Wisconsin and the Media

We're seeing a lot of arguments on how this wasn't "really" a defeat for unions and that the voters just don't like recalls. In 2003 when Grey Davis was recalled in California, voters liked recalls fine. Voters were told not to like recalls, over and over. They were told to be jealous of people with decent salaries and pensions, instead of trying to get them for themselves.

I think the bottom line here is that it’s nearly impossible to win against a well-run campaign propagated through a media dominated by the propagandists. All the money spent in the state was able to dominate the media.

Now, this is not news. It is how the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century operated. I think that part of having a free press is having a press that is not monopolized by a single political viewpoint. The people who wrote the post-World-War-II anti-press concentration laws knew understood this very well, having just lived through wars enabled by controlled mass-media. So, so long as there are centralized mass media, I think freedom demands regulation of media concentration.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine! Put Noam Chomsky on Fox!