For this blog, I'm going to start with just how much the American media landscape has changed. It wasn't all that long ago, when most people did not have CNN. Back in the days when Fox News Channel and Democracy Now did not exist. In those days, only a handful of Americans regularly tuned into the BBC, and of course even before 9/11, it was all but unthinkable that an operation like Al-Jazeera would EXIST let alone that large numbers of Americans would start to watch it.
No as recently as the 1980's, most Americans watched the old standbys that now seem quaint such as NBC, ABC, and CBS. Despite the glitz of the then new CNN, most people watched the news stations that had been shared across the political spectrum for generations. Although criticisms of bias came from both the left and right along with concerns about commercialism and "dumbing down", Republicans and Democrats, left, right, and center tended to watch news outlets that their grandparents would have recognized.
And yet, after Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act in 1996, things would begin to change largely for the worst, but also in ways that almost nobody would have predicted. One predicted result was that American media would become more monopolized, more controlled, and farther to the Right. Hence Fox News Channel and the current state of CNN. Needless to say CNN, isn't what it promised when it was started in 1980, and Fox News Channel isn't so much a real news channel but a propaganda outlet for the radical right. To be fair could one suggest that Democracy Now is leftist propaganda? Realistically, much it would have been more like "moderate liberal propaganda" a generation ago.
However, what almost nobody predicted that in addition to turning to both right wing/conservative and left wing/progressive *brands* of news, more and more Americans would end up turning to foreign news. In the case of the BBC, that was more than anything else America "catching up" with most of the world, in that the BBC had long been a popular media outlet internationally. You could argue that one of the reasons the BBC wasn't as popular in America as it was in the rest of the world is the same reason we drive on the right side of the road-Namely that we left the British Empire before the BBC became an institution or before automobiles became widespread!!
But part of the equation was that the US had many fine presses and fine media outlets for generations, so unlike a lot of smaller nations, more recent British colonies, and/or nations that didn't always have the same freedom of the press Americans didn't seem to feel as much of a need to *import* halfway decent news, and in particular foreign coverage. In a way, the loss of democracy and a free press, sent many Americans turning back to Britain for media access!!
Even more ironic however, is the rise of Al-Jazeera English in the US. While most Americans don't have access to it, a surprising number of people who do seem to find that they like having access to the same news that much of the Arab world considered the first breakaway from decades of state controlled media. And that this is happening at a time when Al-Jazeera was slammed as "anti-American" early in the Iraq War. In a few years many would come to regard it as having a great "internationalist" perspective, and some favor it because it shows a more developing world centered coverage-which in fact many progressives and leftists have wanted for decades.
But what does this all mean for American culture and society? Only six years ago, a major contender for the Democraty party nomination was slammed for among other things reading reading the New York Times (I often wondered if the people who made this ad ever saw Howard Dean in person.), and when Dunkin' Donuts got slammed because a woman in their ad was wearing an Arab style scarf in from of the Oregon State Capitol. What in this context, can it mean that certain segments of Americans are so suspicious of anything Arab or foreign, and get a lot of that reinforced by watching Fox News, while others are getting their news from Al-Jazeera. And others still are watching the BBC. And many who have no access to foreign news outlets may be watching Democracy Now. And others still continue to watch ABC, CBS, or NBC for their nightly news?
So you have a situation where one group of Americans considers another group of Americans news source to be a "terrorist news station", who considers the other group's news source to be a "radical right news station". It almost seems like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel. A picture of extreme polarization.
What is the solution? Should we try to get everyone watching the same news sources once again? Is it even possible at this point? Should we try to develop more of a British model of public television? Or should we go for a radical break-up of monopoly media?
Or should we consider both homegrown and foreign media as essential parts of national political discourse? Is the growth in foreign media a good thing, because it might change a perspective where Americans think of US casualties, while ignoring hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and millions of Vietnamese?
Or it simply doomed to polarize American society further than it already is?
One thing I do not claim to have on this is any solid predictions of how all of this will shake down, or even how it will look in a few years. Certainly, this post raises far more questions than answers. And the answers are nothing short of the future of news media in American society.
Say Goodnight Readers!
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