Media Concentration and Democracy

C. Edwin Baker is the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and has been on the faculty at Penn since 1981. He also taught at NYU, Chicago, Cornell, Texas, Oregon, and Toledo law schools and at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he was a staff attorney for the ACLU. He is the author of three earlier books: Media, Markets, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the 2002 McGannon Communications Policy Research Award; Advertising and a Democratic Press (1994); and Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (1989). He has written more than fifty academic articles about free speech, equality, property, law and economics, jurisprudence, and the mass media, in addition to occasional popular commentary.

• 1. Democracy at the crossroads: why ownership matters; 2. Not a real problem: many owners, many sources; 3. Not a real problem: the market or the net will provide; 4. First amendment guarantee of free press - an objection to regulation?; 5. Solutions and responses.

"Among the many First Amendment theorists in America's law schools, Ed Baker stands out for combining a comprehensive theory of the media that democracy needs to thrive with a thorough examination of the empirical economic and sociological evidence that makes his case. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to question the deregulatory, hyper-commercialism ideology that has dominated media policy in the United States for the past couple of decades or who wishes to participate in the ongoing debate over media ownership." Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America