Strikes me that there's some wishful thinking animating this piece by Reihan Salam just up on The New Republic website, but it does suggest how the Dean campaign could effectively combine anti-corporate populism with the anti-media variety.
The article begins:
As if readers of the Drudge Report needed any more evidence to demonstrate that Howard Dean is a raging Bolshevik, the WASP warrior recently declared that, as Drudge's short-lived banner headline put it, he would "break up giant media enterprises," or rather, "BREAK UP GIANT MEDIA ENTERPRISES." (Picture bantamweight Dean climbing to the top of the new AOL Time Warner tower armed with hammer and sickle, spitting mad and ready to rock.) Because Drudge is the id of America's right-leaning half, it's no surprise that Dean's fulminations against big media would set off alarm bells. That Dean would openly target a small number of firms for intrusive regulation offends pro-market sensibilities on its face.
But should it? In this case, Dean may well be right. There's good reason to believe that the current regulatory regime is doing little to foster competition or innovation, as any well-designed market should. And, as for the politics, a war against big media is an issue that, if played correctly, could pack a lot of left-right-fusion firepower.
The gauntlet was thrown down this Monday on MSNBC's "Hardball." It begin with a broad riff on corporate power, during which Dean took a bold pro-soul stance:
Where we're at right now in this cycle is that we need somebody to mitigate the power of corporations. Corporations are not bad things. They're neither good nor bad. But the problem is, they're a bad influence on society if they get too much power, because their basic interest is the bottom line. And they forget that human being have--human beings have souls.
This much wasn't new. Last month, Dean was blasted by rivals for having advocated the "re-regulation" of several sectors of the economy, including the news media. It was red meat for the base, but strangely empty. Dean was short on specifics despite having made a sweeping call for a "new social contract for the twenty-first century." When pressed, he offered vague generalities on "workers' standards" and protections for labor unions; tellingly, he spent just as much time on expensing stock options and corporate transparency, causes that are, if not obviously pro-business, certainly pro-market. And so Dean's call for "re-regulation," a red flag for neoliberals and conservatives alike, left a good deal of room for interpretation. Could it have been window-dressing for the lefties, destined to be tossed aside in a mad dash to the middle?
It was with this in mind, one presumes, that the voluble Chris Matthews tried to pin Dean down by asking, "Would you have had airline deregulation? ... Travel, the Democrats' Ted Kennedy was part of that deregulation, the deregulation of radio. There are so many things that have been deregulated ... would you reverse it?"
At this point, Dean pivoted to media concentration. After several minutes of grilling, he said the following:
Yes, we're going to break up giant media enterprises. That doesn't mean we're going to break up all of GE. What we're going to do is say that media enterprises can't be as big as they are today.
... You have got to say that there has to be a limit as to how--if the state has an interest, which it does, in preserving democracy, then there has to be a limitation on how deeply the media companies can penetrate every single community. To the extent of even having two or three or four outlets in a single community, that kind of information control is not compatible with democracy.
When Matthews argued that "this is not ... capitalism," Dean maintained that his vision of capitalism was the real deal: "[T]he essence of capitalism, which the right-wing never understands--it always baffles me--is, you got to have some rules."
This is an uncontroversial point. In the broadcasting business, laissez faire isn't an option: Government provides the frameworks that define the marketplace in a variety of ways, allocation of the airwaves being foremost among them. For better or worse, government is deeply implicated in financing the nation's communications infrastructures, whether directly or indirectly. But this tells us very little about, for example, the number of media properties a firm should be allowed to own in particular market. That depends on one's assessment of the evidence--has, say, the proliferation of media outlets, including cable television channels and websites, ensured a diversity of viewpoints despite consolidation? (Does a diversity of viewpoints matter? There's a broad consensus that it does, so we'll leave that aside.) Dean believes that it hasn't.
In June, the Federal Communications Commission relaxed a number of media ownership restrictions: It lifted the ban on owning newspapers and television or radio stations in the same market; and, among other things, it allowed the major broadcast networks to own more television stations directly. (Contrariwise, it also set firm limits on the number of radio stations a single company could own--though that wasn't enough of a fig leaf to satisfy critics.) When you think of these regulations as arbitrary, and of the media marketplace as very fluid with ever-shrinking barriers to entry, this makes perfect sense: A constant, almost dialectical, process of consolidation and deconsolidation will eventually lead to a greater efficiency and higher quality.
And yet a number of observers, including Stanford law professor and "cyber-visionary" Lawrence Lessig, suspect that, in a landscape defined by increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, this is unlikely to happen. The ineluctable result of a hands-off approach to media ownership would be ever-greater consolidation. And, as he suggests in his forthcoming book, Free Culture, the outcome of that would be an increasingly sterile cultural environment. While there are steps that could be taken to promote diversity--a bigger push for spread-spectrum that would allow small groups of citizens to share the airwaves with large firms, for instance--moves in this direction have been few and far between.
Many on the right, including William Safire and the NRA, and the left, from MoveOn.org to the Congressional Black Caucus, believe that the current regulatory regime is designed to protect industry incumbents, crowding out smaller players and new technologies. If these critics are correct, it's a classic case of regulatory capture, the bête noire of free marketers. Railing against big media has always been a populist chestnut, and Dean is not immune to its appeal. This time, however, he can also claim to be a responsible steward of a thriving, diverse marketplace.