To fund 2014 transportation and housing programs as well as a bipartisan compromise bill to address the doubling of student Loan Interest rates. The senate is back today at 2 p. M. For general speeches. Later, members resume work on a 54 billion spending bill for transportation and housing programs. Theyll debate the nomination of james comey to be the next director of the fbi, a vote to advance the nomination is expected at 5 30 p. M. Eastern today. Also this week members will consider three nominees to the National Labor relations board. You can watch the house live on cspan and the senate here on cspan2. Cspan, created by americas Cable Companies in 1979, brought to you as a Public Service by your its provider. By your television provider. Of. Host and we want to introduce you to Robert Mcchesney, a Communications Professor at the university of illinois at urbanachampaign, hes also a cofounder of the group, free press. He served as president of that group for several years, hes currently on the board. Professor mcchesney is also an author, and here is his most recent book, its called digital disconnect how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. Professor mcchesney, whats your thesis in digital disconnect . Guest my thesis is that the internet began with extraordinary promise for democratizing society, making the world a far better place. And some of the promise has come true, but much of it has been turned on its head largely due to commercial pressures that have changed the course of the internet dramatically and unless we arrest those pressures and redirect the internet, the future is not necessarily going to be as glorious as we once thought. Host you talk about the need to look at the internet through political economy. What do you mean . Guest i think that the problem we have when weve studied the internet in most of the books that have been written about it many of which are outstanding downplay the importance of capitalism and the relationship of capitalism to democracy. They put technology as sort of having a superpower over society. I think we need to sort of bring it back in and look at the classical relationship of capitalism and democracy and see how the internet fits into that to get a sense of how the internet has developed and where its going. Thats what i mean by political and economic analysis. Host professor, give some examples of how you think its turned away from democracy. Guest well, if you look at the beginning of the internet, the founder of netscape whos one of the entrepreneurs who invests in internet companies, said when he was working on it into the early 90s, office a cooperative environment. By all accounts, it was seen as a great equalizer. It was going to give information equality for all people, it was going to slay tyrannical governments and large monopolistic corporations and produce a much more competitive, localized economy, a centralized economy. And in general it was going to make it such that selfgovernment which had never been fully practical prior to the internet could actually become practical. People would actually have the information required to govern their own lives in a social sense and really fully participate. So thats the high bar of the internet when it began. And i think oftentimes still to this day one of the points i just made people invoke and say, yes, thats what the internets doing. What i would argue is that on certain key points in that mythology or that dream of the internet, whats happened is theres specific places where weve turned in the opposite direction. Ill give a couple examples. One of the great ideas initially is it was going to be anonymous medium. You could go on, and you could not be known who you were, so you didnt need to worry about being monitored or people keeping tabs on you. The way the interbe net has developed purely for commercial reasons because commercial interests can make money off the internet weve now gone to the exact opposite. Everything we do online is known by commercial vendors and to the government. We have no privacy at all. Privacy has been completely decimated. So right there we have a basic difference from what the vision was 20 years ago and where it is today. Host you also talk about loneliness and personalization on the internet of today. Be. Guest well, i think, you know, in the first chapter i talk about, you know, theres the celebrants who extol the virtues of the internet and the great things its going in terms of giving people power and information resources and the ability to collaborate, and then there are the skeptics, the people who are concerned that the internet is undermining the quality of our lives. And one of the arguments of the skeptics is rather than really drawing us together, the evidence suggests the internet is producing a lot of people who are lonelier than they were before. The more time we spend immersed with social media, our smartphone, our computer or tablet is less time we actually engage with other human beings, so thats one of the great debates, and i think its an important debate. I want to add again, peter, my view is that leaving it at that level is just chitchat. Weve got to understand that weve got to put it in the policy, political economy realm. Even if you think the internet is having those effects upon people which it may, i mean, im not here to pass judgment on that, i didnt do the research