This in Salon. Go ahead and get a free day pass — it's worth it.

Clear Channel's big, stinking deregulation mess
The sorry state of the radio industry today is sabotaging FCC chairman Michael Powell's plans to let media conglomerates run wild.

Clear Channel Communications, the radio and concert conglomerate so many people love to hate, has a new batch of disgruntled critics to deal with. But this time it's not the musicians who claim that the entertainment giant plays hardball and locks acts off the airwaves, or the broadcast rivals who allege the company leverages its unmatched size to drive competitors out of business, or even the former employees who insist the company's rampant cost-cutting style has gutted American radio.

Nope -- now the heat is coming from other media company executives and Beltway lobbyists. They are dismayed that Clear Channel is doing what many might have thought impossible. In an era when Republicans control the government and big business generally gets what it wants, Clear Channel is making deregulation look bad.
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The Failure of American Journalism
War, Protest and the Press

The abject failure of the American journalistic model-- long worsening--has become depressingly apparent in the run-up to what appears to be almost certain war with Iraq.

Although there are clear and rational and compelling arguments being made against war both at home and abroad by professional soldiers, seasoned diplomats and millions of ordinary people, the American corporate media, both print and electronic, have become virtual parrots of the Administration line that war is necessary because Saddam Hussein is evil and a clear threat to America.

If the administration's warning that a terror strike was imminent and that Americans should all buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to enable them to protect their homes in the event of a gas or germ attack was akin to someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, the resulting panic stoked by the media's breathless and uncritical repeating of that self-serving nonsense was like a gang of ushers echoing the cry while goading theatergoers into a stampede for the exits.
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