blatham wrote:tinygiraffe wrote:uh? i don't presume to know what you presume i have in mind... what i was thinking was that people would be better equipped to get their own stories if they had pro training. i wasn't suggesting they stay on, tethered to a news agency.
and some indy journalists do have pro training. i was talking about having it for a larger more complete range of people.
It's a tough problem. I doubt any proposed remedy would be very effective so long as the media to which most people in the US attend remains in the hands of a handful of large corporate entities. Therefore, my first move would be to forward legislation regulating monopolization of information sources.
There also seems to be a clear deficiency in educational curricula/priorities which leaves so many americans poorly informed not only as regards the world outside their borders but also as regards their own history and their understandings of the principles which underly a functioning constitutional democracy. That's a generalization, obviously, and does not apply to all americans but it has broad application and seems to me to put the system, as the founders conceived it, in serious jeopardy.
Just as one quick example, we've seen a notion growing quite uniquely on the right side of the american spectrum that an independent media is neither possible nor even necessarily desireable. Not possible because everyone is biased and not desireable because external threats (and internal threats) are so serious and potentially insidious that the state must oversee what can be openly discussed. In fact, those notions are growing because they have been cultivated and disseminated via effective marketing campaigns for a few decades now. It's difficult to imagine a more fertile environment for authoritarian control to expand.
The last thing that should be done is to increase control by federal government bureacracy over information flow and information sources. The federal bureacracy is the worst kind of monopoly or oligarky in that it doesn't have to compete for its power with anything inside the country governed. It's much better to have private corporations competing for more profit than such bureacracies being granted more power.
We in the US already have ample evidence of the deterioration of quality and the increase in cost of most anything federal bureaucracy controls when such control is not expressly granted to the federal government by our Constitution.
The best and most obvious example of that deterioration in quality and increase in cost, is our public educational system. The federal government is not granted the power to govern our public education system. That power belongs to the states or their school districts, as the individual state constitutions specify. When the federal government began to usurp that power back in the late 1960s, our public education system began its deterioration and its increasing cost. That deterioration and increasing cost accelerated each time the federal government usurped more such power over our public educational sytem.
Increasingly, now the emphasis of our public education is on teaching students
what to care about without teaching them
how to analyze and decide for themselves what it is that deserves their caring.
Another example of giving federal bureaucracy powers it ought not have is our campaign finance law. That law has succeeded only in reducing and not expanding the influence of the voters over our elected and appointed officials.
So far that which determines what is presented by our radio and TV media is profit and not the power of those elected or appointed seeking to get themselves re-elected or re-appointed.
