Media consolidation

I’m in the middle of my “proactive ministry in media culture” course this term, and thus have been paying attention to news coverage of media consolidation. The FCC is in the process of making the few rules they have been enforcing much less stringent, and we’re about to see even less diversity of ownership than previously. Helping my students understand why they should care about this, however, let alone why it’s a matter for communities of faith to attend to, is a difficult challenge.

This week I read two reports, one in Entertainment Weekly, and one in the Sunday NYT, exploring the extent to which pop artists are — or are not — responding to the threat of war. Both articles mention the 60’s activism of pop artists, and both also point to media consolidation as one reason why there’s less activism now. (Although frankly it seems odd to me to think there is “less” when the war hasn’t even officially begun, and in the 60’s it took years of actual combat and rising death counts to make an impression on pop culture artists.)

The NYT article notes “few rock musicians expect antiwar songs to get mass exposure on radio stations that have been largely consolidated into two national networks, Clear Channel and Infinity.” The article goes on to point out that that’s hardly a reason not to write such music, and most artists still do.

While I don’t believe that there’s some Machiavelli at the top “pulling strings” and deliberately censoring our airwaves, I DO think that there are processes in place that narrow and constrain what’s available to us. This is yet another reason why it’s important to reach out to alternative news and music sources, and to support digital sharing of music (more about that at some other point). The NYT, for instance, printed the URL to Billy Bragg’s anti-war song (www.billybragg.com), and now anyone interested in hearing it can immediately go to the site and listen.

We all need to dream big dreams, and recognizing that we share those big dreams is a vivid route to deeper and more sustaining hope. We can’t rely on commercial media — no matter how much we enjoy them — to spread those dreams. Most of the time they’ve already decided they’re too risky to even mention…