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any kind of entertainment without having a particular perspective. Attempts to convey information or entertain people without discriminating between what, in the opinion of the people doing the selecting, is important or news- or noteworthy merely results in either a flood of indiscriminate and unsorted information, valueless for any purpose, or a bland, lowest-common-denominator, let's-not-offend-anyone approach that succeeds admirably in offending everyone anyway.

This brings us naturally to the second problem with concentrated ownership (and thus control) of the media. With few people controlling what we hear, we naturally hear very little, and what we do hear is strikingly similar to what the other media outlets are presenting. In economics, this is called "monopolistic competition," a somewhat misleading term meaning that, when a few large producers manufacture an undifferentiated product, it makes very little difference which one you buy. All are virtually identical, and are offered at virtually the same price. It is as if there was a single producer, anyway.

The classic example of "monopolistic competition" (now out of favor) has been cigarettes. A better example these days are the presumably independent media outlets, all of which tend to duplicate what the few others are doing, making for an "undifferentiated product" in the eyes of the public. In consequence, people tend to think in the ways dictated by the few voices they hear. Just as children repeat the opinions of their parents, people regurgitate what they hear in the media. When the media mavens decide who is to be elected, or what political or economic policies are to be followed, there is no one to dispute their claims, and consequently a relatively small number of people make the decisions for the rest of us, regardless of the illusion that the universal franchise gives us of participation in the democratic process. We have only a limited number of options from which to choose, selected by an elite, so we naturally choose from those options, to the detriment of real democracy.

This is not the result of some kind of conspiracy. It is a simple fact of human nature. It cannot be solved by governmental fiat that mandates an artificial "diversity" or equal time policy. The only solution is one that is consistent with human nature and achieves equality of opportunity of media access naturally instead of trying to legislate it.

This, in turn, means empowering people with democratic access to the means

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