but even if if you do, what do you do about it . You have to exlain whats driving it and what can we do to minimize those effects to the extent we can . Robert mcchesney, you spend quite a bit of time in digital disconnect talking about journalism and the internet, and you have a roam in this book. What is that proposal, and why do you spend so much time on journalism . Guest i confess, i have a passion for journalism. Ive written about it a lot. And my passion for journalism is largely my passion for democracy, and i think all democratic theory is predicated in the idea that you have to have healthy, vibrant journalism for there to be effective selfgovernment. Its impossible to have a genuine notion of selfgovernment and the liberties that come with it. In the last 20 years, weve seen a dramatic decline in the resources going to journalism per capita, and i think its an existential problem for selfgovernment in this country. Oftentimes people blame the internet for the dilemma. When they say craigs list took away the advertising that supported newspapers and that forced them to hay off reporter, or they say young people no longer go to traditional media, their directly online so theres no money to pay reporters. Theres an element of truth to that, but i think the research shows, peter, that the decline of resources going to journalism and commercial news media began back in the 80s and was in full swing during the 1990s before the internet had any perceptible effect upon news Media Business models. And what the internet did was, basically, accelerate the process and make it permanent. And the reason it did this is something that only now, i think, is being fully understood by people in news media industry, and theyre coming to terms with it which is when we look at journalism, weve often thought of it as something that was a commerciallyvibrant, healthy enterprise. Entrepreneurs, businesses investing in it could make money, and the competition would produce the best possible journal i. , wed live happily ever after. That notion of journalism was flawed, it was wrong. The fact that we had advertising support for the last 125 years for journalism gave the illusion of being commercially viable. The fact of the matter, though, is that final readers, final users of journalism have never provided enough money to make it a solvent market. It depended on advertising which only used journalism opportunistically for a hundred years, and before advertising slowed, much of our journalism was subsidized by massive government postal and printing subsidies. Journalism is a public good. The market cannot provide it in sufficient quantity or quality. To the extent that the advertising provided the money to give us a healthy journalism, those days are now gone, and their gone for one of the points i make in the book and develop that is really crucial which is simply this the traditional notion of advertising where an advertiser buys an ad on a tv show or even on a went site and web site and some of the money goes to pay for the content on the site, thats the deal, thats gone the way of the dodo bird. Thats not happening anymore. The way its going to be working everywhere in short order is that an advertiser says they want a demographic group. They want women 1824, they want 30 million hits. And an Advertising Network online will find those 30 million women, whatever web site theyre at. And the actual web site gets only a smidgen of the money. Ten years ago newspapers got 900 percent of the 100 of the money, today theyre getting 5, 10, 15 depending on the relationship they have. And advertisers couldnt care less if they go to a newspaper web site or a best buy web site, as long as they hit their target audience. As a result, the Business Models dead online. And one of the tragic thing that is going on in our Society Today is seeing wonderful journalists just desperate to figure out a way to hire young kids to work with them so they can do good juniorism again. Newsroom after newsroom is shrinking down or closing, and i think the evidence is in, there isnt going to be a commercial model. Theres no reason we should expect there to be a commercial model. So what i propose in the book is a model that was developed first by an economist named dean baker whos based in washington. Hes done a lot of great work over the years on Social Security and the housing bubble. And dean came up with this idea 15 years ago originally and ive embellished it. Basically, every american would be allowed to donate 200 of government money to any nonprofit and noncommercial medium of their choice. So itd be a Massive Public subsidy of media, nonprofit and noncommercial so it wouldnt compete with commercial media, but the government would have no control over who got the money. Its be purely up to individuals how they wanted to dedicate their 200. And that would mean all those web sites if they could convince 2,000 people in the community to give them 200, that generates 400,000. You can have a heck of a good product in a neighborhood of a community with 400,000. The next year you might have ten times that much. So you produce great competition. You have no government control, Massive Public subsidy, so we can have people making a living doing journalism in competing newsrooms. I wouldnt have much government oversight. Aside in having to be nonfederal government than profit and nongovernment, everything