Sure.
The four that I lay out are, first, those who think that the sky is falling continuously, the Cassandras, who say that media concentration is bad, it's going from bad to worse, and democracy is on edge basically forever. That has been going on since I started studying, so that's 35 years.
There are the Cassandras, and then there are the others, the ostriches, the ones who think things are better than ever. It's all sunny skies, and how could we ever have anything better than what we have today? We live in an environment of information abundance, they say, and people who are thinking about media concentration in the age of Internet are a bunch of dinosaurs.
We have the Cassandras and the ostriches, and then we have the number-grinders, those who try to bury their heads in a mountain of data to try to establish a straight-line connection between who owns the media and a reflection of political ideology or bias in the output. You can't do that. You can't have single causal relationships in a complex institutional environment like this. That's a fool's errand. The best research in this country by Colette Brin, Soderlund, and Hildebrandt comes to the same conclusion that other good researchers around the world have reached, which is that the evidence is mixed and inconclusive when you try to look at this kind of thing.
Then there's a fourth perspective, which tries to cobble together the good things from other places, and it's my perspective, I suppose. I draw on some others that I've learned from over the years. This perspective is that societies from time immemorial have oscillated between openings in communication and closures in communication, and it's hubristic to think of our times as somehow exceptional and that the forces of consolidation, concentration, and control have somehow vanished from the scene as if they're an extinct species. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that we need to take very strong preventive measures to ensure we have all the conditions possible that are most likely to lead to the most democratic media system possible.
That means adopting strong structural measures, including preventing media concentration, making sure the pipes are open and act as carriers rather than editors, and making sure we have adequate resources. That is most likely to produce a media environment that is conducive to a democratic system. We should minimize, therefore, any kind of content regulation or behavioural regulation.