OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Good News, Bad News

"What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate was not "don't do it, but cover it up more effectively.' They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal."

Yet, while the American Right took away that lesson from Watergate "" and acted on it "" the American Left grew complacent, apparently expecting that the mainstream U.S. news media would continue keeping a watchful eye on government wrongdoing and that liberal money could go elsewhere.

So, as the Right was building a powerful nationwide media apparatus--influencing Americans from all regions and all walks of life--the Left was operating under the slogan, "think globally, act locally" and was focused on "grassroots organizing" or trying to cope with problems that the Right's policies exacerbated, like feeding the swelling ranks of homeless and hungry.

For some reason that I never understood, what little media the American Left had was concentrated in San Francisco, a pleasant place to live but one of the least consequential news centers among major American cities. In short, on the Left, there was a lack of seriousness regarding this emerging media crisis.

Getting It

Starting in the early 1990s, I began approaching wealthy liberals and left-of-center foundations to tell them about the dangerous media trends that I was witnessing. I would often get back blank stares. One foundation executive laughed and told me, "we don't do media."

Nevertheless, in 1995, I thought that perhaps the best way to proceed was to follow the old journalism maxim, "show, don't tell." So, I cashed out my Newsweek retirement account and--with the help of my oldest son, Sam--launched the Web site, Consortiumnews.com.

I hoped that once we showed how much quality journalism could be produced and disseminated over the Internet at a very low cost, some potential funders would get off the sidelines and into the game. But they didn't.

Then, after the right-wing-media-driven Clinton impeachment mess, I again thought that more people would grasp the importance of media. But again, I was wrong.

After the fiasco of Election 2000--when Al Gore was mocked regularly by the right-wing and mainstream media, which then accepted (or cheered) George W. Bush's theft of the White House--I again trusted that the need for honest media would become obvious. I was wrong once more.

Then came the news media's complicity in the WMD lies and the Iraq invasion, followed by the right-wing "swift-boating" of John Kerry and Bush's second term. Surely, the large funders finally would understand the urgency of building honest media outlets and supporting honest journalism.

That was when I wrote the 2005 article, which had a hopeful--but skeptical--tone to it. I wrote:

"When asked about media these days, well-placed liberals will say, 'now we get it.' But there has yet to be much follow-through, as the need to establish independent media outlets remains mostly an afterthought among progressive funders."

Remarkably, four more years later, even as right-wing and mainstream news outlets are ganging up on President Barack Obama--much like they did on President Bill Clinton--the progressive funders continue to grossly underfund media outlets.

Their hope seems to remain that the problem will somehow solve itself, that some metaphorical pendulum will swing, that some regulation might do the trick. But all that is "magic thinking," unrealistically trusting that some supernatural intervention will happen before it's too late.

The truth is that there is no answer other than doing the hard work and investing some serious money. Until liberal funders realize that they must engage fully in what the Right likes to call the "war of ideas," there will be many more casualties among those who tried to do the right thing and were taken down for lack of resources.

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