John Nichols talking:
Ben Bagdikian was our great inspiration. I mean—and, you know, he was an inspiration. If you were to ask Noam Chomsky and so many other folks who have really identified the challenges of media today, they all go back to Bagdikian, this incredible journalist, an Armenian-American immigrant who became the best in his field and then stepped out of his field, became a critic and a commentator, and essentially said, “Look, this monopolization is going to put so much power in a handful of corporate elites that we will begin to lose journalism.” Clearly, that has happened.
But the most important thing for people who are tuning in today or listening today is to understand that Ben Bagdikian predicted the 2016 election. He said that when you begin to really dumb down media and make it so huge that it becomes a dumb beast, that it literally lives off clicks and ratings, and it’s desperate to, you know, kind of draw in anybody, it’s going to—it’s not going to go for a higher level of discourse. It’s going to go to a point where it’s easily played by the likes of a Donald Trump. You read Bagdikian from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you see the outlines for exactly where we are today.
And this is the most important thing: He said that especially dangerous was the killing out of local journalism. We have seen so much of that. And remember, in a democracy, democracy begins at home. When we don’t have good local journalism, people covering our communities, that’s when horrible things happen, things done in our name without our informed consent. Ben Bagdikian was literally the Paul Revere, riding through our villages and towns, telling us we can’t let this happen. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed in every way. But if we read him and understand what he talked about, we begin to understand how we must respond to our current moment.
media monopoly. He started writing and said there were about 50 companies that controlled most of our media. He kept doing new editions of the book. The last edition of the book, which I believe was in 2004, it was down to five, five or six. And this is the simple reality. This is the guy who made us stop simply complaining about the media and start to understand the media system, the whole infrastructure of it. I think he did such incredible work on allowing us to understand corporate power over media. And the fact is, we now talk about media, generally, in ways—even Republicans talk about media power in ways that they don’t even know are rooted in Ben Bagdikian’s incredible research and writing.
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John Nichols
political writer for The Nation and co-author with Robert McChesney of the new book, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.
— source democracynow.org