Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy

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Overview

The celebrated media advocate's "damning and important" (Publishers Weekly) case for digital media to serve the public versus corporate interests.

Praised by the leading media analysts of our time, from Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney to Ben Bagdikian and The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, Digital Destiny describes "what's gone, and is going, wrong with the digital media ...
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More About This Book

Overview

The celebrated media advocate's "damning and important" (Publishers Weekly) case for digital media to serve the public versus corporate interests.

Praised by the leading media analysts of our time, from Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney to Ben Bagdikian and The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, Digital Destiny describes "what's gone, and is going, wrong with the digital media in this country" (Midwest Book Review).

In this "intimate" and "comprehensive" (AlterNet) account, Chester, one of the nation's leading advocates for a more open and democratic U.S. media system, warns that the potential of the Internet and other digital communication channels to function as "the people's media" is being undermined by a powerful, largely invisible coalition of corporate and political interests. Instead of the information commons that many dreamed of, our electronic media system is increasingly designed to sell to rather than serve the public and is becoming dominated by commercial forces and personal data collection that threaten privacy and freedom of expression in the digital age.

Prescient and provocative, Digital Destiny "will become required reading for a generation of students, scholars, activists, and concerned citizens across the nation" (Robert W. McChesney).
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In recent years, the Federal Communications Commission has come under fire from advocacy groups and, increasingly, the general public for its regulatory decisions (or, in many cases, lack thereof). Writing in the tradition of critic Robert McChesney, media watchdog Jeff Chester examines the FCC, charting the close network of lobbyists, trade associations and other industry representatives in which it is embedded. Through close analysis of recent FCC moves and decisions on media consolidation and network neutrality, Chester makes a damning and important case for sweeping reform in governmental regulation, culminating in a series of policy recommendations that would adjust the balance of power between media corporations and customers. Unfortunately, Chester is mostly preaching to the converted; the general tone of the book is so stridently (even antagonistically) polemic that it's more likely to turn off uninformed or dissenting readers than persuade them. While offering red meat for those already concerned about issues of personal privacy and media choice in an era of growing corporate media oligarchy, Chester doesn't do much to reach beyond them, limiting the book's appeal both as a book and as a piece of advocacy. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A sobering view of today's entrenched corporate media giants as a threat to the concept of an enlightened electorate. As executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public-interest group, the author has spent 30 years in the middle of Washington's often obfuscated communications policy-making apparatus. Recent trends, he argues, have so broken down former caveats against consolidation of media ownership-newspapers, radio, TV and now digital networks and services-that the future of media content, including the Internet itself, may be effectively determined without public participation. Thanks to rampant deregulation of large media corporations, particularly under the reign of former Bush administration FCC Commissioner Michael C. Powell, Chester asserts, commercial considerations-advertising revenues and fee-based media services-have become the prime force in new media development and delivery schemes. (The news here for many readers may be that it wasn't always this way.) Longstanding policy guidelines recognized that multiple media ownership in local markets could result in shaping information solely to further the agenda of corporate owners. However, Powell, son of former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, pushed a GOP-endorsed free-market campaign that, while rebuffed in some of its more extreme dimensions, has now empowered single entities to own multiple media outlets and services in local markets. As a way of pointing out the determination-and, in his view, insidiousness-of media giants to lobby against ownership restrictions, Chester singles out the New York Times Corp. as one of the most aggressive, noting that the maneuvers of its corporate stewards remainedcuriously absent from its own news pages for an extended period. A party power shift in Washington, the author sums up, won't necessarily diminish the threat. Complex, quixotic attempt to sway the American public from the temptation to "amuse itself to death."
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781565847958
  • Publisher: New Press, The
  • Publication date: 1/8/2007
  • Pages: 282
  • Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Jeff Chester is the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. A former investigative reporter and filmmaker, he has been at the forefront of the fight against the increasing consolidation and commercialization of the U.S. media system for nearly three decades. He lives outside Washington, D.C.
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Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction: Communications at the Crossroads     xv
Really "Meet" the Press: The Days, Months, and Years When You Didn't "Read-or See-All About It"     1
Consolidation Dance: Featuring Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, and a Cast of Lobbyists     16
The Federal Conglomeration Commission     46
The Art of the Front     65
The Powell Doctrine     90
Showdown at the FCC     102
The Brandwashing of America: Marketing and Micropersuasion in the Digital Era     127
Cable Costra Nostra: Why You Should Never Believe What the Media Industry Promises     159
The Golden Wire     171
Supermedia Monopolies     182
A Policy Agenda for the Broadband Era     192
Notes     209
Index     279
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