The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  On his website Dr. Rummel has a “Peace Clock” that shows that in 1900 only 8 percent of the world’s people lived in nations that were democratic.2 By 1950 the number had increased to 31 percent, and, Dr. Rummel says, “Now is the dawning of a new world,” as by the year 2000 fully 58.2 percent of the world’s people lived in democratic nations.

  Rummel also coined the word democide in his book Death by Government to describe the deliberate murder (or allowing the deaths) of a state’s own citizens.3 Rummel points out that the world was shocked when the Chinese Communists slaughtered people in Tiananmen Square but should not have been shocked: the Chinese state had killed more than 35 million of its own citizens prior to that time and continues to kill them to this day.

  As awful as that number is, the Soviets hold the world record, having killed an estimated 54 million to 61 million human beings, according to Rummel. Although we all know about the wars incited by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, what most people miss is that in the twentieth century up to four times as many people died at the hands of their own governments as in all the wars combined. The cause? According to Rummel and many other experts on the topic, it’s a lack of democracy.

  In his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, former US ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer says that there are only 45 dictators left in the world and that with thoughtful and nonviolent effort we may be able to end all of their reigns before the year 2025.4 The worldwide trend, Palmer says, is solidly toward peace. In a November 2003 interview, he told me, “If you could foresee a world which was 100 percent democratic, there would be no war.” There would be competition, Palmer notes, but not war, and the result would be an increased standard of living among people all across the planet.

  And the trend is good. Palmer is vice chairman of the board of directors of Freedom House, which produces an annual report on democracy around the world.5 “In 2002, the last year that we covered,” he told me, “we saw roughly 26 countries moving in the right direction [toward democracy] and only about 11 doing some reversal.”

  We may be standing on the edge of a new era of peace because democracies have a built-in mechanism (the will of the people) to prevent aggressive wars. So long as our democratic institutions can resist being taken over by a new version of warlords, aristocrats, and kings in the form of multinational corporations (particularly those in the defense industry), we could see the prospect of the biblical “thousand years of peace”—following the brutality of the past century—in our or our children’s lifetime.

  Reinventing Democracy

  Democracy doesn’t just appear, fully formed. In every part of the world, over and over, it has to be refigured out, developed, put together piece by piece. This is why it can appear so different in different parts of the world yet always share the same set of basic values.

  Democratic indigenous cultures almost always have their own laws, appropriate to their time and place, to ensure stability and peace. The Australian Aborigines, for example, have carried for as long as 80,000 years the belief that if they engage in intensive (single-crop, tilled-soil) agriculture, the gods will punish them with terrible famines.

  So how do people find their way from a violent warlord, theocrat, or feudal culture into a peaceful and stable democratic culture?

  ■ The people have learned that they must live in a sustainable fashion in balance and harmony with their environment.

  ■ They’ve agreed that they’re no longer willing to live in a violent society characterized by extremes of wealth and power.

  ■ They’ve agreed that power must be locally held and locally exercised.

  Eventually, enough people re-remember the basic tenets of democratic life and figure out how to apply them to their own particular time and place. When enough people wake up to the possibility of living in a democracy, the nondemocratic culture dissolves and a newly formed and unique democracy emerges, as we see in examples from New Caledonia to the Iroquois to the American Revolution, to the dramatic shift around the world toward democracy in the past century. Today, all across the world, people are creating fledgling democracies with the hope that they can successfully transit them into multigenerational, long-term democratic nations.

  From What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy by Thom Hartmann,

  © 2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  An Informed and Educated Electorate

  From Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

  If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be…. Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  TALK RADIO NEWS SERVICE, BASED IN WASHINGTON, DC, IS owned and run by my dear friend Ellen Ratner. Ellen is an experienced and accomplished journalist, and a large number of interns and young journalism school graduates get their feet wet in reporting by working with her.

  In March 2010 I was in Washington for a meeting with a group of senators, and I needed a studio from which to do my radio and TV show. Ellen was gracious enough to offer me hers. I arrived as three of her interns were producing a panel-discussion type of TV show for web distribution at www.talkradionews.com in which they were discussing for their viewing audience their recent experiences on Capitol Hill.

  One intern panelist related that a White House correspondent for one of the Big Three TV networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) had told her that the network registered a huge amount of interest in the “hot story” that week of a congressman’s sexual indiscretions. Far less popular were stories about the debates on health care, the conflicts in the Middle East, and even the Americans who had died recently in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  “So that’s the story they have to run with on the news,” the intern said, relating the substance of the network correspondent’s thoughts, “because that’s what the American people want to see. If the network doesn’t give people what they want to see, viewers will tune away and the network won’t have any viewers, ratings, or revenues.”

