| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America. By Mark Lloyd. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. x, 338 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03104-5. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07342-7.)
"The ongoing American experiment in democracy is failing," Mark Lloyd argues in Prologue to a Farce, because federal communication policy has allowed our media to become dominated by a handful of corporations concerned more with profits than the public interest (p. 11). Lloyd, a lawyer and journalist, traces the historical relationship between communication, public policy, and democracy in the United States from the early republic to the present, offering an impassioned and reasoned analysis of how our current public sphere is disturbingly different from the one the founders envisioned.	1
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 presents Lloyd's theoretical argument about the role of communication policy in a democracy, drawing heavily from James Madison, from whom the book's title is taken. One of Madison's goals, Lloyd asserts, was to promote a vigorous circulation of public information, and in supporting the post office, Madison used the federal government to subsidize the affordable distribution of printed materials throughout the country. A democracy, Madison believed, required an informed citizenry, which in turn demanded a communication policy that made as much information available to that citizenry as possible.	. . .

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