Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
So, how should America deal with media that purports to be "news" but, in fact, is offering a healthy serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies? if you have any additional ideas, what are they?
Can a nation survive as a democratic republic without an honest and trusted news ecosystem? Is it an actual fact that truthful and reliable news "- combined with the kind of cultural trust people have in both government and each other as the result of a shared reality "- are both historic and necessary preconditions for a democracy to work at all?
Thomas Jefferson once famously said that if he was given the ultimatum of choosing to live in a functioning nation without newspapers or a place with newspapers but no national government, he'd surely choose the latter.
It was a statement of his generation's love of newspapers, literature, and free speech far more than the anti-government spin that rightwingers try for when quoting the author of the Declaration of Independence. No republic in the history of the world had ever survived without an informed, participating electorate, and this nation's Founders knew it.
This truth was echoed two generations later when the young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, spent half a year traveling America and wrote one of the entire century's best-selling books, Democracy in America, published in 1833.
Astonished, he repeatedly mentions in the book how blown away he is that the dirt-poorest farmer or remote-hollow hillbilly is as literate and enthusiastic about discussing current world events and politics as an upper-class resident of Paris.
Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that our vibrant, free, trusted press was the one thing that set America apart so democracy could work here; it was so critical, he believed, that he was openly skeptical there were enough literate people or a free enough press in France to be able to safely give up the monarchy and imitate America.
Now, it seems, consolidation and the pouring of billions of dollars by conservative billionaires into our media infrastructure has produced a crisis in America's democracy.
It's frightening people, and they're looking for solutions.
The Pew Research Center published a surprising new study this week showing that fully 48 percent of Americans "say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content-- This is up almost 10 percent from just four years ago.
Similarly, the percentage of Americans, Pew notes, "who say freedom of information should be protected "- even if it means some misinformation is published online "- has decreased from 58% to 50%."
Depending on the outlet, news is often skewed (either by omission of stories or simply presenting partial information) even on so-called "mainstream media"; naked lies told by politicians are only rarely called out; and political advertising today is more often deceptive than straightforward.
And Americans know it, and are sick of it.
A Pew study from last November found that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe they've seen news media slant stories to favor or disadvantage one political party or point of view. Three-out-of-five people said this was causing a "great deal" of confusion about issues related, for example, to the last presidential election.
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