Making Public Media, as Digital Destiny

Do experiments in new kinds of public media matter? Yes, according to Jeff Chester, the indefatigable dynamo who heads the Center for Digital Democracy (http://www.democraticmedia.org/). He has just issued a book-length manifesto for media reform, Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy (The New Press). He takes on the powers that be in big media and government, and ends with a clarion call not only for media policy activism but for energetic and creative public media experiments on the broadband frontier: "As we look back a few years from now, much of our digital destiny may have been determined by how we have knitted together new projects that enhance civic discourse throughout what will be a ubiquitous electronic media system."