Product Description

The celebrated media advocate's clarion call for new media to serve the public instead of corporate interests—and what's involved in this high-stakes struggle.

With the explosive growth of the Internet and broadband communications, we now have the potential for a truly democratic media system offering a wide variety of independent sources of news, information, and culture, with control over content in the hands of the many rather than a few select media giants.

But the country's powerful communications companies have other plans. Assisted by a host of hired political operatives and pro-business policy makers, the big cable, TV, and Internet providers are using their political clout to gain ever greater control over the Internet and other digital communication channels. Instead of a "global information commons," we're facing an electronic media system designed principally to sell to rather than serve the public, dominated by commercial forces armed with aggressive digital marketing, interactive advertising, and personal data collection.

Just as Lawrence Lessig translated the mysteries of software and intellectual property for the general reader in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Jeff Chester gets beneath the surface of media and telecommunications regulation to explain clearly how our new media system functions, what's at stake, and what we can do to fight the corporate media's plans for our "digital destiny"—before it's too late.

• A single company—Comcast—largely determines what channels are available on cable TV.
• Soon TV sets will regularly monitor our viewing habits and relay this personal information to data warehouses around the country.
• By tracking which Web sites we visit on the Internet, a vast system of interactive advertising enables online marketers to target us with "personalized" ads.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #895114 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In recent years, the Federal Communications Commission has come under fire from advocacy groups and, increasingly, the general public for its regulatory decisions (or, in many cases, lack thereof). Writing in the tradition of critic Robert McChesney, media watchdog Jeff Chester examines the FCC, charting the close network of lobbyists, trade associations and other industry representatives in which it is embedded. Through close analysis of recent FCC moves and decisions on media consolidation and network neutrality, Chester makes a damning and important case for sweeping reform in governmental regulation, culminating in a series of policy recommendations that would adjust the balance of power between media corporations and customers. Unfortunately, Chester is mostly preaching to the converted; the general tone of the book is so stridently (even antagonistically) polemic that it's more likely to turn off uninformed or dissenting readers than persuade them. While offering red meat for those already concerned about issues of personal privacy and media choice in an era of growing corporate media oligarchy, Chester doesn't do much to reach beyond them, limiting the book's appeal both as a book and as a piece of advocacy. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* How is it, the author asks, that every new communications technology, from radio to cable television, is hailed as the one that will make the media more democratic and then is almost immediately subverted (or perhaps perverted) by politics and big business? Chester, a longtime critic of media commercialization, explores how the newest technological breakthroughs, the digital media, could spell further disaster. Do we really want television sets that monitor what we watch? Or an Internet that knows what sites we visit and reports back to advertising companies? Do we want to see newspapers, television stations, and radio stations in the hands of massive corporations that control what we see and what we think? After scaring the bejeebers out of us, Chester concludes with a "policy agenda for the broadband era" in which he puts forward some badly needed reforms, such as strict rules governing the collection of information on the Internet; regulations limiting how many media a single company can own; and a complete overhaul of the FCC, to turn it from a "corporate lapdog" into a genuine communications watchdog. Cautionary tale is too weak a term for this angry call for democracy, fairness, and a little old-fashioned common sense. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Digital Destiny is the most important book on media policy in years, and will become required reading. -- Robert W. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Digital Destiny warns that the manipulators of television now threaten freedom in the new digital world. -- Ben H. Bagikian, author of The New Media Monopoly

Chester shows how Big Media too often allows journalism to take a backseat to profit margins..a passionate and powerful book. -- Ken Auletta,, author of The Underclass and Backstory: Inside the Business of News

Complex, quixotic attempt to sway the American public from the temptation to "amuse itself to death. -- Kirkus Reviews

Jeff Chester is the Paul Revere of the media revolution. -- Bill Moyers, author of Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times

No other work as concisely and powerfully frames the democratic challenge that media policy presents. -- Lawrence Lessig, author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

Read this important and timely book. It discloses the past, present and future multi-billion dollar agendas of the powers-that-be. -- Charles Lewis, founder, Center for Public Integrity

Customer Reviews

The Paul Revere of Media Criticism
There is an irony in writing a review of Jeff Chester's (Center for Digital Democracy) critique of new media and the future of democracy on this site given how successful Amazon has been in using the internet to do the things that Mr Chester so despises. The book contains very detailed discussions about how large telecommunications companies have and are subverting democratic processes in America. The book is both a brief history of political developments in modern communications and a work of art in judiciously critiquing these developments in order to suggest what we as citizens should do about it. Armed with this in hand roll on the revolution!

A Wake Up Call About Control of the Internet
In this book Mr. Chester warns that the big communications media -- TV Networks, Big Cable Companies, Microsoft, etc. are attempting to find ways to take over, control, and therefore make a lot of money on the Internet. He is absolutely correct. They would love to do just exactly this.

The author is head of an organization, The Center for Digital Democracy, that is attempting to preserve the openness and diversity of the Internet in the broadband era. The book is a Wake-Up call to get people's attention to the problem.

I'm not so sure that I fully agree with his fears. Yes, from a connectivity standpoint he is right, someone, probably a large company will own the wire that comes into your house. But I don't see it likely that they will have much control over the content being delivered. If they could, the politicians would find a way to eliminate the SPAM (I get several a day), phising (I just got one of these today), viruses and porn that is on the net now.

Part of the problem from the big company standpoint is that the web is international in scope, you can't control the web hosts in China or Nigeria. It will be interesting to see how this works out in the future.