Cspan created by Public Companies in 1979 and brought to you as a Public Service by your provider. We want to introduce you to Robert Mcchesney thomas a communication professor at university of illinois at urbanachampaign. He is a cofounder of the group free press. He served as president for several years. He is on the board. Professor mcchesney is also an author. Here is his most recent book called digital disconnect of capitalism. What this your pieces in a digital is connect . Internetsis is the began with extraordinary promise for democratizing society and making the world a far better place. Some of it has come true. Much of the has been turned on its head largely due to commercial pressures that is change the course dramatically. Internet,redirect the the future is not necessarily going to be as glorious. In your book you talk about the need to look at the internet through elliptical economy. What do you mean . I think the problem with we downplaysinternet capitalism. That technology has a super power over society. I think we need to bring it back in and look at the connection and see how the internet fits into that and get a sense of how the internet has developed. That is what i mean. Examples of how you think it has turned away from democracy. Look at the beginning founder ofrnet, the netscape as well the entrepreneurs investing into Internet Companies said it with the internet began and was it was an it, cooperative environment. By all accounts, it was seen as a great equalizer for democracy. It was going going to give information for all people. It was going to slave large corporations and craig competitiveness and local create competitiveness and localized areas. It has never been fully practical prior to the internet could become practical. People had the information required to govern their own lives in a social sense and fully participate. That was the high bar of the internet when he began. Made, the points i just people said that is what the internet is doing. What i would argue on certain key points in that mythology or dream, what has happened is specifically we have turned in the opposite direction. I would give a couple of examples. One of the great ideas initially was it was going to to be an anonymous media. You cannot be known who you were. Did not have to be word about being monitored or people keeping tabs on you. The way the internet developed for commercial reasons because that is the way it is to make money off the internet. It is now the exact opposite. Everything we do online is noted by commercial vendors. We have no privacy at all. It is been completely decimated. Right there, we have a efforts between the position 30 years ago and where it is today. You also talk about loneliness and personalization on the internet of today. In the first chapter, i talk about the celebrants who stole the virtues of the internet and the great things it is doing in terms of giving people resources and the ability to collaborate. People are concerned the thernet is undermining quality of our life. One of the arguments is rather than really trying us together on evidence suggests it is making people lonelier and they have fewer friends. The more time we spend on social or our cap la or smartphone is less time we engaged with other human beings tablets or smartphones is less tight we are engaged with other human beings. We really want to take this debate somewhere where we can affect it and know we have to put an end to policy. Even if you think the internet is having those effects upon people, it may. I am not here to pass judgment. Even if you do, what do you do about it . Why didnt take place why did it take place . Robert mcchesney on what you spent quite a bit time talking about journalism and the internet. You have a proposal in this book. What is that proposal and why do you spend so much time on journalism . A passionss i have for journalism. Passionon is largely by for democracy. All a democratic theory is predicated on the idea you have to have healthy, vibrant journalism for there to be effect of selfgovernment. Have ampossible to notion of Self Government and the liberties and that, with the without credible journalism. In the United States today tom a we have seen as dramatic decline in the resources going to journalism per capita. A sharp decline. It is an axis mitchell problem in this country. Existential problem in this country. A blame craigslist for taking away advertisements. There is an element of truth to that. The Research Shows that the client is going the decline was inn the 1980s and full swing during the 1990s before the internet heading effect on newsom models. It accelerated the process and made permanent. The reason is something that only now is being fully understood by people in the news Media Industry and they are coming to terms. When you look at journalism, we often out of it as something as an enterprise that businesses investing could make money and the competition to produce the best journalism and live happily ever after. We can now see that the notion is flawed. It was wrong. The fact we had advertising gives ther journalism illusion of being viable viable. The fact of the matter is final readers and users never provide enough money to make a solvent market. Itd depend on advertising. To pay for most of the bills. Before advertising rose up, my Research Shows that for the first hundred years, most of our journalism was subsidized. The truth is, journalism is a public good. The market cannot provide sufficient polity are quantity to the extent that the advertising provided healthy journalism. Those days are now gone. It is really crucial. It is this. The traditional notional of advertising on a tv show or magazine with on a website. Some of the money that goes to pay for the content on the site is the deal, that has gone the way of the dodo bird. It is not happening anymore. The way advertising works and works everywhere in short order an appetizer say they want a demographic. They want women inventing advertiser will find those 30 million women on whatever site they are on. It only gives a smidgen of the money. They used to get 100 . Five percent, 10 , depending on the network or the relationship they have. Can go on a best buy