Can Journalists Help Themselves?

[Commentary] What is the responsibility of journalists to report on the radical changes that have so dramatically diminished our media? And to what extent, if any, should journalists be involved in working for a reinvigorated and reformed media ecosystem? If the media is increasingly under the control of special interests that are themselves a major part of the problem, we must find redress. The premise of the First Amendment is that informed citizens are necessary for self-government. Absent an uninhibited marketplace of ideas (which the Supreme Court has identified as a Constitutional necessity), our civic dialogue runs dry, problems go uncovered and therefore untended, and we make a mockery of the founding premise that an informed people can best determine their own destiny. So we must at least tee up these issues and talk, calmly and rationally, about what is to be done. I don’t pretend to have answers to all these questions, nor even to have raised more than a few of them, but I welcome and encourage a dialogue with interested readers as to their perspectives on the issues. I hope we can have that discussion now. We can still, late in the game though it is, reinvigorate the media foundations upon which successful democracy depends.

[Aug 12]