  The two other interns commiserated with the first about what a shame it was that Americans wanted the titillating stories instead of the substantive ones, but they accepted without question that the network was therefore obliged to “give people what they want.”

  When they finished their panel discussion, I asked these college students if they knew that there was a time in America when radio and TV stations and networks broadcast the actual news—instead of infotainment—because the law required them to do so. None of them had any idea what I was talking about.

  The Devolution of Broadcast News

  But the reality is that from the 1920s, when radio really started to go big in the United States, until Reagan rolled it back in 1987, federal communications law required a certain amount of “public service” programming from radio and television stations as a condition of retaining their broadcast licenses.

  The agreement was basic and simple: in exchange for the media owners’ being granted a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use the airwaves—owned by the public—they had to serve the public interest first, and only then could they go about the business of making money. If they didn’t do so, when it came time to renew their license, public groups and individuals could show up at public hearings on the license renewal and argue for the license’s being denied.

  One small way that stations lived up to their public-service mandate was by airing public-service announcements for local nonprofit groups, community calendars, and other charitable causes. They also had to abide by something called the Fairness Doctrine, which required them to air diverse viewpoints on controversial issues. Separately, during election campaigns, broadcasters had to abide by the Equal Time Rule, which required them to provide equal air
time to rival candidates in an election.

  But the biggest way they proved they were providing a public service and meeting the requirements of the Fairness Doctrine was by broadcasting the news. Real news. Actual news. Local, national, and international news produced by professional, old-school journalists.

  Because the news didn’t draw huge ratings like entertainment shows—although tens of millions of Americans did watch it every night on TV and listened to it at the top of every hour on radio from coast to coast—and because real news was expensive to produce, with bureaus and correspondents all over the world, news was a money-loser for all of the Big Three TV networks and for most local radio and TV stations.

  But it was such a sacred thing—this was, after all, the keystone that held together the station’s license to broadcast and thus to do business—it didn’t matter if it lost money. It made all the other money-making things possible.

  Through much of the early 1970s, I worked in the newsroom of a radio station in Lansing, Michigan. It had been started and was then run by three local guys: an engineer, a salesman, and a radio broadcaster. They split up the responsibilities like you’d expect, and all were around the building most days and would hang out from time to time with the on-air crew—all except the sales guy. I was forbidden from talking with him because I worked in news. There could be no hint—ever, anywhere—that our radio station had violated the FCC’s programming-in-the-public-interest mandate by, for example, my going easy on an advertiser in a news story or promoting another advertiser in a different story. News had to be news, separate from profits and revenue—and if it wasn’t, I’d be fired on the spot.

  News, in other words, wasn’t part of the “free market.” It was part of our nation’s intellectual commons and thus the price of the station’s license.

  After Reagan blew up the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, two very interesting things happened. The first was the rise of right-wing hate-speech talk radio, starting with Rush Limbaugh that very year. The second, which really stepped up fast after President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which further deregulated the broadcast industry, was that the money-losing news divisions of the Big Three TV networks were taken under the wings of their entertainment divisions—and wrung dry. Foreign bureaus were closed. Reporters were fired. Stories that promoted the wonders of advertisers or other companies (like movie production houses) owned by the same mega-corporations that owned the networks began to appear. And investigative journalism that cast a bright light on corporate malfeasance vanished.

  And because newscasts had ads, and those ads were sold based on viewership, the overall arc and content of the news began to be dictated by what the public wanted to know rather than by what they needed to know to function in a democratic society.

  The interns were aghast. “Reagan did that?!” one said, incredulous. I said yes and that Clinton then helped the process along to its current sorry state by signing the Telecommunications Act, leading to the creation of the Fox “News” Channel in October 1996 and its now-legal ability to call itself a news operation while baldly promoting what it knows to be falsehoods or distortions.

  Now here we are in 2010, and the news media is an abject failure when it comes to reporting the real news—news that citizens in a democracy need to know. Even Ted Koppel, no flaming liberal by any means, said in an April 2010 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation that he thought the state of the news industry was “a disaster.”1 He went on:

  I think we are living through the final stages of what I would call the Age of Entitlement. We fight two wars without raising a single nickel to support them. We feel entitled to mortgages whether we have jobs or not. We feel entitled to make $10 million, $50 million, or $100 million even though the enterprise we headed up is a total failure. And we now feel entitled not to have the news that we need but the news that we want. We want to listen to news that comes from those who already sympathize with our particular point of view. We don’t want the facts anymore.

