As a former radio broadcaster and journalist,
I saw this disturbing trend coming as far back as the 1980's. Working mostly in small city radio, I watched with alarm as more and more stations began joining large corporate outlets where the only opinions the audience would hear were those of the corporate owners.

When I first entered the area of broadcast journalism in the mid-1960's, a community with one or two local broadcast outlets, each with a hard-working, competitive local or regional news team, could give the listeners in-depth coverage of area news and often do it better than local TV outlets do now.

The sense of responsibility to the listeners is gone now. Since the broadcaster is a faceless person afflitated with a large corporation, his anonymity means he can lie with impunity to literally hundreds of smaller broadcast affiliates and no one out there listening is the wiser. And corruption spreads because the checks and balances, (local public opinion and direct listener response) is essentially gone. Formerly, the broadcast faciliity and everyone directly connected with it, had a stake in serving their audiences and giving them what they wanted and needed.

Not so anymore. All that matters is to keep feeding the "cash cow." Corporate owners with 200 or 300 affiliates obviously could not care a wit about the needs of listeners in any one of those widely scattered communities. It's corporate advertising and corporate politics that feeds the money machine.Pity the poor listeners. Who cares what they want or need from their local broadcast outlet? Any collective power they might have had has been taken away. Now the listener or viewer, exists to serve the broadcast corporation instead of the other way around. As it was first intended broadcast licenses were granted or lost based on whether or not the station was serving the best interests of its audience. It is a frightening situation. Big Brother has arrived.

The regulatory agency, the FCC, is now a paper tiger, indebted to the powerful political interests who are in turn indebted to the ruling corporate heads and their investors.

Amy Goodman's critiques of big media should be balanced with the understanding that she is being paid by one of the large organizations she criticizes. Goodman's book is published by Hyperion, which is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. (the Disney company is not mentioned in the book, by the way) Time Warner has a distribution deal with Hyperion, so Goodman's "Un-embed the media" tour will clearly fortify the coffers of the big media Goodman criticizes. This would be akin to Michael Moore having an endorsement deal with General Motors at the time he was creating the documentary "Roger and Me."