website or any website as long as they hit their goal. When the tragic things that is going on in our Society Today is single wonderful journalists desperate to figure out how they can pay their bills or higher young kids to work with them so they can do Good Journalism again. It is shrinking down. It is never going to happen. There is not going to be a commercial model. There is no reason we should expect it. What i propose in the book is a by an economist dean baker who has done great work on Social Security in the housing bubble. He came up with this idea 15 years ago originally. Basically every american would be allowed to donate 200 of government money to any nonprofit of their choice. The public subsidy, the government would have no control over who got the money. How they wanted to devote their money. These will be for website that are struggling. If people in the Community Give them 200, you can have a heck of a good profit with 4000. Next year, you might have 10 times that. It distorts competition. You do not have government control. What cap ibo make living during jerk doing journalism. The only condition is i would not have much of government oversight. It would have to be put online immediately and not protected by copyright. Anybody could use it. The public would not be subsidizing. Chesney, a cut wall streetsney, journal, New York Times, and people want to read the product, it is not fair they should pay pay for it . K the logic makes sense. I am a shareholder in wall street journal. With the theking things came during Boston Marathon explosion. The boston globe on the by the New York Times withdrew its pay wall after the explosion saying this information, we are not going to keep anybody from getting it. That is how information is in a free society. We should be encouraging the distribution not putting up walls saying you have to pay to get inside. It is fine for companies to put up a walls and they can find customers. Journal mightt be able to pull it off every there is no evidence it will be a credible model to support vibrant journalism for the rest of us. Or even close to the type of journalism in terms of the resources, the number of people working we were custom to. There is nothing in the payroll system that will do that. People going to more personalized journalism, views they agree with . I do not go into that in detail. That is not essential to what i am concerned about. There is some evidence that people do that. What i do argue in the book as part of the reason you see that taking place is there is so little, original journalism. At might as well go look opinions with your journalism since you are not getting news. What i mean as people look at fox news and they are not the , they think the great partisan is a more tone to the news. It is reliable indicator of what the republican party. In fact, i would argue in terms of economics what fox news did quite brilliantly was it realize if you do not have reporters covering anything, youre going to have a news channel without the resource to generate journalism. You ought to have something entertaining. Something provocative that will create a market and be part of the news media was a substitution for doing real journalism. Msnbc which is now on the liberal niche follows the same pattern. Doing real work, it is a logical place to go. Fullociety having a hand of networks giving their opinions on a handful of issues every day, it is no substitute for having people actually covering stuff. I do not want to beat the dead horse here, it is crucial. The amount of resources covering capitol hill and the federal government and State Government thomas City Government has plummeted in the last 15 years. Much of what goes on in government and government legislative bodies and private commercial interest they used to be covered and make it to the news no longer gets covered today. That is the big crisis we face. About the difference between pr professionals and journalists and how that has spread. Is a fieldelations that blossomed in the 20th century in the United States. It is one of our gifts to the rest of the world. Try n his job is to it works on two levels. It is part of lobbying to keep private interests people to get their way. Asimportant to a sauce public interest. It plays Important Role a key part of what it does and tries to influence coverage of the issues that are important to the firm or corporation that does the Public Relations. There has always been a body of people whose job was to influence the news so the reader would never know or the viewer to get a story that will be favorable to the client. In 1960, there was one Public Relations person for every working journalist. It was more like three quarters. Relationship was 4 pr people to everyone journalists. I suspect the ratio is moving to five to one. Say i still have local news and cable news and i still occasionally pick up a paper. What this means is you have stuff that is still called news. A critically what we think of is andnews is unedited reflected upon Public Relations officialements about sources that are right on critically and the news media because they do not have journalists to cover it. They are outnumbered. We think we are getting a lot of news. We are really getting propaganda. One more question on journalism before we move on to other topics. What do you think of the role of the aggregators such as Huffington Post . They play a very Important Role. Sift throughrs can a lot of material. If you find one you trust, they can save you a lot of work. They played Important Role. Again, i wanted them to have something to aggregate than more than Opinion Pieces about pr pieces. This is the communicators and we are talking with rob Wittman Chesney about his most recent book. A page of your book. I wrote that. It is true. A true false question, i will say true. I want you to expand on. The internetclude giants in that statement . The internet giants are right in the middle of everything. What i mean and is a key point recall, ik, if you took about the permits of the internet is it was to break down monopolistic giant corporations and make it possible for nuance brewers to come and challenge challenge them a great competitive markets so that