Knight: Access to News Wildly Unequal in US

Saving journalism and achieving digital democracy might seem like a pretty tall order. But that is the task of a high-powered commission that says, in a report being released today, that the country's growing hunger for information is "being met unequally, community by community." The elaborately named Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy raises the specter of two Americas -- one wired, the other not so much. Citing estimates that more than one-third of the country has no broadband connection to the Internet, "that's a hell of a lot of Americans who don't have access to the way we're communicating," says Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation, which commissioned the year-long study with the Aspen Institute. "When an urban kid who wants a job at McDonald's or Wal-Mart has to apply online, if you don't have digital access, you can't apply." Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and a former Time managing editor, says the report's focus is "not how do you save dying metropolitan newspapers. There's a wariness to assume that the old institutions should be preserved just for their own sake." He says the challenge is "coming up with a way that people who provide good and relevant information can pay their mortgage and put food on their table." The Knight study is critical of public broadcasting, saying it needs to become "more local, more inclusive and more interactive." To accomplish this, "the government as well as private sector donors should condition their support of public media on its reform." What these operations need to do, Ibargüen said, "is figure out how you include the public in the broadcasting. They really do come out of the tradition of I write, you read."