The next time I am tempted to complain about the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality of local news, I am going to try, instead, to be grateful that we have local news. A lot of people in this country no longer do. Congress and the Federal Communication Commision have continued to relax ownership restrictions, and conglomerates have swallowed up small family-owned newspapers and radio and television stations and discovered the cost benefits of consolidation and convergence.
One of the results is that the weather reports being watched by viewers in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or Las Vegas may be coming to them from a studio in Hunt Valley, Md. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls this “News from Nowhere.”
Klinenberg became alerted to the changes occurring at the “ground level of the media landscape” while doing research for his first book and learning that the local media never addressed many of the questions about how 739 people could die during a heat wave in a major American city in 1995.
Klinenberg’s interest was further piqued when he heard about the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals near Minot, N.D., the state’s fourth-largest city. Use of the Emergency Alert System — designed for just such events — was never instituted; the six local radio stations continued to play music. More than a thousand people were injured, many because they were neither alerted to the disaster nor given instructions on what to do. One person died. All the radio stations in Minot were owned by the same conglomerate, one based in San Antonio. Two offices ran the automated programming for all six stations; neither had a live staffer to issue the alert.
“Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media” is a riveting look into every part of what is called the “media ecosystem,” which includes the Internet as well as newspapers, radio and television.
Klinenberg grounds all of his reporting in human terms and gives concrete examples of what happens when too few own too much and, worse, control what information will be disseminated to the people. He also wisely includes news of the victories being achieved by media activists.
