American democracy is lost unless citizen Davids do battle against the corporate media Goliaths. We have heard this rallying cry before, and we hear it again in Eric Klinenberg’s Fighting for Air. But Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, has humanized and dramatized the argument by writing a book based on extensive original reporting. It is an investigative work, not a rant; it is both intellectually serious and politically passionate, and so it challenges readers like me who have never been much impressed with the claim that media concentration is destroying the Republic.

Fighting for Air, nonetheless, wobbles between analysis and advocacy. Its arguments aren’t tested against rival possibilities. Its praise for the activists and academics who have pushed for low-power radio, tangled with the Federal Communications Commission in public hearings, and promoted libertarian policies for Internet governance may be merited, but there is no way to evaluate such praise with the evidence offered. And its historical sense is limited. Klinenberg doesn’t mention past media reformers like Newton Minow, Action for Children’s Television, or the educational broadcasters, foundations, and politicians whose efforts in the 1960s created PBS and NPR. Klinenberg writes knowledgeably of past legal challenges to corporate control of broadcasting. Even so, he reports without skepticism the rhetoric of today’s media reformers who see their movement as unprecedented. Their enthusiastic rallying of the faithful reads like a public television or radio appeal for funds—we’re almost there, a few more pledges before nine o’clock and we’ll reach our goal!

Klinenberg is also the author of Heat Wave, a stunning study of the failure of the city of Chicago—including its local newspapers and TV—to respond effectively to a crushing hot spell in the summer of 1995. In two weeks, more than seven hundred Chicagoans died from the heat. Many...

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