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A groundbreaking investigative work by a critically acclaimed sociologist on the corporate takeover of local news and what it means for all Americans
For the residents of Minot, North Dakota, Clear Channel Communications is synonymous with disaster. Early in the morning of January 18, 2002, a train derailment sent a cloud of poisonous gas drifting toward the small town. Minot's fire and rescue departments attempted to reach Clear Channel, which owned and operated all six local commercial radio stations, to warn residents of the approaching threat. But in the age of canned programming and virtual DJs, there was no one in the conglomerate's studio to take the call. The people of Minot were taken unawares. The result: one death and more than a thousand injuries.
Opening with the story of the Minot tragedy, Eric Klinenberg's Fighting for Air takes us into the world of preprogrammed radio shows, empty television news stations, and copycat newspapers to show how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg argues that the demise of truly local media stems from the federal government's malign neglect, as the agencies charged with ensuring diversity and open competition have ceded control to the very conglomerates that consistently undermine these values and goals.
Such "big media" may not be here to stay, however. Fighting for Air delivers a call to action, revealing a rising generation of new media activists and citizen journalists—a coalition of liberals and conservatives—who are demanding and even creating the local coverage they need and deserve.
- Sales Rank: #156973 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-01-09
- Released on: 2007-01-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Eric Klinenberg has written an extraordinary and powerful account of the devastating elimination of localism in U.S. media and journalism, and how Americans from all walks of life are rising up to challenge the great media crisis that grips our nation today. Brilliantly written and tightly argued, Fighting for Air is the perfect book for anyone wanting to understand what is going on in this country, and why it is so important to our future."--Robert W. McChesney, author of The Problem of the Media "Eric Klinenberg has given us a chilling report on how the American news media, increasingly concentrated, have made a mockery of the commitment to operate 'in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.' Admirably researched and lucidly written, Fighting for Air should serve as a wake-up call on the deafness of radio and television to communal needs." --Daniel Schorr, Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio "Big media conglomerates--in radio, TV and newspapers--have taken over local outlets all over America, silencing independent local voices. Eric Klinenberg has done a masterful job of researching what has happened to America's local news media. Fighting for Air is a must-read for anyone who cares about the role of the media in a democracy."--George Lakoff, author of Don't Think of an Elephant! "Fighting for Air is a richly detailed, compelling, and timely investigation into the problem of the U.S. media and what people are doing to take it back. Klinenberg pulls back the curtain on complex media policy issues, with stories of real people, how they have been harmed by Big Media, and follows up with inspiring tales of underdogs who are fighting back and winning. This book is a call to action to fight for a strong, vigorous, independent media."--Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democ...
About the Author
Eric Klinenberg is an associate professor of sociology at New York University. Author of the acclaimed Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Klinenberg has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and Slate.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
At approximately 1:39 a.m. on January 18, 2002, a 112-car Canadian Pacific Railway train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside Minot, North Dakota, the fourth largest city in the state. According to the operating crew, the train had been traveling at forty miles an hour, and the accident happened when they attempted to slowdown after hitting a rough spot on the tracks. Thirty-one cars jumped off the rails, and several burst open, spilling about 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia, a toxic compound commonly used as a fertilizer, into a woodsy neighborhood called Tierrecita Vallejo, “Lovely Land of the Valley.”
Minot, a quiet town with a population of nearly thirty-seven thousand nestled into a low-lying valley below the Canadian border, developed with the expansion of the rail lines and is now known for its air force base and annual state fair. In winter, arctic air grips the region, freezing winds howl through the streets, and residents hunker down. On the morning of the accident the winds were unusually gentle, and instead of dispersing, the anhydrous ammonia quickly formed a vapor plume that covered the crash site, spread to the adjacent residential area, and floated ominously toward town. Once they realized what was happening, the train crew unhitched their two locomotives and hurried into Minot. The conductor used his personal cell phone to call Ward County 911.1 OPERATOR: 9-1-1, what’s the emergency?
