"Tragedy and Farce" by Nichols and McChesney..looks worth buying.

[madfloridian]

Here is a review of it:

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2006/herman0406.html

The authors put their analysis of the current state of the media in a historic and normative context. Media diversity has diminished hugely since the 19th and early 20th century. In the years just before World War I there were not only many more newspapers than today, there were many hundreds of socialist and other dissident papers and journals, which were important contributors to the significant reforms enacted in those years. The World War and follow up “red scare” and crackdown decimated the dissident media and since then we have seen a steady growth of commercialization and centralization. These adverse trends were accelerated with the 1996 Telecommunications Act(thanks Clinton) and the Republican triumphs in 2000 and 2004.

How the book got its title is interesting:

The book’s title, Tragedy & Farce, is taken from an 1822 statement by James Madison that, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” Nichols and McChesney make a good case that our founding fathers were worried about the abuse of the war-making power and would have been aghast at the failures of the contemporary media and their transformation from any kind of watchdogs to lapdogs and agents of government war propaganda, in the process providing a “liar’s paradise."

And they go into the role the media played in the 04 elections:

But the media not only failed to serve the public interest on the critical issue of war, it did very badly on the equally critical matter of elections. Nichols and McChesney have two excellent chapters that present a very strong case that the media played a key role in making the 2004 presidential election both a tragedy and a farce. In “Policing the Primaries,” they argue that Karl Rove was fearful of the Howard Dean candidacy and wanted very much to have John Kerry as a candidate, as the former could take an antiwar position whereas the compromised Kerry could not. The media obliged Rove, eventually finding Dean too far out—the “scream” fraud was only one facet of a systematic campaign of derogation that effectively removed Dean from serious consideration. Kucinich was even more quickly eliminated by a media determination that he was not a “serious” candidate. His strong effort to inject a discussion of issues in the campaign was brushed aside in this media “policing” of the primaries.

....."Of course this Bush edge was greatly aided by the Bush campaign’s appeals to patriotism and fear-mongering, by the power of the presidency, the aid of the unscrupulous right-wing media (Fox, Sinclair, and others), and the cowed “liberal media.” The failure of the New York Times to run an article just before the election on Bush’s “box” under his coat, pointing to illicit electronic communication during the debates, and CBS’s unwillingness to run a program on Bush’s doctoring of evidence on the runup to the Iraq invasion, again allegedly because the election was so near, suppressed news relevant to voters’ electoral choices and were pure gifts to the Bush campaign. In reference to CBS’s decision (which could well apply to the New York Times), “Then we can be clear about what happened in the Fall of 2004: CBS News ceased to be a news organization.”

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595580166/103-9810634-1287865?v=glance&n=283155