Fighting for Air is a work of public sociology, written narratively to provide an accessible account of how and why the U.S. media has changed so dramatically during the past decade, and to identify the emergence of an improbable social movement for media reform. The book is based on five years of fieldwork and extensive travel across the media field: in the radio, television, newspapers, alternative weekly, and Internet industries, and from the newsrooms where journalists perform their craft to the marketing departments and executive suites; in the political agencies responsible for regulating media markets and setting communications policy; in the town halls and convention centers where citizens congregate to discuss the state of their media; in the neighborhoods where residents consume (and increasingly produce their own) news, information, and entertainment; and in the places where civic groups, old and new, are uniting to demand the media that they need.
After decades of scientific specialization and technical debates that shut out nonprofessional readers, public sociology—long associated with scholars such as Daniel Bell, W. E. B. DuBois, Kai Erikson, Arlie Hochschild, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, and Richard Sennett—is now experiencing a renaissance, and without it this book would not be possible. Michael Burawoy, former president of the American Sociological Association, and Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council, have led the revival of American public sociology, and I thank them for doing so.
During my research a number of journalists and broadcast personalities confided that they had long wanted to produce stories about how media consolidation has devasted their profession, but could not because their editors or producers refused to cover the state of their own industry, or because they feared the career repercussions. As I have learned, today people in the industry are all too aware that a dwindling number of companies employ a dwindling number of reporters, editors, DJs, music programmers, and anchors, and the resulting job insecurity means that most media workers—from top national television news anchors to interns in small-town newspapers—are reluctant to speak out or write about how chains and conglomerates are quietly compromising the quality of American democratic and cultural life. The chilling effect of media concentration on free and open speech about the media, in the media, is just one of consolidation’s many hidden costs. It also makes the public sociology of culture and communications especially necessary today.
The pressure not to report on the social and political consequences of media consolidation makes it especially important to acknowledge the journalists who do so anyway. Eric Boehlert, Amy Goodman, Jim Lehrer, Bill Moyers, John Nichols, and William Safire deserve special mention for their relentless efforts to cover the rise of Big Media and the fall of the federal government’s public interest commitments, as do the journalists Ken Auletta, Katherine Seelye, and Sara Mathews, whose thorough beat reporting on the media business proved invaluable during my research. I owe an incalculable debt to Eric Bates, at Rolling Stone, and Serge Halimi, at Le Monde Diplomatique, who not only commissioned some of the stories told in this book but also ensured that they were well told.
Scholarship from media studies and sociology provided the foundations for this book. In particular, I drew on the work of Manuel Castells, Susan Douglas, Herbert Gans, Todd Gitlin, Robert Horwitz, Robert McChesney, Michael Schudson, Paul Starr, and Barbie Zelizer. I’m also fortunate to have friends and colleague s—at New York University and beyond—whose suggestions for research and editorial comments improved the manuscript. Thanks to Rodney Benson, Sarah Deming, Peter DiCola, Jerry Frug, Jodi Kantor, Danielle Klinenberg, John Lavine, Ronald Lieber, Jeff Manza, Harvey Molotch, Jay Rosen, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Aurora Wallace, and Matt Wray.
Undergraduate and graduate student research assistants also provided tremendous help. Aaron Platt transcribed interviews and conducted thorough reporting on the media business, while Claudio Benzecry, Ellen Berrey, Katy Gilpatric, Jennifer Jones, Robin Kello, Monika Krause, and Allison McKim dug up crucial evidence. Their work, and much of my own, was supported by the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stephen Vladeck Faculty Fellowship from New York University, the Social Science Research Council, the Overbrook Foundation, and the NYU Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Tina Bennet helped in so many ways that no single title—über-agent, advocate, key source—adequately describes her contributions to this project. Not many authors get an editorial team like the one that worked on Fighting for Air. Vanessa Mobley, my initial editor, treated the manuscript with her signature intelligence and care. Patrick Clark, Grigory Tovbis, and Megan Quirk kept things steady and organized, while Riva Hocherman gave the beginning sections a close read. Sara Bershtel, my editor at Metropolitan Books, intuitively understood both the big picture and every little frame inside it, and she masterfully shepherded the book into print.
My parents, Rona Talcott and Edward Klinenberg, kept our family in the heart of Chicago when so many others around us abandoned the city, instilling a commitment to ideals of urban civic life that anchors this book. My wife, Caitlin Zaloom, makes city living a distinctive pleasure, since she has an eye for little treasures that I would never have discovered on my own. She also brought us Cyrus, the greatest treasure of all, and both were considerate enough to let me finish writing just days before letting their own labor begin. I’m lucky that Caitlin happens to be a brillant scholar and wonderful writer. She put so much of herself into this project that dedicating the book to her, as I do, might falsely imply that it is not already ours.