Group single-handedly seeks to change Internet as we know it

Publishing and broadcasting account for more than a million American skilled jobs that could be enhanced by the global distribution power of the Internet. Unfortunately, Free Press has not offered ideas to generate market innovation in the American economy. Indeed, while entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley invest their time in developing new business models that will generate new media jobs and wealth, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press co-founder, John Nichols, say Congress should bring the same urgency to media “reform” (ie: bureaucratization and nationalization) as it accords to terrorism and financial collapse.

Indeed, the group is so out of step with the mainstream interests of most Americans, it is hard to fathom who might be listening or why any thoughtful policymaker should take any account at all of Free Press’ ideological hostility to business innovation, for-profit media companies and basic creative rights.

Searching for political comparisons to Free Press, draws me more than forty years back—ironically to a man of the free-market right, Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater, who proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice.” Free Press flips this radical libertarian mantra on its head and advocates “extremism in the pursuit of big government.”

Fortunately, America soundly rejected Goldwater’s uncompromisingly ideological extremism. Today, 40 years later, we should reject a similarly ideological Free Press’ fanaticism, which seeks to stifle innovation and wealth-creation.

The Internet is doing quite nicely, thank you very much, without Free Press’ prescription for the government’s heavy interventionist hand. Over the past 20 years, American politicians of both parties have pursued a sensible policy of minimizing government control and involvement in new media and online technology. Let’s keep it that way by rejecting the destructive “reforms” of men like Robert McChesney and John Nichols.

Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the author of the international hit “CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How the Internet is killing our culture.”