So here I am on a Saturday morning cleaning the office when I had one of those radio moments. I was forced to turn off the vacuum, and have a seat in the conference room. The interview spoke to a part of me that I only became aware of in the last couple years. Trey, nor I, have a journalism background, though we do have a disproportionate sense of justice and frustration with soft media and a sense that we don’t have all of the information needed to make good decisions when voting.
An idea that one would think I’d have learned by now was that the founding father’s believed that good public journalism was mandatory in a democracy, and this was the reason it was subsidized —just like education. Secondly, countries in the world who currently subsidize journalism have the best track records for freedom of press.
Consider, like an institute for higher learning, that there will be radical professors, but by helping to level the playing field and removing coverage of issues from the dollar driven powers that be, we support knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
When a candidate for public office is found to have a criminal background, we may ask ourselves why we didn’t know this sooner? Why didn’t the media alert us to this? We might ask, who is the media and what are their motivations?
We have created a venue, The Salida Citizen, where we now have a very small stream of income which we allocate to various causes and writers to promote community awareness, while also encouraging open idea exchange. To further the discussion about the value of local media, and what The Citizen means to us here in the Ark River Valley, listening to this excellent interview is a must.
I’d love to hear your comments. Please review, and comment below. -bd
A synopsis from Boswell’s:
Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone.
Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown.
In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation’s leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.
From Bob Edward’s site:
If the American people collectively will suffer when independent journalism disappears, should Federal money be spent to save it? John Nichols of The Nation magazine and media critic Robert McChesney lay out their multi-billion dollar plan to resuscitate the American press in their new book The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.
A review of the book from Powell’s on which the interview’s ideas are based
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