Fighting Back Against the Media   

Screened Out: How the Media Control Us and What We Can Do About It

By Carla Brooks Johnston
M.E. Sharpe
232 pages; $29.95

Times are getting tougher for free-speech absolutists.

More than 350 years after the "Areopagitica" championed free and open encounters between truth and falsehood, today's domination of the media by mega-conglomerates may make Milton's optimism seem naive.

How can truth win out when corporate and commercialized speech seem to ride roughshod over the individual and socially responsible? When violence and trash, aimed manipulatively at the young, clog the air? When cynical, misleading ads backed by big-moneyed special pleaders drown out rational political debate? When government squirms under the thumb of big business, showing little backbone for even the modest oversight of a generation ago?

Maybe these worries are overstated. Truth has always faced powerful foes, and it has held up pretty well. But the rise of media and culture as issues in this year's presidential campaign underlines our collective disquiet. Many people feel impotent and angry in the face of a general uglifying of culture, and some sort of critical-mass backlash could be in the making.

So Carla Brooks Johnston's "Screened Out" comes at a timely moment.

It is at best an uneven book. It has organizational and repetition problems, overrelies on a handful of sources, too often reads as a philippic instead of as evidence-based reasoning.

Here is an example: "[M]ost of us have no idea how much the media influence, often control, our feelings and behavior. The media moguls rival Hitler and Stalin in their successful use of propaganda.... If we do not wake up and take corrective action, a new era of corporate fascism may sweep the globe."

In passages that are only somewhat less fervid, Johnston contends that media are "killing our culture and scaring us to death." Her bill of particulars is familiar: too much bad news, too much violence, too much stereotyping, too much preoccupation with the abnormal and atypical, too much infotainment, too little public service.

Her specific complaint is with television ("the most powerful tool for affecting people's minds or emotions"), but the indictment might as well name print and new media too.

Johnston, a longtime author and educator, never actually demonstrates that media are as all-powerful as she proclaims, and her explanation for the media failings strikes me as oversimplified. Essentially, she argues that bad content is good business. She doesn't adequately grapple with the many underlying reasons for audience behavior or the repressed anger and frustration that much of popular culture seems to reflect.

Still, "Screened Out" tweaks a nerve. Johnston performs a special service, it seems to me, in refusing to play consumer victim.

She wants us to fight back, and her book makes a good start on working through some possible remedies.

For example, she makes some good points about journalists' training and background. Many, she believes, are not broadly enough educated to understand "the context and consequences for society of their work." Too few have lived in other cultures or through crises, so "they have little appreciation of their role as a fourth estate in democratic culture." For too many, perhaps, the goal is not to "follow the footsteps of many of the journalists and creative artists who have preceded them," but to "play with the toys."

She makes a similar point about the public, contending that it is neither media literate nor " 'civic' literate." Such citizens, she says, "are taken advantage of...in much the same manner that print illiterates in our society have not always been able to protect and provide for themselves."

Her recommendations include both the idealistic and the down-to-earth. She wants the Federal Communications Commission to reimpose standards eased in the past generation, including restrictions on allowable advertising minutes and requirements for public affairs programming. She wants universities to improve how they teach government and media to both budding journalists and the general public, and she offers 17 specific components of such a curriculum.

She also has suggestions for broadening the mission of public broadcasting, expanding alternative media and taxing broadcast advertising to better fund public media.

Johnston even has a good go at itemizing how citizens and groups might mobilize to lobby for change. There, of course, is the catch. For years, a key incentive for the media to do their civic duty has been fear that, if they don't, government will step in. In an era where government no longer seems very threatening, it will be interesting to see whether citizens themselves have the will and muscle to step in.