would be to be put online immediately and anyone can use it. The public would not be subsidizing private profits, theyd be subsidizing a public good. Host there are a couple of forprofits, well known wall street journal, New York Times, if people want to read the product, is it not fair that they shouldnt pay for it . Guest well, the logic makes sense, but as a scholar my job im not a shareholder in the wall street journal. And i think one of the striking things about pay walls came during the explosion at boston at the marathon. The boston globe, owned by the New York Times, put up withdrew its pay wall temporarily immediately after the explosion saying this information so important, we arent going to keep anyone from getting it. And i think thats how information is in a free society in journalism. I think we should be encouraging distribution and not saying youve got to pay to get inside. I think its fine for companies to do walls, and it looks like possibly some of the Business Press will be able to do that, the elite press, the New York Times might be able to pull it off, but so far theres no evidence its going to be a credible model to support vibrant journalism for the rest of us, and, you know, or anything close to the type of journalism in terms of the resources and the number of people working that we were accustomed to 10, 20, 30 years ago. Theres nothing in the pay wall system thats going to bring that back. At best, its going to stop the bleeding for some elite outlets. Host Robert Mcchesney, are people going to more personalized journalism, going to views they agree with rather than looking at a more Broad Spectrum . Guest you know, i dont go into that in detail in the book, its not really central to what im concerned with in the book. You know, i think theres some evidence that people do that, but what i would, do argue in the book part of the reason we see that taking place is that theres such original journalism left, so much less than there used to be that, you know, you might as well go look at some opinion with your journalism since you arent getting any news. People look at, for example, fox news, theyre the one that jumps out when you talk about partisan journalism today, and they think that the great advance of fox news was that it brought a more explicitly partisan tone to the news, that its a pretty reliable indicator of what the Republican Party is thinking about on an issue. And i think thats what it brought to the product. In fact, i would argue that in terms of economics what fox news did quite brilliantly is it realized if you dont have any journalism, any reporters covering anything, then if youre going to have a news channel without the resources to actually generate journalism, you ought to have something provocative, something thatll draw attention to you, and being a partisans news medium is exactly a substitution for doing real journalism. And i think msnbc which has found a liberal niche of sorts has followed the same pattern. Once you stop covering things, its a logical thing to go so you have some value added. But for society having a handful of Cable Television networks giving their opinions on a handful of issues every day, theres no substitute for having people actually covering stuff. And thats the and, i mean, i dont want to beat a dead horse here, peter, but this is really crucial. The amount of resources covering capitol hill, covering the agencies of the federal government, covering state government, city government, have absolutely plummeted in the last 15 years. Much of what goes on in public life and the relationship of government and government legislative bodies and private commercial interests that used to be covered or make it into the news a generation ago no longer gets covered today. And thats the great crisis we face. Host Robert Mcchesney, in digital disconnect you talk about the difference between pr professionals and journalists and how that has spread. Guest well, you know, Public Relations is a field that blossomed in the 20th century in the United States, and its one of our great gifts to the rest of the world. And it began, its job is, basically, to try it works at two levels. One, as part of lobbying, to help firms to get their way with legislators and government. And insofar as that happens, its important to massage Public Opinion so it will not be hostile. And be it plays a very Important Role a key part of what it does, a better way to put it, is tries to influence the Media Coverage that are important to the firm so that it is not hostile and, ideally, is very favorable. So theres always been a body of people for the last hundred years whose job it was to influence the news surreptitiously so the reader or viewer would never know to get a story that would be favorable to the client. Now, in 1960 there was one Public Relations person, basically, for every working journalist. Actually more like threequarters of a Public Relations person for every journalist. But 2010, the relationship was four to every one, and weve seen a sharp decrease in the number of journalists, so i suspect the ratio has moved to 5 to 3 or 4 to 1. 5 to 1 or 6 to 1. I still pick up a paper, what this means for news is youll still have stuff that is called news, but as the pew research has shown in its exhaustive evaluation of journalism over the last decade, increasingly what we think of as news is really unedited, unreflected upon Public Relations, either statements by official sources or just press releases that are run uncritically in the news media because they dont have any journalists to cover it. Its a 5 to 1 or 4 to 1 ratio. So we think were getting a lot of news but, in fact, were really getting propaganda. Host one more question on journalism, mr. Mcchesney, before we move on to some ore topics other topics. What do you think of the role as the ago regray to have such as the drudge report or Huffington Post in. Guest i think they play a very Important Role. I think aggregators can be like editors. They can sift through a lot of material, so if you find one you trust, you can count on them to save you a lot of the work you normally do. So i think thats a very Important Role in a news media system, in a media system. But my concern, again, to beat my dead horse is i want them to have something more to aggregate more than Opinion Pieces about pr releases. Host this is the communicators on cspan, were talking with university of illinois Professor Robert mcchesney about his most recent book, digital disconnect. Page 168 from your book, professor i wrote that. [laughter] thats true. Host i want to go guest if thats a true false question, ill say true. [laughter] host no, i wanted you to expand on it, i guess, and also why do you include what you call the internet giants in that statement . Guest oh, the internet giants are right in the middle of everything. What i mean by the internet giants, and this is a key part of the book, a whole chapter is dedicated to this. If you recall at the beginning of the interview, i talked about the promise was that the internet would make it possible for new entrepreneurs to challenge, to create much more competitive markets, to give Consumers Power so they wouldnt be forced to take higher prices or shoddier products. And one of the greatest ironies of all is that instead of being a force for competition, its probably the greatest generator of monopoly in the history of economics. Everywhere you look online what you see is that there are gigantic firms that are dominating the internet that have monopoly franchises and headaching enormous amounts making enormous amounts of money as a result. Amazon, google, facebook, microsoft, e bay be, all of them e ebay. Those sort of monopolies almost never, ever exist, and they dont even john d. Rockefeller with standard oil did not have a monopoly in that sense. Economists mean when you have such a large percentage of the market that you basically can control the market and control whos allowed in it and not in it on what terms. When youve got 50, 60, 70 of that market, you definitely have a no thoply. And all the firms i just named are way above the 50, 60, 70 , many of them are in the same range of john d. Rockefeller and standard oil in the 19th century which i think was in the low 80s. So we have these gigantic monopolies online that are impossible to challenge, and they become vastly profitable as a result, and to get some sense of this, 13 of the 32 Largest Companies in the United States in terms of market value, sort of who investors are betting on, are internet companies. 13 of the 32 largest. Sometimes its 14, it fluctuates. Put it in comparison, there are only three of the too big to fail are among the 32 most valuable companies, and these are the banks that everyone agrees owns the government. So there are 13 of these internet companies, all the companies i just mentioned although facebooks not yet in the top 32. But my point is these are enormous companies. Theyre monopolies, they have immense political power, and theyre used to getting their way. And if theyre in agreement on something, if they agree on a specific issue, they will always get their way with our government. Its one of the reasons why monopoly is considered by democratic theory to be such an enemy of government, was it gives private economic interests such power over government. No matter how well intended the governing system might be, you cant deny that sort of economic power. Thats the situation were in. Well, these companies all make their money to varying degrees, but with google and facebook in the front but all of them to a certain degree by collecting data on people, by invading privacy. You know, they say online if you get something for free online, youre not the customer, youre the product. And when you go online for facebook or google or anything where youre not forking out money, youre giving that service because, basically, that company is taking everything you do online that they can get their hands on and using it to create a profile of you, to package you, to sell you. Well, theres one other thats very interested in that data, thats the u. S. Government and its National Security forces, Intelligence Community which has now decided, the pentagon has created cyberspace as one of its main theaters or campaigns of war just like a continent. Youve got the asia command, the african command, now we have the internet command. Thats how they regard it. And they need to get all the information they possibly can too. The more they know about everyone, the easier it is for them to do their job protecting the United States, accomplishing their goals. Well, both of these sides have something be each other wants, so that were seeing online is a marriage between these huge Corporate Giants and the military