By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

I am wary of media criticism from the left. Often, it is overdrawn, depicting the media as so much in the pocket of their corporate owners that no disturbing information or dissenting views can get a hearing. Such broad-stroke indictments--commonly heard on community radio stations and at almost any informal gathering of two or more leftists--won't really explain how the media confine the pubic discourse day in and day out. What's more, the sweeping indictments are easily dismissed, since occasionally a disruptive piece of information or a dissenting voice does make its way into the mainstream media.

This crude media criticism is not only distorting but debilitating, since it suggests the impossibility of presenting our own views to our fellow citizens in any great number. That's a recipe for resignation.

Comes now a valuable and sophisticated alternative critique, By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate (Common Courage Press). The authors, David Croteau and William Hoynes, may be familiar to some of you already, since they conducted the path-breaking studies of Nightline, MacNeil/Lehrer, and Public Television, which Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published over the last few years. Three of the six chapters of this book are basically reprints of the original studies, which concluded that "the public-affairs programs widely acknowledged to be the best and most prestigious in the United States generally present the world and worldview of those who wield power, defining a narrow consensus about the limits of acceptable political debate."

But since these case studies are old news by now, they are not what I find most useful about this book. What I do find useful and provocative is the theoretical scaffolding the authors erect around their studies.

In the first chapter, "Making Sense of Media Politics," they demolish the notion that we have a well-functioning free press. They document how the media no longer serve as effective watchdogs, and instead tend to act as "a transmission belt for official positions." Instead of watchdogs, the media have become lapdogs, they say. Nor, the authors argue, do the media serve the other two vital functions that they are entrusted with: providing a broad range of information, and presenting a forum for diverse opinions. The authors sketch the reasons for these failings, citing the corrupting influences of government sources, corporate ownership, and advertising pressures.

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