[Reader-list] Public Good-Language&Media

[ravi sri]

May I invite your attention to an interesting and
important book

Not For Sale : In Defense of Public Goods
(Eds) Anatole Anton,Milton Fisk, Nancy Holmstrom-2000-
Westview Press (www.westviewpress.com) Pp468+xxiv
ISBN 0-8133-6618-6 paperback  $25

This book has an impressive list of contributors like
Nancy
Folbre, Angela Davis, Stanley Arnovitz and is a good
resource
to understand and contest the neoliberal discourse
that
promotes markets and privatisation as the solution.

Two chapters listed below  deal with language and
media.

Language as a Public Good Under Threat : The Private
Ownership of Brand Name: Michael H.Goldhaber 
'Little seems as obvious as the thought that language
is
intrinsically a public good.Yet today more and more of
common meanings have to with what in fact are
trademarked
names, part of the private, permanent, intellectual
property
of large corporations, who are all the more eager to
protect their nww turf because it has become essential
to their
profitability.Inevitably, this threatens the common
ownership
of semantic space and therefore the possibility of
discourse
itself'.

Communication as a Public Good: Robert W.McChesney

'I chronicle the concentration of media ownership in
the
United States and the debilitating effects of this has
upon
the practice of journalism. If media are to provide
the basis
for a viable democracy, it will be necessary to enact
major
structural reform of the media industries'

James Boyle, Herbert Schiller and Dan Schiller are
some of
the academics who have voiced similar concerns in
books and
articles written by them.

k.ravi srinivas
http://in.geocities.com/ravisrinivasin/Ravi'sPage.html
http://in.geocities.com/ravisrinivasin/krspub.txt


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