Tune in for 'The Media Democracy Blues' hosted by Roger Smith during Crazy Words, Crazy Tune. This special two-hour interview with the eloquent media scholar and historian Victor Pickard will air on Friday, October 3, from 12-2pm in the regular time slot of “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune.”Victor Pickard teaches mass communication and political economy at the Annenberg School at U Penn. His first major book, America’s Battle for Media Democracy (2015), concentrates on the key decisions made in the 1940s that set in stone the foundations of the commercial, corporate-dominated media system that continues to bedevil us today. Pickard is also the current board chair of the media policy reform group Free Press, which was co-founded by his mentor, Robert W. McChesney. America’s Battle for Media Democracy makes a great bookend to McChesney’s first book, which covers the spirited radio reform movement of the 1920s and ‘30s that tried and failed to secure a non-commercial space for labor and civic groups on the airwaves.