August 4 – The Time Warner and CBS Spat Over How Much to Gouge the Public; Are We Living in “1984”?; The U.K. Guardian and the Snowden-Wikileaks Affair

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Part 1	We begin with the spat between Time Warner and CBS Viacom and look into the extraordinary arrogance of these giant multi-billion dollar corporations who are punishing the consumer they clearly don’t care about while they play chicken with each other over how much they can gouge the public. Derek Turner, a research and policy analyst at Free Press and author of “Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age” joins us to discuss the absence of competition and choice in the market place the uselessness of the FCC and the Congress as advocates for American citizens and consumers.
Part 2	Then we examine the extent to which today we are living in George Orwell’s classic novel “1984”. Lewis Beale, who writes on culture and film for the Los Angeles Times and Newsday joins us to discuss his article at CNN “We’re Living ‘1984’ Today”, and the similarities between the contemporary American surveillance state with the novel’s “doublethink”, “newspeak” and “endless war” of the dystopian future Orwell predicted in 1948.
Part 3	Then finally one of the world’s leading analysts of popular culture and media, Toby Miller, joins us in the studio. He is the Chair of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside and has just returned from teaching at the City University of London. We discuss the role of the U.K. Guardian in the Snowden-Wikileaks affair and how the American surveillance state is viewed from abroad.