See how a few corporations came to own & control so much media and how news stories, journalists, and our societies have been damaged by it. Tell a friend, host a screening, buy a DVD, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Share your understanding of media problems and solutions with others.

Other documentaries to watch:

• The Corporation
• Manufacturing Consent
• The War You Don’t See
• Big Boys Gone Bananas
• Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
• War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
• All Governments Lie

Click here to find out more about our film contributors. Find out about the organisations they represent, and what they do to support freedom of information.

Like Free Press, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and The Center for Public Integrity. The Media Consortium, a national network of over 60 leading independent journalism organizations, is also a great resource. Get your news information from independent & diverse sources and become critically engaged with media;

• themediaconsortium.org
• freepress.net
• publicintegrity.org
• fair.org

We often take the Internet for granted but we need to realise how important it is and how discrimination is operating over the Internet over our access to information. Help keep the Internet free and accessible to all and find out more about what is happening with the Internet and get involved; savetheinternet.com.

Write a Letter to the Editor, Publish an Op-Ed, write in a Guest Column, a Newsletter Article, Comment or Blog, even make a video, start and sign petitions, and Advocate, Inform, and express with passion your understanding about media problems and solutions, and submit and self-publish your piece.

By pressuring The President, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to make rules that support the public interest, Call, send letters, email, attend public hearings, and even meet with your Congress member and Ask for a specific action. Here are some suggestions about policies to change;

• The Telecommunications Act of 1996 should be rolled back and replaced with new law that can begin to break up the most egregious conglomerates, reinstate mandatory local community access, and put teeth into the requirement that stations demonstrate their record of public interest programming when they apply for renewal of licenses. License challenge procedures must be made more accessible to civic groups dissatisfied with their local radio and TV broadcast stations.
• The Federal Communications Commission has shifted from its original purpose of protecting consumers against unfair industry behavior to an opposite role of protecting media industries from their consumers and promoting their conglomeration. The FCC must be reconstituted to include specified representatives from nonpartisan groups.
• Restrictions on time for commercials shown during newscasts were in effect until the Reagan administration dropped them in the mid 1980′s. The restrictions on commercials should be restored to reduce some of the news media’s incentive to narrow the truth in the news and to cater to corporate interests.
• We need a parallel non-commercial public information system, or several of them, financed by consumer subscription sign ups, to compete with commercial news media channels and outlets for consumer attention.
• Paid political advertising should be banned from American broadcasting. In the two months before elections, every station should be required to provide prime time hours for local and national candidates, with fifteen-minute minimums to avoid slick sound bites without content.
• Public broadcasting must be financed through a new, nonpolitical system, as is done for the best systems of other democracies. Today, non-commercial broadcasting depends on appropriations by federal and state legislatures that themselves are heavily beholden to corporate interests. A small surtax on all consumer electronic equipment–computers, TV sets, DVD players, radios and the like–would be miniscule at the individual retail level but could provide funding for a full-fledged multi-channel radio and TV non-commercial system, and for a substantial national broadcast news and documentary operation.
• The auctioning of broadcast frequencies to stations implies transfer of the airwaves to private ownership–but the public owns the airwaves. Frequencies should be granted, as in the past, on credible promises made and kept of public service. Let the FCC do what basic public ownership of the airwaves implies–grant stations licenses for a limited time, conditional upon their general performance as good citizens in their communities.

Using independently created curricula. Some are already available and others are being developed. The average American child will spend more time in front of a TV set & computer screen than in front of a teacher. The young are targets for commercial materialism. They need to know how important an influence the media are in their lives and how to analyze the media and its news presentations.

When they do not live up to their public interest obligations. Directly confronting your local media outlets can result in tangible changes to what you see or hear in your community’s media.

Revelations from Edward Snowden leaks have shown how the UK and US governments’ surveillance practices are an affront to our basic right to privacy. Here are 2 campaigns that you can support;

• openrightsgroup.org
• mediareform.org.uk

It was Ben Bagdikian’s book, ‘The New Media Monopoly’ that first inspired our film. Also read from the useful Action Guides for more information and detailed examples about what to do;

• freepress.net
• thirdworldtraveler.com
• benbagdikian.net