An excerpt from his book - From Freedom to Slavery

Perhaps the most blatant betrayal of our freedom came during this century when the Federal Communications Commission, charged with regulating the use of our airways, instead delivered them to corporate America. What I am saying is simple and frightening: An agency of the United States government, the FCC, effectively transformed our airways into commodities and handed them over to the corporate entities that exploit us. Left with no means by which to engage in communication with each other, we became estranged, ineffective, and at last impotent. We became a people without thoughts of our own, without ideas, without values or viewpoints of our own to be shared with each other in the fullfillment of the democratic dream. Instead, we, ourselves, became commodities to be sold in the media's marketplace.

I say we, too, were marketed. When we sit down to watch what purports to be the evening news we are being sold. We are an audience with a high value. Every program, from football to MTV, gathers its specific audience in the same way that the fisherman nets perch or halibut or salmon, depending on the market's demand. As fish in the net, we are sold to the advertisers as so many hundreds of thousands of middle-aged persons, or kids, or teenagers, or the affluent. We no longer speak back. We no longer speak to each other. We no longer speak at all. We are only silent. Silent listeners. And as water washes the rocks smooth and at last wears them away, so, too, our brains are washed into intellectual oblivion. With an evil magic, the brain washing transforms our children from the bright, the inquiring and the creative to mindless consumers, to empty headed shoppers concerned chiefly with things, and the means by which to acquire things. The brain washing turns our children into things for sale, things in the pursuit of things, things chasing dollars and the things dollars will purchase. The brainwashing has dehumanized us. It has left us comporting ourselves like lurepen slobs drooling at the trough where we are slopped like anthropomorphic hogs with the vacuous fare corporate America throws at us.

The FCC could have, indeed, had the duty to make the airways available to a wide variety of interests that represent a free citizenry. The airways should have been assigned to television stations controlled by labor, by blacks, by women, by environmentalists, by small businesspeople, by educators, by farmers, by workers, in short, by the American people. Instead, without considerations--free--the FCC gave our airways to three mammoth corporations who now own them as their private property and, with other networks that have since come into existence, perfect the redesigning of our minds into those of the perfect consumer. Our minds have also been reformed to adopt a single virulent philosophy, a supposed wisdomsthat to prosper, Americans must support the dribble down theory of the New King, that to survive, Americans must abdicate their power to the corporate conglomerate.

The FCC, itself a hopelessly entangled bureaucracy, one ultimately controlled by the gargantuan corporations it seeks to regulate, has repeatedly proven it can not exercise its power to preserve our rights. In fact, it no longer harbors any intent to do so. The corporations who own the networks are too large, too powerful, too entwined into the power structure to be controlled. ABC was swallowed up by Capital Cities Communications. NBC was scooped up by General Electric when it purchased NBC's parent, RCA. The FCC, itself, has become a part of the intimate corporate family. Its members and functionaries pass back and forth through the revolving door, today purportedly regulating the corporation, tomorrow, as their reward for good and faithful service, occupying a posh position in the very corporations they regulated yesterday.

Justice Brandeis in Whitney v.California said, "Those who won our independence believed... that public discussion is a political duty," as, indeed, it is. Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan said, "thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wideopen .... "But how can we perform our public duty unless we control the means by which to communicate with each other? Worse, how can we be free when we are constantly reeling under the sedative of corporate propaganda? In retrospect, how could self government have been so easily destroyed by the simple devise of delivering our airways to the New King?

The First Amendment guarantees our free speech. By implication it also guarantees the people's right to own and control the means by which the people can speak to each other. One would not claim the ownership of a useful interest in a car unless one also owned the wheels. Further, the fact that our airways have been stolen from us these many years does not eliminate our ownership of them. Time does not create a cure for an original wrong. If we steal our neighbor's cow, we can not argue that although we stole her, we nevertheless fed her for fifteen years, and, therefore, she now belongs to us.

Equally Iamentable is the fact that that which has been stolen from us has been thereafter served back to us in the lowest form yet imaginable. It is as if our wheat has been stolen and we have been left to choke in the chaff. In their defense, advertisers and network executives contend that the American public is an unintelligent, unthinking, rustic conglomerate of doits. "Look," they argue, "at what the people choose to watch. "As one executive told me, "The viewers, themselves, demand the garbage we feed them. If they demanded a different cuisine we would feed that to them, as well." Another put it more succinctly: "We, in television, rise to the highest level of our audience. The highest level of our audience, unfortunately, is at the age of an average thirteen year old."

I do not dismiss so easily the intelligence, the taste, or the wisdom of the American people. It is not the level of the people's intelligence that limits us, but the constant barrage of insipid, tasteless rubbish that is relentlessly dumped on us as if we live in the bottom of an intellectual land fill. And how could it be otherwise for advertisers? Most of the products hawked on television are utterly irrelevant to the good life we seek. Madison Avenue knows, of course, that, in an intelligent environment, it cannot sell that which is patently worthless. One is not as likely to buy sugar corn pops as a result of watching a conference considering the health hazards of America's diet as one is likely to buy the same cereal as a result of watching some empty headed sit com.

I have tried too many cases before ordinary people sitting as jurors without developing a profound respect for their inherent, collective wisdom, their ability to absorb complicated facts, and their capacity to there after come up with a just result. It is easy to put the American public down. But those who believe that intelligence and taste, indeed, wisdom, are traits reserved only for corporate moguls and Wall Street bankers are the fools. People know. The collective intelligence of the American citizenry is awesome if, after it is fully informed, it is given a chance to honestly express itself. On the other hand, there is little doubt that if our intellectual diet consists of that which is currently offered on television, the old saying has relevance: "Garbage in_garbage out."

Television producers argue that people want to be entertained. Of course. But that does not mean that people do not also want to be enlightened, delighted, and uplifted, and it does not mean that people do not want to be informed. Despite the myths of freedom that fog our clear vision, in the basement of their minds the people know they are trapped. They know they are rarely told the whole truth. They know their vote ultimately makes little difference. They know that they usually do not and cannot get justice. If one knows that one's fervent striving makes little difference and that the whole truth is a rarity, if one knows one is the object of continuous exploitation from every quarter and is helpless to do much about it, then entertainment is the answer, as escape and denial also become the answers.

I do not disrespect the intelligence of the people. I disrespect those who have, by their own deep scorn and arrogance, so demeaned the people for so long that the prophesy of the people's intellectual impotence has often been fulfilled. But when we have taken back our power, when we again control our airways and our voices can again be heard on every major issue that effects our freedom, when we know that we truly guide the ship of state, the character of the media will have also changed. Then truth, then indepth analysis, then the presentation of facts (no matter how complex), then responsibility, yes, then art, too, will take precedent over the silly, the mundane, the false and the empty. Then, with the repossession of our airways, the people will begin a new adventure_the quest for the long awaited American dream.