We live in a world of unprecedented media abundance, what once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you'd think. But today's media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left.

Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, contend that real media choices remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings—and democracy, community itself, loses out.

But both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong.

A MEDIA EXPLOSION

On the face of it, the scarcity critics have a tough case to make. According to FCC data and various private reports, America boasts about 13,000 radio stations today, nearly double the number in 1970. Satellite radio—an industry that didn't even exist before 2001—claimed roughly 13 million subscribers by 2007. Eighty-six percent of households subscribe to cable or satellite TV, receiving an average of 102 channels. There were 18,267 magazines produced in 2005, up from 14,302 in 1993. The only declining media sector is the newspaper business.

Throw the Internet into the mix, and you get dizzy. The Internet Systems Consortium reports that the number of Internet host computers—computers or servers that allow people to post content on the Web—has grown to roughly 400 million. At the beginning of 2007, the blog-tracking service Technorati counted more than 63 million blogs, with more than 175,000 new ones created daily.

GRIP OF MEDIA BARONS?

But the scarcity critics have a rejoinder: The apparent diversity isn't real because a handful of media barons control most of it. Even the Internet isn't what it's cracked up to be. The Consumer Federation of America's Mark Cooper lambastes the Internet for failing to serve "the public interest," for being too commercial, for hurting deliberative democracy and for failing to enhance citizens' ability "to define themselves and their place in everyday life." Who knew the Internet was so harmful to modern society?

In fact, a 2002 FCC survey of 10 media markets—from the largest (New York City) to the smallest (Altoona, Pa.)—showed that each had more outlets and owners in 2000 than in 1960. Nor do Americans lack a rich variety of "voices" in the media. Each new commercial media outlet must provide at least something slightly different from its rivals. If every book, magazine, TV channel, radio program and Web site really said the same thing, nobody would bother consuming any more than one or two of them.

The liberal scarcity worrywarts ignore a recent history in which the United States has become as information-rich as any society in history.

MORE INFORMATION IS LESS?

But this is where a second group of leftist media critics enters the picture: They warn about the destructive consequences of all this information.

"What information consumes is rather obvious—the attention of its recipients," Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon remarked in 1971. "Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources."

Thirty-six years later, confronting a "wealth of information" Simon could never have imagined, a growing group of left-wing critics warns about its destructive consequences. Titles of recent books by Todd Gitlin and Barry Schwartz—Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives and The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less—capture the anxiety felt by these opponents of media multiplicity. It's just too much.

Yet even if one concedes the number of media choices can be daunting, says Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, the market is responding. In his 2006 best seller The Long Tail, Anderson celebrates the explosion of information-sorting tools that enable us to take full advantage of the media cornucopia. Google, Netflix, Amazon.com, iTunes, or, for political information, Huffington Post and RealClearPolitics are just a few examples.

But according to one of the most influential abundance-is-bad media critics, liberal law Professor Cass Sunstein, Anderson's filters make things worse. Sunstein says all this filtering causes extreme social fragmentation, isolation and alienation, and could lead to political extremism. Schwartz echoes the point, fearing the anti-social effects of a media offering "choice without boundaries." Similarly, Democratic media adviser Bill Carrick complained to the Washington Post that "we're losing the universal campfire."

LEFTIST ELITISM AT WORK

What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism is elitism. Media abundance has meant more room for right-of-center viewpoints that, while popular with many Americans, the critics find unacceptable. The fact that Bill O'Reilly gets better ratings than Bill Moyers perturbs liberals to no end. It's just not fair!

Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction. Kucinich has introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that's defined. A new Fairness Doctrine would affect most directly opinion-based talk radio, a medium dominated by conservatives. If a station wanted to run Rush Limbaugh's show under such a regime, they might have to broadcast a left-wing alternative, too, even if it had poor ratings, which generally has been the case with liberal talk.

Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could even impose "electronic sidewalks" on partisan Web sites, forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be daunting, even if it somehow proved constitutional.

CHOICE MEANS INEQUALITY

That leftist critics start sounding so authoritarian is no surprise. In a media cornucopia, freedom of choice inevitably yields inequality. When Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us it's all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses.

In reality, it's just the result of consumer choice.

Adam D. Thierer is a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation.