Book Reviews 137 Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger Democracy By Dean Alger. Maryland, USA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, 277 pp. The uncompromising subtitle of Dean Alger's Megamedia makes his position on media monopoly absolutely clear. Although Alger has an impressive academic background, the book is intended for an intelligent general audience as well as for those with more specialist or professional interests in media and public affairs. Underlying the book is Alger's fierce commitment to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which he regards as "the prime pillar of the Bill of Rights" (p. 1). Alger notes that the news merua are absolutely central to the functioning of democracy, while entertainment and other features and programs in the mass media have powerful effects on society more generally. For Alger, the essence of the First Amendment's central provision is to ensure that the principal sources of information and ideas directed at the public are genuinely independent and diverse 138 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 163 voices which will maintain and promote a healthy democratic society. He writes. ‘We should be greatly concerned if much or most of the main media fall increas- ingly under the control of a small number of giant corporations and extremely wealthy and willful people, especially when such people are inclined to use the powerful media of mass communication for their own political and ecofKlmic pur- Of course for Alger there is no “if.” Megumedia is a highly readable aocount of how it in fact did happen, the implications of the m n t situation, and the impli- cations for democracy should the present process not be stopped. The book is clear- ly written and coherently structured. Composed of nine chapters, each one is logi- cally connected to its predecessor: chapter one details the growth of “megamedia,” chapter two investigates the meaning of democracy and the ways in which devel- opments in the mass media affect the democratic process, chapter three offers a detailed account of the structure of ownership and control of the media, chapter four reviews the key elements of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which signif- icantly changed telephone and mass media law in the United States, chapters five and six discuss and analyze the consequences of the patterns of ownership and con- trol of the media, chapter six focuses on news operations that are part of conglom- erates and other large multimedia corporations, chapter seven examines megame- dia patterns in various nations around the world, chapter eight attempts to put in perspective the patterns and trends in the ownership and control of the mass media and their relation to our societies and the democratic process, and chapter nine dis- cusses a number of ways to assure a true diversity of independent sources of news and opinion. nK overall picture of media control that Alger paints is a disturbing one. He has a firm grasp of media history and often makes his most-telling points by compar- ing the past with the present: In 1900,559 cities in America - over 60 percent of cities with daily news- papers - had competing papers. But by the m i d - l w s , fewer than 30 cities had competing dailies - 0.2 percent of cities with daily newspapers ... By 19!37, Gannett’s 92 daily newspapers, with total daily circulation of about 6 million, and Knight-Ridder’s 35 dailies with total circulation of 4.3 million, meant just two chains reached roughly 25 million in actual daily readership, since each paper is read by about 2.5 people, on average. (p. 31) However, the traditional mass medium of newspapers is only the beginning of the story of concentration of ownership. Increasingly, the megamedia giants have become multimedia owners - owners of various combinations of broadcast and cable TV networks, TV and radio stations, cable TV distribution systems, satellite TV systems, movie and TV entertainment program production companies, book and magazine publishing, and Internet operations, as well as newspapers. For Alger, a matter of even greater concern is that mass media have increasing- ly become the property of huge corporate conglomerates that he defines as ‘‘a cor- poses” @p. 1-2). Book Reviews 139 poration that owns businesses in a variety of commercial markets” @. 31). Alger suggests that a dozen megamedia corporations dominate mass media in the world today, the “Dominant Dozen,” and he goes on to list them in order of size and importance: Disney-Capital Cities-ABC; Time Warner-Turner; News Corporation, Bertelsmann; General Electric-NBC; CBS Inc.; Newhouse/Advance Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra-Hachette-Filipacchi; Gannett; and Tele- Communications Inc. At the cenm of Alger‘s book is his concem that such con- glomerate control raises serious questions about the consequences for news cover- age, economic competition on a level playing field, and other economic and sociopolitical issues. He notes that conflicts of interest must arise when matters relating to various commercial areas of the parent conglomerate become public issues: military contracting and cost overruns or faulty products, for example, and he asks “Is there a danger that the NBC news division will pull its punches when reporting on developments involving its parent corporation, or not go after the story in the first place?” @. 32) His own answer to this question, of course, is in the affirmative. For Alger, the issue of conglomerate control is one that is directly antagonistic to the fundamental ethos of democracy. If conglomerates control the principal means of communication, there is little l i i e l i h d , he suggests, of a vigorous dem- ocratic dialogue. An important part of Alger’s own agenda is to demonstrate the ways in which the present situation came about, and his grasp of general history, not solely media history, is crucial to his overall argument. Plato. Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Adam Smith, and John Dewey all feature prominent- ly m the early sections of Megamedia, as Alger seek to contextualize his argument by noting that a central principle in democratic theory has been the need for a gen- uine, open marketplace of ideas if a democracy is to function well. He approving- ly quotes Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black The F i t Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dis- semination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public ... Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combina- tions a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. (p. 20) Although Alger‘s portrayal of megamedia and its implications for the democrat- ic process as it currently stands is far from optimistic, he concludes his book with a chapter alliteratively entitled “Accountability, Alternatives, and Action” in which he presents what he sees as possible alternatives to the current systems. He sug- gests, for example, that there should be one or more significant, fully independent alternative outlets within the main media channels so that widespread public expo- sure to the altemative media material is achieved as a matter of natural accessing of media, and not stuck in the nether reaches of cable and satellite TV systems where more effort is required to gain access to it. In addition, he argues, the 140 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 1 6 3 increasing reliance on big corporate funding sources for public TV and radio and the inevitable corporate influence must be cut back or eliminated entirely. Concomitantly, the enhanced public TV and radio services must also be linked to a substantial, topquality Internet operation that is coordinated with the offerings on TV and radio. To assure independence, Alger insists that there needs to be more insulation from the political meddling by some presidents and forces in Congress that has been in recent times all too pervasive. currently, presidential appointments are made (with Senate approval) to the Board of the Corporation for public Broadcasting (CPB), which is the chief policymaker regarding programming and related mam. Alger has some good, if controversial, ideas for funding Public Broadcasting, including a small tax on television and radio advertising, which he proposes to call “the public purposes advertising tax.” Here, he suggests that in order to protect small media and small businesses the tax should only apply over a certain level; for example, for all advertising buys from a given company in a given media outlet above the $5,OOO level. A further revenue possibility, he suggests, is to borrow from the British model and institute a small tax, possibly one percent, on each TV and radio set sold for sales involving radios, the money would go to public radio; for TVs. the money would go to PBS. All such income generated would be deposit- ed in a Democratic Diversity in Communications Fund (DDC Fund) to be used for the augmented support of public TV and radio and to provide access to cable and satellite channels. A prime use of this DCC fund would be to enhance aixess to cable and satellite television. and Alger is bullish in his insistence that a set of local-access channels should be a federal requirement for every system, since many municiple govern- ments have failed in this responsibility. These reserved channels on local cable TV systems should come with studios, editing facilities, videocams, and other means of facilitating alternative, community-based program material. Financial support from the DCC Fund should be provided to defray organizing, personnel, and other program development costs, and, crucially, community people, not people who work for the cable monopolies should be hired to administer the program in co- ordination with community nonprofit public seMce organizations. Megamedia is an excellent book well-researched and informative on an issue of vital importance, with the imagination and the energy to envisage ways out of a sit- uation that clearly poses grave dangers to Western democracy.