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CRITIQUE OF STATUS QUO--WHY THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO SUBSIDIZE FREE [INDPENDENT AND CRITICAL] PRESS AND MEDIA IN AMERICA

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Kevin Anthony Stoda
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At this point, Gonzalez shared an anecdote, which reveals how historically both radio and TV news programs have dependent on good, responsible free media to help them organize their own new programs for American citizens. This is very important because there are certainly other countries around the world and charge or tax both listeneners and advertisers for using national airwaves--i.e. the majority of European states have such taxes. [America has essential given away its airways since the 1930s for "peanuts", e.g. nominal leasing fees.]


Gonzalez shared, "Well, and even within the old media, newspapers are still the, as I say, the fountainhead of news. I remember once in 1985, I was at Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer. We were on strike, and we were on strike for five weeks. And all my friends in TV came to me and said, "When are you guys going to go back to work? Because without you, we don't know what to report." This is the TV news [today and historically].


Nichols agreed, "Hey, Juan, let me tell you how real that still is, and this is the scary part. There's a new Pew Center study out. They actually studied Baltimore. They looked at where all the original newspapers came from. They looked at all the independent media, all the online, everything. They found that 96 percent, almost 96 percent--there's a little debate about the precise figure, but well over 90--came from old media, largely from the daily newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. But here's the scary part: the footnote. The Baltimore Sun is producing 73 percent fewer original news stories today than twenty years ago. So new media is commenting on old media, but it's not filling the void of news. Old media is giving us a lot less."


"And so, you say, well, OK, come on, Pew Center folks, tell us, where is the news coming from? Who is generating it, if it's not--well, it's in there. Eighty-six percent of the stories came in the form of public relations, either from government or from corporations; only 14 percent produced by a reporter who went out and tried to speak truth to power. This is a scary zone we're entering." Nichols concluded.

Earlier, Gonzalez had noted, "Well, 2009 was one of the bleakest years in memory for the news industry. One count found that 142 daily and weekly newspapers closed down, nearly triple the number in 2008. Colorado's oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, shut its doors last February. The nation's oldest gay and lesbian newspaper, the Washington Blade, abruptly closed in November. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer scaled down to a web-only publication. The Christian Science Monitor became a weekly publication. Many other news organizations slashed the size of their newsrooms. An estimated 90,000 workers lost their jobs last year in the newspaper, magazine and book publishing industry."


McChesney had later noted, "The business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this country is disintegrating. There will be some advertising, but much less. There will be some circulation revenues, but much less. And if we're going to have journalism in this country, it's going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector. And we argue in the book, as you said, that we actually have a very rich tradition of this. The first hundred years of American history, the founders did not assume the market would give us journalism. There was no such assumption at all. They understood it was the first duty of a democratic state to see that a vibrant, independent, uncensored Fourth Estate exist."

What I couldn't tell from this whole educational (historically educational because of the details on the first six or seven generations of American history) report on media in America was why these journalists and media experts are still upbeat about their being a coming media revolt or revolution in the future, i.e. with federal government support (including financial support) for free speech and free media.


The only good news for me as a listener was to hear that the Obama administration is currently clearly in favor of continuing Net Neutrality, in order to keep big media from controlling the web unfairly as has occurred in small and large radio, newspaper, and TV markets in the last 4 or 5 decades.

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KEVIN STODA-has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades.--He sees himself as a peace educator and have been-- a promoter of good economic and social development--making-him an enemy of my homelands humongous DEFENSE SPENDING and its focus on using weapons to try and solve global (more...)
 

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