CALLER: Uh, uh, this Minot Dispatch?
OPERATOR: Yes, it is.
CALLER: We’ve got an emerg, just had a derailment. We’ve got an
explosion. Oh, it’s around Tierrecita, Tierrecita Val, Vallejo, uh, CP
Rail, we just had a derailment and we’ve got an explosive. Over.
OPERATOR: Okay. Uh, do you know what kind of chemicals are on
board, sir?
CALLER: Uh, we’ve got hazardous material and I can smell stuff now. Although the Ward County 911 dispatchers do not see much action in the dead of winter, they had an emergency management plan in place. After taking the conductor’s call, the operator paged the Minot Rural Fire Department, and within two minutes the chief and assistant chief responded. They sent six units from the rural fire hall to the accident site, requested mutual aid from the Minot City Fire Department and the Burlington Fire Department, and notified the Air Force Base Hazardous Materials Team. Ward County also sent officers from its Sheriff’s Department to the scene.
Local officials had to issue a public warning with information about the spill as well as instructions on how civilians could stay safe. Emergency personnel were familiar with anhydrous because local farmers use it regularly, and their advice was simple: Stay indoors, away from the spill. Cover your mouth with a wet washcloth if you have trouble breathing. Turn off your home furnace. Do not try to drive through the cloud. Anhydrous takes oxygen out of the air and is capable of shutting down car engines. In large enough doses, anhydrous shuts down the human respiratory system, too. Even limited exposure burns the eyes, the skin, and the lungs. The emergency crews feared that some civilians who smelled or saw the toxic cloud would leave their homes in hope of outrunning it, only to put themselves in harm’s way. Four minutes after the train crew first reported the crash, dispatchers received a call from two panicked parents whose child had run out into the toxic air. MALE: We’re out at, um Tierrecita Vallejo, 625 37th Street
Southwest . . . We don’t know what’s going on. Something sparks
and flew. It reeks in our background. We’re gonna try, get out of the
house.
OPERATOR: Okay, um. What
FEMALE: What is happening here?
MALE: (talking to female: What, What is it?) It’s bad. We’re gonna try
to go to the neighbors. What is it? . . . It smells really bad. I don’t
know if, uh, a train blew up or . . .
OPERATOR: Yeah, there is, there is a train derailment there.
MALE: Okay . . . Where is Kelsey at?
FEMALE: She ran.
MALE: God damn.
OPERATOR: Everybody in the room?
MALE: No, we don’t. My daugh, she sent my daughter out.
OPERATOR: Outside?
FEMALE: Oh, shit.
MALE: Yell at her.
MALE: Becky?
FEMALE: Kelsey. Come back, Kelsey, come back. Kelsey, can you come
back.
MALE: God damn it, Becky. What in the hell are you doing in the
middle of the night.
OPERATOR: Do, do you have everybody there now?
MALE: No, we don’t. My daughter isn’t there. I don’t have anything
on. They’re all dressed and she sent her out but it smells really bad
outside.
OPERATOR: Okay, yeah, just.
MALE: Is she here?
FEMALE: No, honey, she’s gone.
OPERATOR: Ma’am?
FEMALE: My daughter ran out the front door.
OPERATOR: She ran out? How old is your daughter?
FEMALE: She’s twelve . . . Is she gonna die out there?
MALE: I don’t know.
FEMALE: You guys have to hurry please . . . Two minutes later the office fielded another urgent call. OPERATOR: 9-1-1, what is your emergency?
FEMALE: Hi. There’s some emergency at our house at Tierrecita
Vallejo. I don’t know what it is but there was a huge, huge crash.
There’s smoke everywhere outside.
OPERATOR: Right. We’re aware of it. We have fire units en route,
okay? You need to stay
FEMALE: What is going on?
