And corporate media don't really care about covering real issues that impact the public, like climate change or net neutrality, let alone covering those issues honestly or objectively. The corporate media only care about the bottom line, about ratings and about getting more money from their advertisers.
The fact is, the media didn't really create Trump.
The media have just been waiting for a candidate like Trump to come along ever since Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and then Bill Clinton further cemented media consolidation with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In a speech at Syracuse University, President Obama rightfully pushed back against the profit-centric mentality of the media and the attitudes of network executives like Les Moonves.
The reality is the corporate media have proven that when left to their own devices, they value corporate responsibility to shareholders higher than social responsibility to inform the electorate about controversial issues of public importance.
Without the Fairness Doctrine and a roll-back of the ownership rules in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, media companies have no reason to act in the public interest, and no reason to cover inform people about issues of public importance like climate change, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, net neutrality or runaway income inequality.
There's a reason the framers of the Constitution wrote the press into the First Amendment: Democracy can't thrive without an informed electorate.
It's time to democratize the media, and that means it's time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and to reinstate media ownership rules so a small handful of wealthy right-wingers no longer dictate our daily media diet.
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