Two world views

The KUSF shutdown and a recent Paul Krugman column prompted some rueful reflections this morning.

Actually, what really prompted this entry was an excerpt from former KUSF mentor/DJ Howie Klein's Down with Tyranny blog, an entry called "The Systematic Destruction Of Independent Media--From KUSF To NBC". Even more specifically, Klein quoted a recent newsletter from Sen. Al Franken, in which Franken lamented the FCC's recent decision to clear the sale of NBC to Comcast:

I’ll be candid with you: This is an awful development for those of us who care about media consolidation. It will restrict your freedom of choice and raise your cable and Internet bills. And it could pave the way for even more media mergers and even less room for independent voices in the media.

Being out of the mainstream in some (not all) of my tastes, I'm sensitive to the loss of small, independent voices in our national culture. My concerns, though, are, if not quite incomprehensible, then trivially irrelevant to a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, as Krugman's recent column, "A Tale of Two Moralities," made clear.

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

Krugman casts this divide in terms of taxation, but in fact this philosophical divide on the role of government and taxes is but a part of a larger question of how we shape our own society.

One side of the debate vehemently denies that government has any but the smallest role in determining how our society evolves and responds to problems. The federal government is there to ensure that no external power interferes with us, and state and local governments are there to ... well, it's not clear to me exactly what role people on that side of the debate see for state and local governments, but a role exists, if only because the Constitution parses out power between the federal government and "the states." How does society handle everything else? Presumbly it's a tradeoff between state/local legislation and the free market. The market is assigned a rather large role in this world view, because the collective wisdom of its impersonal workings is presumed to be a better guide than the grand schemes of individual technocrats.

The other side of the debate posits that government at all levels is the great leveler, counterbalancing unwholesome influences in the free market and imposing some measure of responsibility on the profit motive. If the free market seems to be steamrolling over some, the government's role is either to stop the steamrolling or to mitigate the suffering, e.g., through unemployment insurance or a last-ditch health care option.

Obviously most of us fall somewhere in the middle of this divide, but the terms of the debate are set by the most extreme advocates of either side.

So what does all this have to do with Sen. Franken's opinion of the NBC/Comcast deal, and for that matter, what does it have to do with KUSF?

Well, Sen. Franken obviously feels that the untrammeled workings of the market in the NBC/Comcast case are, in fact, detrimental to our society. The concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands is detrimental to our national debate because it lessens the likelihood that voices critical of the controlling owners, or critical of policies and trends those owners favor, will be heard. It gives those owners an increasingly powerful voice in that debate. Unsurprisingly, Franken believes government, the FCC in this case, had a role to play, but failed to play that role.

As for KUSF, it was a small voice on the FM dial owned by an entity that had (and has) no other major media outlets. Though not known for political programming as such, its on-air personalities were largely free to speak their minds, and certainly were free to play a range of music that owed nothing to any corporation's pocketbook. It hosted guests who spoke on a myriad of topics, guests who might have found it difficult if not impossible to be heard anywhere else on the dial. Again, these were not political conversations for the most part; these were people speaking on the arts, on culture, on topics of interest to the San Francisco Bay Area. For the most part they weren't controversial: they were simply not significant enough to warrant airtime on bigger radio stations.

I can guarantee you that 90.3 FM, KDFC, will not be airing those voices. That's not its aim. And so, without malice but certainly with some harm, an outlet for those disparate voices is gone.

KDFC will be playing classical music, and that's all. It will not be airing foreign-language programs, or Shoestring Radio Theater, or Rampage Radio, or Radio Goethe, or any of the dozens of other programs serving a myriad of communities. Even whether the variety of KDFC's music can approach the variety available on the old KUSF's airwaves, like MTheo's Monday night show Classics Without Walls, is yet to be seen (but I'm not holding my breath).

Oh, and who owns the 90.3 FM license? The University of Southern California, which already owns its own radio station, KUSC, in Southern California.

I'm not saying USC will do badly by its new acquisition, but is consolidation of ownership always a good thing?

We as a nation are confronting that very question, and have been for a couple of decades, yet for the most part people don't care. Rupert Murdoch's Fox empire, the Clear Channel media empire, the Disney media empire, and now the Comcast media empire -- is it good for us to be getting our information and entertainment (since the two are now so closely entwined we have to consider them together) from such behemoths?

Is it good for us to let the free market operate untrammeled to permit economies of scale in our media? Is bigger always better?

Do we want our government to rein in such consolidation? Is there a need for government to play such a role?

Is the popularity, or market share, of an idea or of a voice a reliable gauge as to its importance to our society?

We will be playing out the answers to these questions whether we like it or not. Unfortunately, my sense is that too few of us feel the answers matter, and so through apathy and inaction we will lose many, many small but significant voices who could have enriched and improved our national debate about who we are and what kind of society we're going to have.

And we'll never know what we missed.