so they would not be forced to take shoddy or products. Instead of being a force for competition, it is probably the big screen eight or of monopoly. Everywhere you look online, what gigantic firms that are dominating the internet that have monopoly franchises and are making enormous amounts of money as a result. We are all familiar with amazon, google, facebook, ebay. All of them have monopoly franchises. I do not mean they sell one percent of everything, pure total. They almost never exist. Did not haveeller a monopoly in that sense. When you such a large percentage that you can control the market and control who is allowed in it and not and what terms. , you are ine 60 the range and you have monopoly. When you have over 30 or 40 . They are way above the 50 , 60 . Most of them are in the range of John D Robert feller john d rockefeller. These giant monopolies that are impossible to challenge and they become a vastly profitable. You get a sense of best. 13 of the Largest Companies in terms of market value are Internet Companies. 13 of the 32 largest. Sometimes it is 14. It fluctuates. Comparison, three of the too big to fail banks are the most valuable. Only three of them. 13 of the Internet Companies. All the companies that i mentioned. Facebook is still not in the top 32. These are enormous companies. They are monopolies. Cap immense political power. They are used to getting their way. Have immense political power. They will always get their way with our government. It is why its considered by democratic eric to be such an theorye by democratic to be such an enemy of government. Of cannot deny that sort power. That if the situation we are in. These companies all make their money to varying degrees. Degreethem to a certain by collecting data on people and invading privacy. They say online that if you get something for free, you are not the customer. When you go online or facebook or google or anything where you are not forking over money, you are getting a service because basically that company is taking everything you do online and using it to crate a profile of you and packaging and sell you. There is one of the group that is issues and that data and that is the u. S. Government. Security forces. Intelligence community. The pentagon has corrected cyberspace is as one of his main theaters. Command, the africa command, now the internet command. You have the asia command, the africa command, now the internet command. The more they know about people, the easier it is for them to do their job and college their goals. Both of these sites have something they each want. We are seeing a marriage between these huge Corporate Giants in the military and National Security part of the government. They have a mutual interest in collecting data and sharing it. , for securityment people to get more government information from google then they can get on their own. For these companies, that the u. S. Government doing their work from them. Protecting copyright abroad and their franchises abroad is protecting them from hackers. What did the u. S. Government does it it pays for much of the research. Almost all of them come out of military spending. It is a marriage made in heaven why that is a problem for us is going back to democratic theory. It is not healthy for the monopolies and is not healthy to have a militarized state working with those monopolies. That sort of emerge relation that we have is considered anti pedicle to have a vibrant vibrantical to having a eight, me. Writes ghts in your conclusion, what you call for it heavy regulation of digital, natural monopolies or convergence of them to Nonprofit Services every what you mean and how would you do that . How would you regulate some of these companies . We look at a company like google or amazon, most people in america, you see a much market power they have. Do tok how come we cant build what we did to at t and break it up too much smaller Competitive Companies . It will have the benefits without the monopoly. The problem with that as a solution and why nobody takes that seriously is the reason why these companies are monopolies is the technology. For social facebook or if i have a choice to go to joe blow, i will go to facebook. If i go to joe blow, it will be a waste of my time. Everybody is going to use the Number One Service as a rule. There may be a second like google plus. The Network Economics pushing toward monopoly. If you are in a situation where cannot get around economy, economists say you have three choices. Ones to do what we are doing and let let the monopoly do what ever it wants and hope you are lucky and nothing bad happens. Secondly, is to do what they tried to do throughout our history which is to have heavy government regulation but strong regulation that would allow the monopoly to exist but with exact terms in exchange for letting them have these monopoly profits. We let at t have a phone monopoly, the deal would they would not discriminate against anyone. They would offer their phone service to everybody in the country. Option. One option and isird the one i run ugly that Milton Friedman ironically that Milton Friedman suggested that taught about in the book it was a firm against this big, the only rational way is to have it be government run or nonprofit, noncommercial. If you do not want that much power for the entire nervous system of your economy. Weppet talking with have been talking with university of illinois at urbanachampaign professor Robert Mcchesney. He is a cofounder of free press. David horwitz included him on dangerousf 101 most professors in america. Heres the cover of the book. This is the communicators on cspan. Cablepan created by companies in 1979. And they would come up as close as they could and go up to us which meant they would send squads armed. They would come charging at our first lines. It did not matter how many casualties they took. Were who went down followed by a new wave. They had a new no weapons. Just kept by force of numbers trying to push us all to of our positions. The 60th anniversary of the korean war armistice. Every weekend on cspan three. Website, the history of popular culture. A collection of stories on the history of popular culture. Culture is quite more than that