ver before. The tight "pool" system imposed by the Pentagon on mass media in the Persian Gulf War broke down almost immediately once the fluid ground war began; television crews wandered out on their own to film Iraqi prisoners of war surrendering, and I listened as CNN reporter Charles Jaco huddled behind a wall and reported on firefights still going on in the darkened streets of Kuwait City. Throughout the war, Peter Arnett reported "live" from Baghdad; politicians complained, but his reports could still be heard by anyone who got CNN.
The media are freer in other ways as well. "Music Television," MTV, represents an entirely new form of television entertainment, undreamed of a few years ago. It has changed the nature of popular music, making visuals as important, if not more so, than music per se. Music enthusiasts and purists may protest, and point gleefully to embarrassments such as the Milli Vanilli flap. Modern dance enthusiasts, however, might fairly argue that videos give their preferred form a mass audience it never had before. In spite of the noisy posturings of Christian fundamentalist media critics and their allies, "moral" restraints on the mass media have generally continued to be rolled back. Just last night, for the first time, I heard the word "penis" on a widely available TV ("Live at the Improv" on the Arts and Entertainment Network, part of "expanded basic cable" service on my local cable TV outlet). Not a great moment in the history of free expression, but certainly greater freedom for one comedian to express herself. The total number of media outlets is truly enormous:
7,000 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio
and 1,000 television stations, 2,500 book publishers,
Bagdikian, 1990: xix
In other respects, however, "freedom of the press" is open to question as applied to today's mass media. "The media" are themselves part of...