to color in its advertisement-laden Sunday edition. And many magazines today are available on the Internet.
The table for McWorld has been set by Hollywood. If movable type (along with gunpowder and navigation) brought the medieval world of status, hierarchy,