OPERATOR: You need to stay calm until we can figure out what, what’s
going on, what to do. Okay. Stay calm. If there’s gonna be any
evacuations, we will announce it. Okay. But you need to stay in
your house.
FEMALE: We can’t hear if you announce anything. Within minutes of the accident, calls to 911 were coming in by the dozen. Those who lived near the accident or were driving close by heard the explosions and saw fires burning. Some who were farther away smelled chemicals in the air and worried that there had been a bomb at the local military base. The toxic cloud grew to some five miles long, two and one-half miles wide, and 350 feet high, penetrating into the homes of approximately fifteen thousand people, waking up some and causing widespread fear and confusion among those who stumbled around their homes trying to assess what was happening.2 Minot residents complained that their eyes, lungs, and nasal passages were burning, and told dispatchers that they didn’t know how to protect themselves.” What should we do?” one resident asked his wife as she spoke with the operator. She repeated the question. “What should we do?”
Instead of calling 911 to find out what had happened and what they should do, most people in Minot turned on their televisions and radios, which had proven to be reliable sources of emergency public health and safety information since the Cold War, when President Harry Truman charged broadcasters with responsibility for the service. Not only were broadcast companies then uniquely positioned to conduct crisis communications on a massive scale; they also had a special duty to do so: the government required that they meet public-interest obligations in exchange for a license to use the nation’s airwaves and for regulatory enforcement that prevented other operators from sending signals over their designated frequencies. In 1951, Truman established the CONELRAD (Control of Electromagnetic Radiation) system, a federal program which when activated (by emergency tones sent through predetermined chain of stations) required all of the nation’s television channels and FM radio outlets to immediately broadcast warnings before shutting down their signals, preventing foreign enemies from taking over the spectrum during a military attack. As part of the program, selected AM stations would move to one of two designated frequencies,640 kHz or 1240 kHz (each of which was tagged with triangle-in-circle “CD Mark” on radio dials built between 1953 and1963), from which they could securely issue safety announcements. “At the first indication of enemy bombers approaching the United States,” explained a civil defense publication from the 1950s, “the CONELRAD stations, 640 and 1240, are your surest and fastest means of getting emergency information and instructions. Mark those numbers on your radio set, now!”
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, disaster planners recommended improving the technology so that local officials could activate the system during a range of public safety threats, and in 1963 they introduced the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) for warnings during natural disasters, civil emergencies, or military attacks. U.S. law required radicand television broadcasters to conduct weekly tests of their EBS systems, and most Americans who watched television or listened to the radio between 1963 and 1997 remember hearing the bracing, two-tone signal, along with a flat yet reassuring voice announcing, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.”
In 1997 the federal government updated EBS with a new technology, the Emergency Alert System (EAS). According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), EAS improves crisis communications because its “digital system architecture allows broadcast stations, cable systems, participating satellite companies, and other services to send and receive emergency information quickly and automatically even if those facilities are unattended.”3 The president, state and local governments, and the National Weather Service can also use EAS to override local broadcasts, an innovation designed to protect the publicly expanding the number of authorities who can trigger an alert when disaster strikes. After the derailment, dispatchers in Minot knew to direct callers to the airwaves—speci...
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
A Critical Contribution to the Field
By Harold Feld
As a participant in the "media reform movement" who has witnessed and participated in the events Klinenberg describes, I found his observations accurate and his analysis penetrating. I have full review on my professional blog. To give the teaser:
Anyone who wants to understand the media reform movement should buy this book. More importantly, this is the book to give your friends and relatives so that they can understand why the media reform movement matters, and why it will succeed in transforming the media landscape despite the multi-billion dollar forces arrayed against it.
Others have written excellent books on the rise of media concentration and why it sucks rocks. What makes Fighting for Air different, and therefore a must read, is that it chronicles the history of the media reform *movement*. Certainly you will understand by the end of the book why media concentration has inspired a movement of people dedicated to stopping further consolidation and reversing the effects of our increasingly centralized and homogenized media. But this realization comes through the telling of the stories of the movement -- its people, its victories, and its set backs.
