Echoing James Madison's 1822 warning, "A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both," Lloyd (senior fellow at the Center for American Progress) constructs a political history of communications policy in the United States from the Constitutional Convention to the present time. He argues that in the longstanding battle between public interests and financial interests, the latter have come to dominate today's communication landscape, with severe deleterious effects for the practice of republican democracy. He concludes with a number of recommendations for reclaiming the Founder's communications environment, including ending the federal subsidy of commercial media, reforming the Corporation for Public Broadcasting along democratic lines, fully funding the Federal Communications Commission, providing universal communications service support to all nonprofit organizations, restoring postal subsidies to small independent nonprofit presses and returning the postal service to congressional control, and including civics and media literacy as part of the core curriculum of public secondary schools. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The cure for an American media where market interests have usurped democratic participation