and National Security part of the government because they have a mutual interest in collecting data and sharing it if it suits both their interests. For the government, for the security people they get a hot more data thanks to google and amazon and microsoft than they could get on their own, and with these companies they have the u. S. Government doing their work for them, protecting copyright abroad, protecting their franchises abroad, protecting them from hackers. And also what the u. S. Government does for these companies is it pays for much of the research and development that produced almost all these technologies in the first place. Almost all of them come out of military spending, so its really a marriage made in heaven. Now, why thats a problem for us is going back to democratic theory. And democratic theory its not healthy that monopolies that dominate the government, and its especially not healthy to have a militarized state working with those monopolies. In fact, in almost all democratic theory, that sort of emerging relationship we have is considered antithetical to having a vibrant, healthy democracy. Thats why fights over issues like sopa and sispa are so very important. Host and Robert Mcchesney writes in his book, digital disconnect, that the resulting National Security complex is almost unimaginable, like trying to compute the distance from earth to a faroff galaxy in millimeters. Host Robert Mcchesney, in your conclusion one of the things you call for is heavy regulation of digital natural monopolies or conversion of them to nonprofit services. What do you mean and how would you do that . How would you regulate some of these companies . Guest i think when you look at a company like google or amazon or apple, most people in america, the First Response if you see how monopolistic they are and how much market power, you say why cant we do to them what we did to at t, what we did to standard oil and break it up into a bunch of smaller competitive companies, and then well have the benefits of the market without the monopoly cost. And i think the problem is the solution and why i dont think anyone takes that seriously. The reason these companies are monopolies is the facetoface of the technology. Network economics generate monopoly. If ive got a facebook, if my choice is to go to facebook for social media or joe blow book for social media, im going to go to facebook. All my friends from high school that ive lost touch with, if i go to joe below book, itll be a waste of my time. Everyones going to use the Number One Service as a rule. There might be a second or third with like a google plus, but basically Network Economics push you towards monopoly. And if youre in a situation where you cant really get around it, economists say youve got three choices. One is toot what were doing which is to let the monopoly do whatever they want, basically, and joust hope nothing bad happens but let them be unaccountable. Secondly, is to do what they tried to do throughout our history and have done throughout our history like we done with at t which is have heavy government regulation heavy would be the wrong word, but strong government regulation which would allow the monopoly to exist but be exact terms in exchange for letting them have these monopoly profits. For example, when we let at t have its phone 40 knoply, the deal was they would not discriminate against anyone, they wouldnt use different layers of pricing to make more profits and also, the and, the would offer their service to everyone in the country. Rural and poor areas. So thats one option, try to do regulation and get something in exchange for it. I think the third option, and this is the one ironically that milton friedman, the great conservative economist whos a mentor at university of chicago, suggested and i talk about it in the book, is that once a firm gets this big, and were talking in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the only rational way of a natural monopoly is it to be a nonprofit, noncommercial, knew mismyrun. If you dont want that much powerful over the bottle neck for the entire nervous system of your economy. Host and we have been talking with Professor Robert mcchesney, one of the found ors of free press. He currently sits on the board of that organization. Digital disconnect is his most recent book. In the 2006 David Horowitz included Robert Mcchesney on his list of the 101 most dangerous professors in america. Here is the cover of the book. This is the communicators on cspan. Cspan, created by americas Cable Companies in 1979, brought to you as a Public Service by your television provider. Ahead here on cspan2, secretary of state john kerry and other representatives of the u. N. Security council speaking about the conflict in the african great lakes region. Then a look at how states and the federal government are meeting the october deadline for open enrollment of Health Insurance exchanges. After that were live from the center for American Progress with a debate on the role of debt and deficit reduction and economic strategy. And later, the Senate Returns at 2 p. M. Eastern for general speeches followed by more debate on funding for transportation and housing programs and the nomination of james comey to be the next fbi director. At a recent u. N. Security Council Meeting in phi, secretary of state john kerry and u. N. Secretarygeneral ban kimoon disss