BOSTONSecond of two parts

BILL MOYERS believes that the corporate consolidation of American media has concentrated their power, and concentrated it in the wrong hands. Conglomerates use their newspapers and radio and television stations to effect public policies that further enrich them. What is more, he argues, they are right-wingers hornswoggling the American people out of their democracy!

The part about political influence isn’t new. At its conception, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had enormous amounts of money changing hands without regard to political party. Today, the loathsome congressman sitting on a telecommunications committee will be endorsed for life by the media in his district.

But in the true dialectic of the current decade, newspapers are suffering; local television news is shedding overpaid icons and replacing them with interchangeable nonentities; and network news has a fraction of its former ratings. The Internet, satellite radio, etc., represent democratization that challenges, or at least seems to, the effects of consolidation.

In 1964, CBS paid $11.2 million to buy an 80-percent interest (later a full interest) in the New York Yankees. Thoughtful people regarded this as a journalistic conflict and a dangerous consolidation of CBS’s power. It wasn’t the latter. In 1964, the Yankees had been to the World Series 14 times since 1949. In 1965, they dropped into to the second division (then so-called); and in 1966 to last place, behind the horrid pre-1967 Boston Red Sox.

Under CBS, the Yankees did not make the post-season in eight seasons, and in 1973 CBS’s founder, William Paley, sold the team at a loss (for $10 million) to Cleveland shipbuilder George Steinbrenner. In 1983, Paley lost most of his power at CBS after 45 years. (I leave it to the reader to look up what became of Mr. Steinbrenner.) The principle is that in business, as in baseball, acquisitions, like divestments, are capitalistic risks of which profits, not prophets, are the proper judge. In the next correction, what has made consolidations attractive may make media outlets available on the cheap.

Bill Moyers doesn’t understand that. He does understand that media are no longer of their community, they are of their market, and are no longer run by benevolent tyrants who supported charity and believed, with Ben Franklin, that making enough money was enough. He writes: “Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. . . . [C]orporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force and pollutes the political culture.”

The case in point that most offends Mr. Moyers was the lead-up to the war in Iraq. He accuses the Fourth Estate of … “colluding with . . . the neo-conservative arsonist.” I consider that historically fatuous. The press’s own soul-searching before the war in Iraq didn’t carry the day, nor should it have. But dissent was reported, and the media bore no resemblance to the Yellow Press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in instigating the Spanish-American War, in 1898.

Mr. Moyers fears that the media are democracy’s enemies’ “fifth column.” I fear that while some 14 percent of the American people read 20 books or more last year, and 6 percent read 50 or more, more than half of Americans did not read one. It is our public schools that compound social inequality by not educating students for citizenship in a democracy. To half a nation, Britney Spears’s kiss on Madonna’s lips is what the news is. The medium is incidental.

I also fear the decline of news-papers relative to other media. To local television news, an investigative report means knocking on a flummoxed pervert’s door unannounced, with cameras rolling. Network news is driven by its advertising. Both depend on depleted newspapers for reporting. Who will investigate anything if they disappear?

Bill Moyers is insightful to the point of genius. Where I think he is a muddled is his opinion that for-profit media are news-suppressing right-wing “arsonist[s].” By nature, the bottom line doesn’t have “wings,” and he ignores the left’s suppression of news, which often is motivated by ideology. Three examples:

• On no issue has the left been more wrong than the strong, popular, demonstrably moderate presidency of Alvaro Uribe of Colombia. But until the masterful rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 16 other forsaken souls, the FARC who had kidnapped them, and the dictator of Venezuela, had been favored in the news.

• If you are a university graduate student, try applying for a grant for a proposal to tweak some tiny aspect of the theory of global warming. You are sure to be blackballed.

• Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, I had a call from a Harvard graduate asking: “Do you think the Jews did it?” I knew that fantasy was out there, but the source was astonishing. Today, I understand that the old idea that Jews are the root of evil in the world has been returning. What in 1998 I heard from white supremacists, in 2008 I hear from college kids. This does not come from the right. It comes from the left, from universities and from the product of public schools that haven’t taught civics or citizenship for 45 years.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.