David Neiwert, a local author who specializes in investigating hate crimes and other examples of rabid nonsense, has issued a “Media Revolt Manifesto.”
Like many of us, Neiwert’s mad as hell at the GOP cheerleading and pundit-blather that passes for “news” in today’s US mainstream media. Thankfully, he wants us to get beyond just complaining and protesting about it.
He sees rescuing US journalism as a multi-faceted, multi-fronted task. At the center of this new media paradigm will be the so-called “new media”:
“Blogs… can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.
Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground — without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.”
Of course, some of Neiwert’s goals are easier to accomplish than others.
He’d like to see more websites that don’t just rehash or comment upon stories from the traditional media. He’d even like to see “the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly.” But he acknowledges the difficulty of funding original reporting, particularly on the web (Salon’s bleeding red ink, and Slate survives as a Bill Gates vanity project).
So he also calls for a mass groundswell of support for breaking up the media conglomerates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and otherwise reshaping the media we’ve already got from “a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity” into something that actually serves the needs of an active democracy.
“I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach,” Neiwert says. Can it happen? Only if we all, those of you who read news and those of us who write it, do our part to help make it happen.
