Causes include technology, working staff-slashes, owner greed and stock value.
(EUGENE, Ore.) - Already this is a tipping-point primary-election, readying for even more historic/change-producing onslaught vs Washington-ways impacting our democracy.
NOW surfaced in many ways, for more millions of Americans than ever before, is deep, desperate, enduring damage-done to our governance system.
Our vaunted republic-democracy has been under relentless neocon attack ever since Reagan, with Bush I and Bush II as mutual major perpetrators.
Corporate concentration of dollar-power supporting neocon impacts on legislation, deregulation, privatization and especially globalization; further “empowered by radical tax favoritism for a variety of payer-levels”; has provided “huge momentum for major changes” in our once-world/famed “free press” and supporting media.
Given probing, thorough coverage, solid content and even the smallest cogitation, provided by an intensely-involved “free press”, none of that could or would have happened.
One politician-terrifying tool has been the “corporate campaign contribution” proffered provisionally, with production definitely involved.
Now that white/enveloped largess has relentlessly found its way into every level of our democracy from small-town politics to the very top.
Congress itself is victimized, too --outnumbered 100-to-1 by lobbyists-- aided and abetted by ongoing press-failure to report in depth, detail and distressing consequence, for “true edification of all the people.”
We have allowed attacks to continue despite major early-warning signs, symptoms and significant situations; while MainSttreamMedia consistently fails to find courage and conviction to provide deep, probing, first-quality coverage to carry on continuously its demanded Constitutional role: To tell truth to power, and make sure millions of us were reading and hearing and seeing what it took to do that job.
Making citizens fully aware of essential issues and needed decisions is the driving motivation which caused the Founding Fathers to set us up with three components --Legislative, Executive, Judicial-- each checking and cooperating to provide, protect, preserve and perfect what our Constitution guarantees: ”equality under law”.
They never envisioned the destroying concept of “the unitary executive” substituting one-man royal-rule over the whole nation. Yet this massive bludgeon remains Unexamined, poorly-re ported, little understood even today, as heavy-attack on Constitutional principles.
Functions-and-processes for each component, “perfected” from protracted, intense, effective study of all possible models, modes, methods --and many philosophies-- stood the onslaught of terrible times and the test of decisions-demanded, for more than 200 years.
Why would we ever abandon Constitutional conformity which provides, protects, and preserves --if we but protect the Constitution itself?
The Founders and their following leaders built-in for best-possible prevention the precise and protected role assigned the “free press”: To inform the people about what the powerful were sure to project and promise and, perhaps, even provide; given essential understanding by responsible citizens making sure it happens.
Racism, sexism, ridiculous remarks, no matter from whom, when and why, should not claim preference in coverage and content over major issues of economic, social and cultural significance. Those now, surely, demand full attention and unflinching examination from our truly-free press; sharing fact and findings with the frustrated public seeking to understand decisions they know are demanded.
The First Amendment was their final gift to their new nation, providing protection and potent powers envisaged as permanently-protective process; to protocol their new invention --a true people’s democracy.
Devolution, denigration, close-to-collapse current state of the MainStream Media has led on inexcusably, irresponsibly, to neocon nemesis now obvious in our beautiful Capital.
Would we have allowed the “preemptive” attack sold to us as truth, IF we had been informed of the full, potent, permeating facts-available about he Iraq war-plan?
That could and should never have occurred --if the heavily-corporatized MainStreamMedia had been doing its job properly, preventibly, and potently --as provided by the Constitutional role protected for the press.
More recently came the pundit-parade, providing portentous political provender: Endless repetition, of radical words by a black preacher, proving only that conviction by association can be politically providential --but remains highly non-Constitutional-- even when endlessly replayed, refurbished and reiterated.
That’s a reflection of the flat-out begiining-finale collapse of the so-called “MainStreamMedia”, as we’ve seen our vaunted-and famied Constitutionally-protected “free press” system distorted, then perverted, by corporatization, consolidation, and inevitable consequences: Reportorial and investigative professional/staff slashes; deep cutbacks in production, distribution, area penetration, discarding circulation areas for costs and unprofitability; close connection to controlled customer-groups, chosen for dollar- response to advertising; and complete surrender to profit-uber-alles as the major driving principle for every now-corporatized-business move possible within “the new business model”.
That “new model” is the transition to nearly-universal use of new technologies for production and new circulation patterns.
That demands new approaches to advertising and support; excruciating strictures, new structures and sustaining situations, still under radical development, test and installation.
Yet that is the only possible future for our “free press”. If done rapidly, right, reliably, really-universally, it may well be not only the salvation technique for “the daily news” (without paper !) but also for our neocon-attacked, now-damaged democracy itself.
Oregonians have been fortunate under impacts of the “free press” degeneration felt so heavily nationally in the past thirty years, demonstrated so painfully by MainStreamMedia, so far-- and in this turning-point run/up to the national election already shaping the early 21st Century for every American life.
Our daily newspapers, primarily in smaller towns and cities remain family-owned/and/controlled; and our major-city daily is noted for its basically independent leadership reflected quite recently by receipt of that powerful appreciation --”the Pulitzer”.
About some others, perhaps the less-said the better. Gannett’s driving major-domo Allen Neuharth and his extremely competitive acquisition-activities, now universally recognized as among the major reflections-of-trend, are also a major cause of the demand for “the new model” now widely seen as the invasion of the corporateers nationally.
The overweening facts of this entire developmental trend and its consequences are reflected neatly and honestly from the Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism, described in detail by UO J-School Dean Jim Gleason, in an Op Ed carried in prime location by the Register-Guard, headed “Awards recognize journalists who did the right thing”.
Gleason makes doubly sure his audience is supplied the essential “surround” --background demanded for full story-understanding-- before he fills in “the big picture” --now causing seismic perturbations in every media segment and once-massive staff, for each and every one of all the mainstream media “historic institutions”.
His explanation of the strong trends begins: “These are challenging times for the news organizations that have defined journalism in the United States for more than a century and for the journalists who work in what we now call the ‘mainstream media’.”
Then “...an advertising-based revenue model has supported journalism --from the great to the mediocre-- and the development of the ethical standards that inform and guide working journalists”, Dean Gleason states.
But then Dean Gleason continues with the bad news forced upon us all --to the near-fatal damage of our democracy-- by the inevitable developments driven by “digital technologies, a changing advertising market, and a host of other factors... changing the practice of journalism at a mind-spinning pace.”
It is well worth noting that one of the three award-winners described by Dean Gleason is a web-based alternative weekly, and a second is a family owned daily in Spokane.
But perhaps the premier award-winner, for our information here while reviewing the current-and-coming collapse of MainStreamMedia, is the Collegiate winner, a young lady who relentlessly pursued and finally “broke the story” --concerning the implication of suppression of newspapers with an unflattering editorial-- by the president of her community college, clearly controlling her own education.
That, for me, is proof that there will remain those who know and understand precisely why and how the “freedom of the press” is so essential an element in any possible remediation and longtime continuance of our democracy.
Without them and their effort, our future is even more problematical than YOU had already felt it was surely becoming, these beginning days in our 21st Century.
Reader’s Note:Quotes are condensed, shortened, summarized; verbatim record available on request to Editor with ID. Key documentation for this Op Ed numbers over 40 items, too long for inclusion, available as for quotes.
Major items consulted include: “Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of America's
Newspapers:; James D. Squires; TIMES Books, 1993 (!); ISBN
0-8129-2101-1/ “The Chain Gang: One Newspaper versus the Gannett Empire”; Richard McCord; ISBN 0-8262-1375-8. “Obama - Let’s Challenge the Murdochization of Our Media”; NATION Magazine; thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/322037. ‘Let’s Be Serious”; Bob Herbert; http"//www.nytimes.com/2007/05//20/opinion/20/herbert.html?_r=1&t... “The Old Titans All Collapsed; Is the U.S. Next ?”; Kevin Phillips; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/200...
Op Ed: MainStreamMediaSalem-News.com