WE NEED TO BREAK UP MEDIA CONGLOMERATES
I cringe then violent scroll when I have to half-heartedly read an article in the Washington Post, N. Y. or L.A. Times, …or fight the urge to channel surf when I distrust-watch a segment on 60-Minutes, NPR, CNN, MSNBC…in order to be readily informed about what presented or mis-represented facts that I might agree or disagree about in a social media or offline discussion.
I cringe because even if the current article or segment is fair and balanced much of what our journalist report is not. They are literally responsible as a profession for the dastardly rise of Trump & Clinton and there’s no way except in hell that is their job. That alone is reason enough to dismantle the too big to be fair media conglomerates.
I’m not against journalist per se. Joseph Pulitzer was a racist and sexist ass hole (whose best journalist was a woman) yet from the view here he rightly remains the Gold Standard for journalism. Today maybe not even a single news outlet or journalist comes close to what Pulitzer accomplished when it came to rooting out police brutality and public corruption by pursuing the story until the guilty were fired or jailed. Today that honorable effort solely belongs to fugitive hackers and Whistle-blowers who leak what should have been reported in the mainstream media years ago, regardless of how the corrupt information was officially classified.
That’s if the journalism is adversarial and not cooperatively access based. A practice that guarantees all sorts of systemic discriminations of people and information based suppressions. As most alternative media consumers and others know disinformation abounds.
Undoubtedly, much of the problem lies with us the audience. We don’t champion and reward the journalists who are harassed or jailed by our government for simply reporting the news that ought to have been public in the first place. Same with whistle blowers. Instead as a time saver, the over worked or otherwise busy people among us tend to listen to the narratives in mainstream media, narratives that come directly from the government who regularly classifies truth as a private commodity.
There may be the occasional weak mention of an opposing narrative but the narrative of authority usually is the one that trends with the direct and steady help of mainstream media.
That’s why we need to break up the media corporations alongside banks. The minimum acceptance for a Pulitzer Prize or employment as a journalist or corporation should be Joseph Pulitzer himself, preferably without his, yours or my displays of ass hole-ism.
Surely mainstream media being bashed by alternative media on social media platforms is not nearly enough. That’s more like activist journalism and fact checking from mainstream sources that in many cases ought to themselves be regularly fact checked.
This ought to be a fact, the dismantling of deliberately unfair media systems will not bring unmanageable chaos for we already have that. Historically breakups result in a more balanced system than the one that was broken up due to its improper imbalances. Breakups (not reforms) also result in politicians being burdened by the planned inconvenience of being faced with a considerable amount of prohibitive time to re-legislate the return of monopolies that breakups tend to fix. In the meantime, many politicians are forced to continue to pretend to be bending to our will.
