The Corporate Grip on Truth

Two public “needs assessment” hearings in Virginia's tiny City of Falls Church this past week failed to realize a unique grass roots public opportunity to intervene against the dominate trends of major media control in the U.S. The hearings are part of a cable TV franchise negotiation currently underway between Falls Church city officials and the telecom giant Verizon.

Verizon is entering the cable TV business through the window of its unique “fiber optic cable to the premises” that will offer the fastest Internet and telephone services as well. Falls Church, a small independent jurisdiction inside the Washington, D.C., beltway has been selected as one of a tiny few demonstration launch pads for Verizon’s new multi-faceted offensive that will eventually blanket the entire land.

Verizon devoted plenty of lobbying capital in Richmond during Virginia’s just-completed state legislative session trying to pass a law that would have transferred the authority to negotiate cable TV franchises from a multitude of local jurisdictions to one central state body. It failed, even though Verizon is not finished with efforts to achieve a similar result through legislation at the federal level.

But for the time being, the fact that cable TV franchise negotiations are handled at the level of local jurisdictions provides grass roots America with one of a dwindling number of opportunities to alter the dangerous decline of the nation’s media increasingly caught in the grip of powerful corporate giants and right-wing ideologues.

For example, citizens at the local level can demand that a cable TV franchise provide an array of channels that give viewers access to independent news reporting and programming free from control by such interests. Citizens can pressure their local governments to insist that programming from overseas sources, for example, not only be ample but included as part of basic cable service. The menu of options that can be brought to viewers through cable TV is amazingly diverse, but for many localities, hardly any are available, or some may be only through pricey add-on subscriptions.

Corporate media critics like Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999) and The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (2004), believes that the currently dominate forces in the media are in for a shock in the next few years as wireless Internet networks now being developed by web sites such as FreePress.net and others “will determine communications policy in this country for the next century.”

“It sounds grandiose to say,” McChesney said in a recent interview with Geoff Green of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Independent, “but it's true.”

In the meantime, he commended the notion of grass roots organizing around cable TV franchise renewals. “If people organize their cable franchise renewals at the local level, the effects could be tremendous in improving local systems and really empower people to understand the power they do have locally,” he noted.

For anyone who doubts the danger inherent in the even just the last 10 years’ trends in the control of the nation’s major media, consider these, just some identified by McChesney and FreePress.net: