Hold The Hallelujahs

I no longer believe, and haven’t for years, that our current commercialized and consolidated media is capable of curing its own ills. I applaud what remains of community and independent media. These folks struggle mightily to maintain sufficient resources needed to do their jobs, but it becomes more difficult each year as newspapers are bought up by huge non-community chains, local stations go off the air, newsrooms are shuttered, reporters are fired en masse, and local, regional, and statehouse coverage diminishes. It’s not working; something else is needed. There is no silver bullet solution to repair our media ecosystem. But part of the answer must be significantly increased support for public media, non-profits, and start-ups. Compared to other advanced nations, the United States spent only a pittance on public broadcasting. We need to catch up and, given our size and population, go beyond what even those nations are spending. And we need to provide significantly more support for not just national news and information like PBS and NPR, but on local and community news and information. Then we need to repair commercial media like radio and TV, bringing back Federal Communications Commission regulatory oversight that was built up over the years but eliminated by recent GOP-majority FCCs. Rules and regulations limiting mergers and acquisitions, requiring diversity of viewpoint and diversity of ownership, coverage of local news like mayors’ offices, courts, school boards, environmental challenges, limits on advertising, some semblance of balance in the presentation of viewpoints, and programs for children. While cable has been treated differently from radio and television, it is time to bring some public interest oversight here, too. Yes, the main focus these days seems to be on what to do about the internet. Yet as former President Barack Obama and many others have observed, much of the mis- and dis-information on social media originates on traditional media platforms.