3
press that soon became a mainstay of journalism education, but did not directly address the broad
questions of media ownership and access.
4
Traditionally, the dangers of ownership concentration in the communications industry were
addressed by a combination of antitrust and regulatory policies that attempted to attend to the
amalgamation of corporate power but, of course, did not question private power itself. The logic
of government policy generally derived from the juxtaposition of the antitrust laws and
regulatory practice with free speech jurisprudence. The First Amendment arguments are pretty
familiar by now: The robust clash of opinions unimpeded by government is the prerequisite of
democracy, that is, of self-government; the uninhibited exchange of diverse ideas yields better
public choices, decisions, and policies; a free press provides a vital checking function on
government actions and possible abuses; freedom of expression is a condition of being a human
subject, enabling individuals to learn, grow, and realize their autonomy; the social system
functions better when space is made for people to dissent publicly. The First Amendment
literally forbids government from abridging the freedom of speech or press (in fact the language
literally forbids only Congress from abridging that freedom). Absent such abridgement, the
speech marketplace is expected to secure the benefits listed above. The “marketplace of ideas,”
formulated by Justice Holmes in the 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, typically is the
guiding metaphor in free speech jurisprudence.
5
But the concentration of private power in the communications media skews, if not
undermines, the presumed free marketplace of ideas. To stay with the metaphor, concentrated
media ownership corrupts the marketplace and renders it dysfunctional. At the most basic level,
4
See Siebert, Frederick S., Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press:
Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press
Should Be and Do, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
5
250 U.S. 616 (1919).
Convention