I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall and the camaraderie we share today. All too often the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions rise, fences are built, jealousies mount - and the cause all believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what was once a clear and compelling vision.

    Reformers, in fact, too often remind me of Baptists. I speak as a Baptist. I know Baptists.

    One of my favorite stories is of the fellow who was about to jump off a bridge when another fellow runs up to him, crying: "Stop. Stop. Stop. Don't do it."

    The man on the bridge looks down and asks, "Why not?"

    "Well, there's much to live for."

    "Like what?"

    "Well, your faith. Are you religious?"

    "Yes."

    "Me, too. Christian or Buddhist?"

    "Christian."

    "Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

    "Protestant."

    "Me, too. Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist?"

    "Baptist."

    "Me, too. Are you original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

    "Reformed Baptist Church of God."

    "Me, too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1820, or Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1912?"

    "1912."

    Whereupon the second fellow turned red in the face, shouted, "Die, you heretic scum," and pushed him off the bridge.

    That sounds like reformers, doesn't it?

    By avoiding contentious factionalism, you have created a strong movement. I will confess to you that I was skeptical when Bob McChesney and John Nichols first raised the issue of media consolidation a few years ago. I was sympathetic but skeptical. The challenge of actually doing something about this issue - beyond simply bemoaning its impact on democracy - was daunting. How could we hope to come up with an effective response to an inexorable force?

    It seemed inexorable because over the previous two decades a series of mega-media mergers had swept the country, each deal even bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspaper industry is extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest and most powerful media conglomerates in the world - Goliaths whose handful of owners controlled, commodified and monetized everyone, and everything, in sight.

    Call it the "plantation mentality" in its modern incarnation. Here in Memphis they know all about that mentality. Even in 1968, the Civil Rights movement was still battling the plantation mentality based on race, gender, and power that permeated Southern culture long before and even after the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. When Martin Luther King came to Memphis to join the strike of garbage workers in 1968, the cry from every striker's heart - "I am a man" - voiced the long-suppressed outrage of a people whose rights were still being trampled by an ownership class that had arranged the world for its own benefit. The plantation mentality was a phenomenon deeply insulated in the American experience early on, and has it permeated and corrupted our course as a nation. The journalist of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, had envisioned this new republic as "a community of occupations," prospering "by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole." But that vision was repeatedly betrayed, so that less than a century after Thomas Paine's death, Theodore Roosevelt, bolting a Republican party whose bosses had stolen the nomination from him, declared:

It is not to be wondered at that our opponents have been very bitter, for the lineup in this crisis is one that cuts deep to the foundations of government. Our democracy is now put to a vital test, for the conflict is between human rights on the one side and on the other, special privilege asserted as a property right.

    Today, a hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt's death, those words ring just as true. America is socially divided and politically benighted. Inequality and poverty grow steadily, along with risk and debt. Many working families cannot make ends meet with two people working, let alone if one stays home to care for children or aging parents. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less and less security for a lifetime's work. We are racially segregated in every meaningful sense except the letter of the law. And survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar compared to those they serve.

    None of this is accidental. Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow - not someone known for extreme political statements - characterizes what is happening as nothing less than elite plunder: "the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful." Indeed, nearly all of the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20 percent of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top one percent of households captured more than 50 percent of all gains in financial wealth. These households hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American Revolution. Of the early American democratic creeds, the anti-Federalist warning that government naturally works to "fortify the conspiracies of the rich" has proved especially prophetic. So it is this that we confront today.

    America confronts a choice between two fundamentally different economic visions. As Norton Garfinkle writes in his new book The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth, the historic vision of the American Dream is that continuing economic growth and political stability can be achieved by supporting income growth and the economic security of middle-class families, without restricting the ability of successful businessmen to gain wealth. The counter-belief is that providing maximum financial rewards to the most successful is the way to maintain high economic growth. The choice cannot be avoided: What kind of economy do we seek, and what kind of nation do we wish to be? Do we want to be a country in which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer?" Or do we want to be a country committed to an economy that provides for the common good, offers upward mobility, supports a middle-class standard of living, and provides generous opportunity for all? In Garfinkle's words, "When the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill, when its middle-class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards, when the nation's economy has difficulty producing secure jobs or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss."

    You bet something is amiss. And it goes to the core of why we are here in Memphis for this conference. We are talking about a force - the media - that cuts deep to the foundation of democracy. When Teddy Roosevelt dissected the "real masters of the reactionary forces" in his time, he concluded that they "directly or indirectly control the majority of the great daily newspapers that are against us." Those newspapers - the dominant media of the day - "choked" (his word) the channels of information ordinary people needed to understand what was being done to them.

    And today? Two basic pillars of American society - shared economic prosperity and a public sector capable of serving the common good - are crumbling. The third basic pillar of American democracy - an independent press- is under sustained attack, and the channels of information are choked.

    A few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape in America. Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media conglomerates. Two thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies. As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace. And those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and shift their focus in a "mainstream" direction, which means being more attentive to the establishment than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people.

    What does today's media system mean for the notion of the "informed public" cherished by democratic theory? Quite literally, it means that virtually everything the average person sees or hears outside of her own personal communications is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the company's share price. More insidiously, this small group of elites determines what ordinary people do not see or hear. In-depth news coverage of anything, let alone of the problems people face day-to-day, is as scarce as sex, violence, and voyeurism are pervasive. Successful business model or not, by democratic standards, this is censorship of knowledge by monopolization of the means of information. In its current form - which Barry Diller happily describes as oligopoly - media growth has one clear consequence: there is more information and easier access to it, but it's more narrow in content and perspective, so that what we see from the couch is overwhelmingly a view from the top.

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