[...]
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Figthing for Air is essential reading for understanding media reform
By Gregory Rose
Dr. Klinenberg has provided a valuable service to Americans in his excellent historical and sociological study of media consolidation, its implications for access, content, and justice at both the national and local levels, and the growing movement to challenge consolidation. The work is a model of scholarship for a mass audience, meticulously documenting both the secondary literature and the extensive interviews Klinenberg has conducted with numerous industry and movement figures, while losing none of the immediacy of a compelling narrative and persuasive argument. Clearly and concisely Klinenberg marshals a compelling case.
My only criticism is that a more extensive discussion of the political economy of consolidation and its wider context in the US and international economies, and a more detailed critique of the failed libertarian economic paradigm which was used to sell consolidation to policymakers would be useful. But that would be asking for a much longer and more complicated book, and one which would probably not have done as admirable a job in explaining in simple and direct terms the complexities of consolidation and its dreadful consequences of American public life.
I recommend Fighting for Air as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this vital area of public policy.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
What to do about media consolidation should be the #1 issue in the 2008 election.
By Paul Tognetti
The genie is out of the bottle. Over the past 15 years our radio and television stations, newspapers and magazines have been gobbled up by a handful of media conglomerates. Turn on the radio in just about any city in this nation and you will hear the same tired and unimaginative programming. Local content has largely been eliminated on a good many of these stations and the number of commercials has increased dramatically. In many of our largest cities media companies are allowed to operate up to 8 radio stations, 3 televisions stations, cable TV service and even the local newspaper. It is an alarming state of affairs to say the least! In his new book "Fighting For Air: The Battle To Control America's Media" author Eric Klinenberg brings these critical issues to our attention. While the American public has been asleep at the switch our President, the Congress and those who are supposed to regulate such matters have allowed companies like Clear Channel, Entercom, Citadel and Infinity to gobble up our local media. If you have grown tired of all of the canned programming and recognize the importance that local media outlets have played throughout American history then this is a book you should definitely consider.
So how did this happen? Over the past two decades our government has been "deregulating" media. At one time, no company was allowed to own more than one television station in a community. The number of radio stations were also strictly regulated. And the FCC would never have allowed a company that owned a major daily newspaper to own a television station in the same town. All of this began to change in the 1980's as broadcasters cried poverty and declared that they were having a difficult time turning a profit. There was some truth to this claim, particularly for small to medium size AM radio stations. Broadcasters petitioned to have ownership restrictions relaxed and as you will see the deregulation of our media began in earnest in the late 80's. Perhaps the most dramatic and controversial measure was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In one fell swoop Congress and the FCC eliminated the national station ownership limit altogether and raised local limits from four to as many as eight radio stations in some communities. As a result of this legislation, Clear Channel now controls more than 1200 local radio stations in the United States. A funny thing happened as local radio and television stations were gobbled up by the media giants...local programming began to disappear. The change is most noticable on the radio where thousands of local hosts have been let go. Talk shows that used to focus on local issues have been replaced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. And that guy giving you the weather on your local TV station may be based in a city hundreds or maybe even thousands of miles from your town.
Eric Klinenberg does an outstanding job of framing these issues for his readers. There is so much at stake here. It matters not your political persuasion. Each and every one of us has lost something precious. It is high time that the American people began to fight back! "Fighting For Air: The Battle To Control America's Media" is a great way to educate yourself about these extremely important issues. But we face an uphill fight. For obvious reasons you will never hear or see these issues discussed and debated on the major networks nor will you see them written about in the major newspapers in this country. Once you understand this, you will then begin to realize why so many Americans are convinced that the short-sighted and irresponsible consolidation of the media should rank as the top issue in the upcoming election. We must demand accountability from our elected officials. This is a comprehensive and well written book and one that I can highly recommend!
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