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Foreword to the Voices from the Underground Series MARKOS MOULITSAS T he media is in a period of dramatic change, with new technologies dramatically changing how people communicate, consume information, and connect with each other. But some things don’t change—today, as in the 1960s, a collection of Big Media entities seek to dominate the media landscape, acting as gatekeepers and deciding in newsrooms and offices around the country what the masses should and should not watch, listen to, and read. We don’t have to go far back in time to see the dangers of an arrogant, unaccountable, and irresponsible mass media. The United States recently went to war against Iraq based on lies, yet an obsequious national media surrendered their public charge and carried water for an administration determined to wage an unnecessary war. Afraid to have their patriotism questioned, Big Media journalists allowed a litany of abuses to take place—from torture, to gross violations of civil liberties, to illegal spying on American citizens. Meanwhile, the administration carefully stage-managed their war, giving only careful and restricted access to the battlefield, and blocking any video of the war dead streaming back home. Big Media was happy, even eager, to become an appendage of the executive branch, whether it was Judith Miller at the New York Times dutifully reporting fabrications of weapons of mass destruction to readers, or TV stations cooperating in the smoke and mirrors of the stage-managed toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. These were not the stances of the fierce and adversarial alternative press of the Vietnam and civil rights era that had adopted H. L. Mencken’s dictum to “afflict the comfortable.” What America was treated to in the months leading up to the Iraq invasion was a groveling, ingratiating, and sycophantic media brimming with co-opted insiders parroting the lines handed down by the powerful to further the interests of the powerful. And then a funny thing happened. The arrival of the Internet and its various communication technologies allowed communities of interest to form around key issues, and thus Daily Kos—a key antiwar outpost in 2003—exploded in popularity in the run-up to the war. Few knew we existed, and fewer yet thought we mattered (I didn’t), but a surprising and empowering undercurrent began to form on the Web, outside of the so-called mainstream. Big xiv | Foreword Media was so successful in shutting down credible questioning voices, and was so shameless in boosting the Bush administration’s war, that sites like Daily Kos filled a market need for strong, unapologetic antiwar voices. And we quickly grew from small and insignificant, to influential outposts of alternative news, information, and analysis, helping build opposition to a war and president still being applauded and lauded by cheerleaders in Big Media. It’s a great success story, but one that received an unassailable assist by technological progress. I started Daily Kos on a whim with an investment of $9.99 (the cost of the domain “dailykos.com”) and instantly had access to a worldwide audience. I used off-the-shelf software that was easy and intuitive to use, within the grasp of any but the most unreconstructed Luddites or technophobes. It’s a far cry from the challenges faced by my forebears in the sixties, who were operating in a media landscape even more dominated by Big Media than the fragmented media environment of today. They had three major television networks as opposed to hundreds today (plus online video like YouTube). They had one or two local daily newspapers (if that) instead of infinite Web-accessible news sources today. And even the decades-old technology of radio was limited back then—despite the then-recent emergence of FM stations for “alternative rock”—compared with today’s options of Internet streaming, satellite radio, podcasts, and other listening opportunities. News information was so homogenized at the time, in fact, that in 1969, 85 percent of U.S. households watched one of the thirty-minute nightly newscasts each evening. While some still pine for the good old days when Americans had a supposed “shared media experience,” the reality is that the ability of Big Media to control the message was a frightening prospect, and ill-served anyone in the country who wasn’t an older, right-leaning, upper-income white male. The sterility and worthlessness of that mythological “shared experience” is patently obvious today—the market...

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