PBS Pres Assails ‘Media Industrial Complex”

Of course she’s part of it. The Cornell Daily Sun reports:

Yesterday evening, Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of PBS gave a lecture entitled “Media Consolidation, Convergence, Connection: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Dangerous” at Ithaca College (IC).

….Mitchell spoke for an hour and a half to a packed hall of journalism undergraduates about the recent trend of media consolidation.

“The power center of America has shifted from the military complex to the media-entertainment centered empire,” she said.

Mitchell suggested the marginalization of “hard” news was prompted by the past decade’s three biggest news stories, the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. and the O.J. Simpson trial.

Her speech focused on the negatives aspects of this shift and the domination of the media by a handful of multi-national conglomerates, such as Disney, Bertelsmann, Newscorp, GE and AOL Time Warner.

“These corporations are the gatekeeper’s for us and the rest of the world, determining what we and they see,” Mitchell said.

She did not only blame the media conglomerates though.

She also commented on this summer’s success of American Idol, pointing out the fact that more people voted online for their favorite pop idol than those who voted in last week’s national elections.

Well, it’s easier to vote for American Idol than to try to sort out civic elections – right?