As journalism goes, so goes democracy

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 08 June 2008 12:28PM CST

Section: Media

National Conference for Media Reform 2008That’s what Bill Moyers said in the middle of his plenary address at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis yesterday morning.

Last evening I twittered that there wasn’t much worth writing about coming out of the conference. In reviewing my notes from the Moyers plenary, I find I was at least partially wrong.

Drawing a parallel between the US media system and his son’s ordeal with addiction, Moyers began by stating that nothing is ever broken that can’t be fixed if enough people are committed.

And the US media system is indeed broken. Dominant media consolidation is a “corrosive social force,” said Moyers.

Moyers sees a large part of the brokenness lying solely with corporate media, what he refers to as the dominant media. Paraphrasing Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, Moyers said,

“... what we need to know to make democracy work for all Americans is compromised by media institutions deeply embedded in the power structures of society. Whether employing professional journalists trained at prestigious universities or polemicists whose ignorance, arrogance, and malevolence serve partisan agendas, our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders….”

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