Media Control: How the government controls what we see and hear...

HOW THE FCC CONTROLS THE INFORMATION FLOW:

Excerpted from the new book:
"Unseating America's First Monarch"
By Les Aaron

The government extends the central reach of government through three instruments of power that it wields . In conjunction with government, the media is controlled, per se, through control of ‘access’—this is one of the subtlest forces that can spell the success or failure of a communications medium; secondly, the government exercises through its other powers control of funding for the media—many stations, especially in the public area—cannot survive without government funding and that is predicated to a great extent on the cooperation of government officials seen as less than friendly to the needs of the broadest segment of the population which is not conservative or liberal; and, thirdly, mostly under the aegis of the FCC, the government has the ability to decide what happens within a market area; in effect, it can assert its authority to exercise control of a market area—i.e. How many and kinds of new stations can a media empire acquire? Such decisions are instrumental in the growth plans of media empires.

In recent years, what had been the formulae has been changed to allow certain companies to expand their media empires so that they control all the facets of communication—something zealously guarded against by previous administrations who were concerned that such media concentration would not be in the public good.

To date, the Democrats have failed to understand the power that the Republicans wield in this important area, an area that shapes thinking and public opinion.

(See Unseating The First American Monarch for "solutions...")