Political Quotes

“I want to pick up on a point that the gentlewoman made. She mentioned Clear Channel; and some people say yes, well, Clear Channel is a radio network, but they are much more than a radio network. And the point that I am trying to make and that all of us have been trying to make today, getting back to this chart, is that a handful of giant media conglomerate corporations are owning more and more of what we see, hear, and read; and this is not what a democracy is about. I would remind my colleagues in Congress and all Americans that in the last days of the Soviet Union, which was a totalitarian society, people thought, well, I guess they had one newspaper and one television network, and that was it. It was a totalitarian society. That is wrong. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of different newspapers, different magazines, different television stations, all over the totalitarian Soviet Union. The only problem was that all of those television stations, radio stations, newspapers, and magazines were only controlled by either the government of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party. Many, many different outlets, but limited ownership. What we are seeing here is many, many outlets and increasingly fewer owners.”