after the death of the creator. The
balance of creator’s rights and the public’s need for access to new culture has shifted
in favour of creators and, more notoriously, the corporations who have themselves
been given copyright privileges. Disney has been especially aggressive in fighting for
extraordinary copyright terms. Now, the copyrights on works containing Mickey
Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, as well as all other works published in the U.S. on or
after 1923, last 95 years.
(3) Anti-trust law, established to thwart the massive growth of corporations like
th
century, has been relaxed in the cultural
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the late 19
industries. Such law, which failed to turn back massive mergers like the disastrous
AOL/Time Warner combination, is now guided by criteria relating to market efficiency
rather than the integrity of the culture at large.
(iii) the use of regulations and public subsidies in support of public media
Where tax dollars have historically supported the development of the technologies that
became radio, TV, and the Internet, today’s public investment has been converted to the
advantage of private corporations. Spectrum giveaways, where companies are given
channel capacity by the government at no cost; copyright extensions, which enormously add
to the value of the media properties many companies own; and the defunding of public
media like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, req英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】uiring them to
accept sponsorship monies and thus weaken their independence, are all favours to private
media.
Moreover, concerted attacks on the supposed “liberal bias” have made U.S. public media far
more timid, and moved them to concentrate on upper-middle class audiences rather than
produce programming with broad appeal. All this has resulted in a public media system in
the U.S. that is the weakest in the western world. The revival of public media, McChesney
concludes, will require reaching out to larger non-elite audiences, and expanding the
understanding of what constitutes public media beyond radio and TV broadcasting to other
print and electronic media. McChensey closes: “As Saul Alinsky [the Chicago-based community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals] famously noted, to defeat organized
money, one needs organized people—and in the realm of media, corporate money is highly
organized” (p. 251).
3. AC640 reading: Paul Nesbitt-Larking’s “Sticks, Carrots, and
Party Favours: State and Political Regulation of the Media.”
Journalism, business, government, and PR are converging within a fundamental
culture of marketing that’s so pervasive it’s invisible.
Liss Jeffrey, McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology
Paul Nesbitt-Larking is a professor of political science at Huron College, a small liberal arts
college affiliated with the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. This chapter
comes from his book, Politi
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