These critics can be antidemocratic in their dismissal of popular taste, puritanical in their attempts to link media concentration to the increases of sex and violence in the media, narrow in their own conception of what constitutes diversity, shortsighted in their grasp of the expanded media environment. Powell brags about going home to watch Cartoon Network with his kids; these guys brag that they don't even own a television. They almost certainly exaggerate the degree of uniformity within corporate media, seeing media conglomerates as well oiled machines that always pursue and achieve their common interests rather than dysfunctional families that cannot seem to find ways to collaborate across media sectors.

Yet, they may also be substantively right in their assertion that deregulation will result in a dangerous level of media concentration. When restrictions on the ownership of radio stations were lifted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, global communications giant Clear Channel gobbled up stations nationwide. Before deregulation, they owned 40 stations. Today, they own 1,225. And by all reports, Clear Channel has narrowed the range of music and rigidified the format at every station they took over. Even with current ownership restrictions, media concentration is occurring at an alarming rate.  Three-quarters of all cable networks are owned by six corporate entities, four of which are major television networks. The major broadcast networks own outright 3/4 of all the programming they air. Even many free-market Republicans-conservative columnist William Safire and Republican Senator John McCain for example-are staggered by the rate of media concentration and reluctant to abandon regulatory tools that might contain it.

Powell is right that new media is producing enormous diversity, albeit at the fringes, and Copps is right that media concentration is resulting in a narrowing of diversity at the center. Contemporary media culture is anything but a "monoculture," yet that doesn't mean that media concentration can be treated with indifference.

For the moment, let's suppose that Powell is right, that diversity is out there, somewhere, in the much more complex media landscape that has emerged over the past two decades. Let us also assume that the diversity of the Internet will continue to expand, rather than contract, which seems to be happening right now. Then the issue shifts from one of diversity to one of access. 

Powell is proposing a compensatory model: even if deregulation results in a concentration of ownership over broadcast media, consumers will be able to locate content which more fully serves their needs through cable or the Internet. Here, Powell echoes the let them eat cable' model of free-market ideologue George Gilder who contrasts the "tyranny" of centralized broadcasting and its lowest-common-denominator content, with "first choice" media like the Internet, where different niche groups receive content that more perfectly reflects their tastes and interests. The smaller the niche market, the greater the responsiveness of content providers to minority tastes. What's wrong with this picture?