  Koppel was also well aware of the influence of profit-making on the news organizations, which he believed was driving the degradation of news so that it appealed to our baser instincts:

  I think it’s the producer [of the particular news show] who is at fault, who desperately needs the consumer…. In the good old days, when you only had three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—there was competition, but the competition still permitted us to do what was in the public interest. These days all the networks have to fight with the dozens of cable outlets that are out there, the Internet that is out there, and they are all competing for the almighty dollar, and the way to get there is to head down to the lowest common denominator.

  When we talk about news that people “need,” we are really talking about the intellectual and informational nutrition that is essential for the health and the well-being of our democracy. We need an educated and informed citizenry to participate in our democratic institutions and elections, and we’re not going to get that if we keep dumbing down the news and giving people what they want and not what they and society need.

  Breaking Up the Media Monopolies

  The Studio System

  Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the eight biggest movie studios owned the majority of movie theaters in America. A Paramount theater, for example, would show only movies produced by Paramount’s movie studios, which featured only people under contract to Paramount. The result was that the studios could make (or break) any movie star and control what people could see in their local community. It was very profitable to the studios, but it was stifling to competition and creativity and therefore a disservice to the moviegoing audience.

  So through that era, in a series of actions that lasted almost a decade and which were capped by the big studios’ signing a major consent decree with the feds, the federal government tried to force the big theaters to open up the business to competition. The big theaters said that they would, even agreeing to the 1940 Paramount Decree, but they continued with business as usual.

  The issue came to a head when it was argued in an antitrust case before the US Supreme Court in 1948. The Court, in a 7-to-1 decision, ruled against the movie giants, saying that they could no longer have total control of the vertically integrated system—from contracting with actors to making movies to showing them in their own theaters across the country. They had to choose: operate in either the movie making business or the movie showing business. They couldn’t do both.

  The result was the beginning of the end of the “kingmaker” movie studio monopoly and a boon for independent filmmakers. It also led to a proliferation of new theaters, from ones in urban areas (many retrofitting old opera or burlesque houses) to the new fad of drive-in movie theaters. The industry today is infinitely more diverse and creative as a result of that breakup.

  Television and the Prime Time Access Rule

  In the late 1960s, television was going through a similar vertical integration, with the Big Three TV networks dominating the content of local television stations they either owned or had as affiliates. In response the FCC promulgated the Prime Time Access Rule in 1970, which dictated that at least one hour out of the four “prime time” hours on every local TV station in the nation would have to come from some source other than the network.

  This opened the door to independent TV production companies, like MTM Enterprises, which produced several sitcoms derived from the work of Mary Tyler Moore, and competition from the new television divisions of old-line movie houses, such as Twentieth Century Fox’s producing a TV version of M*A*S*H and Paramount’s producing Happy Days.2

  Although the rules against vertical theater integration are no longer enforced, and the Prime Time Access Rule was blown up in 1996, both the movie and TV industries are broadly more diverse in their programming than they would have been without these “market interventions” that increased competition and decreased monopoly. Which brings us to radio.

  The Vicious Circle of Conserva
tive Talk Radio

  Many people wonder why the big 50,000-watt AM stations (and even many of the big 25,000- and 10,000-watt stations) across the country carry exclusively conservative programming, particularly programs featuring Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. In most cases, it’s a simple matter of the economics of monopoly.

  One of the largest owners of the biggest (full-power) radio stations in the country is a mega-corporation that also owns the largest talk-radio syndication service in the nation. When the corporation’s stations carry shows that its syndication service owns, it makes money both from the local station ownership and from the ownership of the syndication service. When the stations carry shows from other syndicators or independent shows, the corporation loses the syndication revenue and the local station (which it also owns) loses typically five minutes of advertising inventory per hour that it must barter with the syndicated show for in exchange for the right to air the show.

  Thus, so long as the radio industry is allowed to run like the movie studio system in the 1940s, the “studio”—in this case the giant corporation that owns radio stations as well as the nation’s largest talk-radio syndication service—will have an outsized influence on what shows up on the very biggest stations in the largest markets across the country. Because of the huge, booming voice of those stations, those shows will have a significant edge in “finding” listeners (and vice versa), making those shows “successful” and thus creating demand for them from the independent stations. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.