FIGHTING FOR AIR: THE BATTLE TO CONTROL AMERICA’S MEDIA | ERIC KLINENBERG (METROPOLITAN BOOKS)
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A tenured professor at NYU, Klinenberg is best known as the author of Heat Wave, a controversial 2002 study of Chicago’s deadly summer of 1995. He’s heir to the sociological tradition of the great C. Wright Mills, who encouraged colleagues to connect personal troubles with public issues. He begins Fighting for Air with a cautionary tale. Five years ago, on a cold winter night in Minot, North Dakota, one man died and at least 300 people were injured after a toxic chemical spill, when the Emergency Alert System and its backup both failed and local authorities couldn’t find a live person at the local radio station to broadcast a warning. The station had been taken over by Clear Channel, which famously automates much of its programming.
“In 1945,” Klinenberg writes, stirring dreams of a media golden age, “roughly 80 percent of American newspapers were privately owned, often by families that were willing to sacrifice potential profits to maintain their journalistic principles and preserve their readers’ trust. Today, however, more than 80 percent of American newspapers are owned and operated by publicly traded corporations . . . whose executives are unwilling to compromise income for the good of cities they rarely visit.”
If competition is the undefined means, local reporting, local talent, and local color are generally accepted as the unquestioned goals. In an October 23 FCC filing, even Clear Channel genuflected repeatedly at the shrine of localism. But is it an unequivocal good? Consider the story Klinenberg tells elsewhere in the book, in a different context, about how in the 1950s in Mississippi the United Church of Christ forced the FCC to consider pulling the licenses of blatantly racist radio stations. In that place and time overt white racism was a pillar of local culture. An advocate might get caught up in the details and not notice any oddity here. But shouldn’t this story make a sociologist wonder why localism is seen as obviously bad in the 1950s, yet obviously good nowadays?
