QUIZ # 2 March 14 (short essay)  Please see Chapter Five 'The Market' from The Problem of the Media in which McChesney continues to critique the nature of media ownership in the United States and further contends that media oligopoly is anti-democratic and that excessive media control over culture undermines the integrity of society as a whole, i.e. the logic of the media market "compels firms to give us plenty of what we don't want, whether we like it or not." p.176 

Based upon this chapter as well as your own views, do you believe that "creative talent" is indeed being undermined because of "lowest common denominator programming ?" p.194   Is our culture made up of  "the cheap and the imitative ?" p.195 or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, ". . . the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past."  Rather than creative production, are we constantly sold creative reproduction ?  Is Robert Pitman, who turned the music industry's free promotion videos into MTV, right when he says, "what entertains the masses is not so much originality as adroit repackaging of the familiar."  Is, in your opinion, the argument that media corporations are only 'giving the people what they want' a valid one ?  Please discuss.