Today the most dangerous enemy of press freedom is the press itself. This surprising fact is the result of accelerating media monopoly, the concentration of accelerating media monopoly, the concentration of ever more print and broadcast media in the hands of ever fewer corporations. By the middle of this decade, according to some Wall Street analysts, a mere half dozen megacorporations could control most of our media.

This is an alarming trend for two reasons. As the flow of information is controlled by fewer and fewer companies, it becomes much easier to manipulate public awareness of facts and events, public emotion, and public support for government policy. Coverage of the Persian Gulf was is a prime example of a war brilliantly orchestrated as a media spectacle. While the Pentagon's careful scripting of what could be shown on TV doubtless contributed to the onesidedness of the coverage, the media happily went along for the ride.

The other problem with media monopoly is that alternative voices regularly get drowned out. Because the big corporations that own television and radio networks or newspapers and book publishing houses don't have much interest in shaking up the system, the impetus toward glasnost or perestroika in the United States will have to come from outside of Big Media, which is now just one more subdivision of Big Business. The spirit of the First Amendment will be revived when truth, rather than profit, becomes once again the object of a free and uninhibited press.

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