Whatever issue tops your list of priorities, real progress will be impossible unless we first change our media system. Currently, access to communications and control over media content are vested in the hands of corporate titans. Commercial imperatives direct the system to the exclusion of all civic values. Even as technology promises to revitalize the media, the country is poorly informed, polarized, and marinated in lowest-common-denominator fluff and junk. Without a new direction in media policy, progressive and peaceful resolution of the many other serious problems before the American people will be considerably more difficult.

To improve the media, we need to fix the laws and policies that shape communications. That won't happen without widespread public involvement. In this letter, we present a set of guiding principles and specific recommendations that would truly reform our media and, in turn, transform our democracy.

1. Our media/communication systems are profit-driven, but they are not free-market. Today's media system is the result of extraordinary direct and indirect public subsidies. These include copyright protection; licenses to use the public airwaves for radio, TV, satellite, and cell phone companies; permission to use the public rights-of-way for the cable and telephone industries; and direct cash subsidies for telecommunications-just to name a few. The problem is not that these subsidies exist, but that the policies that produce them are made by powerful corporate interests with minimal public involvement or consent. The balance of public service and private interests must be restored.

Recommendation: Restore the original mission of the Federal Communications Commission as a guardian of the public interest. The FCC must become a twenty-first-century agency focused on the digital media marketplace of ideas and commerce, with a commitment to public engagement, transparency, and accountability.

2. Our democracy is premised upon the notion of a well-informed electorate with a diverse marketplace of ideas. Yet the current media system is failing to provide the news and information we need to hold our government and corporate leaders accountable. Consolidation of media ownership has centralized control over production; to boost the bottom line, media giants have gutted newsrooms. Local, international, and investigative journalism no longer makes good business sense. Professional standards have weakened under commercial pressure. Too much of what passes for political journalism is simply analysis, spin, and pointless prognostication. We must recommit ourselves to a healthy news business through public policies that promote a diversity of ownership and content distribution.

Recommendations:

Ø      Support ownership limits and public oversight to foster more diverse, competitive, and local ownership of radio, TV, and cable channels.

Ø      Open antitrust investigations into vertically integrated media companies that control production and distribution through anti-competitive practices.

Ø      Authorize the license of more noncommercial, low-power FM radio stations in communities nationwide.

Ø      Guarantee channel space and sufficient funding for public access TV stations in every community.

Ø      Reduce postal rates on public affairs magazines, the seedbeds of investigative journalism and serious political thought.

3. Our democracy requires both a diverse commercial media and a vibrant noncommercial alternative. The advertiser, not the content creator, is king in today's media. The civic commitment to media designed for children and for unbiased public information has withered. The hyper-commercialism of our times, which extends now to the earliest years of childhood, is a dangerous trend that requires checks and balances.

Recommendations:

Ø      At a minimum, quintuple the federal funding for public and community broadcasting, to at least $3 billion annually-earmarking money for children's and public affairs programming. Funding should come from fees paid by commercial licensees to the public airwaves.

Ø      Ban all advertising on broadcast and cable TV programs where over 33 percent of the viewership is under the age of twelve. This is similar to the rules in many European nations.

4. The Internet and the digital communication revolution hold tremendous democratic promise, but they won't reach it without the right policies. The Internet is the most transformative engine of free speech and free market commerce since the printing press. It is the first media form that is decentralized, owned by no one, and entirely driven by the collective desires of consumers and citizens. Yet control over access to the Internet is almost exclusively the domain of a handful of giant cable and telephone companies. These companies operate in highly profitable, barely competitive markets with extraordinary control over the flow of information in this country.

As a result, our broadband networks are slower and more expensive than most of the developed world. But fast, affordable, universal internet access is mandatory for the United States to advance politically, culturally, and economically. Protecting freedom of commerce online goes hand in hand with protecting the free market of digital ideas-a central countermeasure to the ossification of traditional media. Consumer choice, free speech, innovation, privacy, and the closing of the "digital divide" must be the hallmarks of technology policy.

Recommendations

• Establish "Network Neutrality" rules that guarantee free speech and a free market on the Internet by prohibiting discrimination, manipulation, and interference by network owners like Comcast or AT&T.
• Restore competition to the market in high-speed internet access to break the hold of the cable-telephone duopoly on the nation's "broadband" infrastructure.
• Transition all public subsidies for telephone networks to fund infrastructure to bring the benefits of broadband to all Americans.

Some of these recommendations can be implemented immediately. Others would require study and further debate. In combination, they would provide for an affordable, universal, high-speed Internet, as well as a far richer and deeper democratic media culture without censorship.

These policies would contribute to fostering economic growth, informing public debate about the crucial decisions that confront us, rebalancing commercial and civic priorities in media, and enriching American democracy with the currency of new ideas.

Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has written over a dozen books on media. Ben Scott is Policy Director at Free Press.