Dean on the Media. He "gets it." ....Does Kerry? [View All]

[Armstead]

Once again, Howard Dean is speaking the truth that otehr politicians seem to avoid with a ten foot pole (ecept for Kucinich.).

Will Kerry ever come out and be this honest about the mess the media has become?


From The Nation
By John Nichols
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1250


Excerpt:

That does not mean, however, that Dean does not think about how he would handle media issues if elected. "I figure I'll win, and then I'll really complain about the media," he says.

What does Dean mean by that? "I think democracy fails under a variety of conditions and one of the conditions occurs when people don't have the ability to get the kind of information they need to make up their mind. Ideologically, I don't care much for Fox News. But the truth is that, as long as there are countervailing points of view available on the spectrum, it doesn't matter," says Dean, who began speaking last year about the need to reduce the power of big media companies.

"Now, the last time I saw a statistic on this, I think that 90 percent of the American people got their news from a handful of corporations," he adds. "That's not very good for democracy, and that's not very good for America. If I become president of the United States, I'm going to appoint a whole lot different people to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) so that we start to make the media more diffuse, more responsible. I'd also like public airwaves devoted to some public services – so that every single station serves the community where it is located."

Dean dismisses the notion that proposals to break the grip of media conglomerates are radical. "That's not radical at all," he says. "That's what we used to have. The right wingers have undone that over the last 15 or 20 years, and we need to go back to what we had to have a sound democracy."

Dean also dismisses the notion that it would be difficult to get the American people to go along with a challenge to big media. "I think the public would love what I was doing," he says of a presidential assault on media monopolies. "The public doesn't particularly like the media, which works in my favor."