How Journalism Has Failed the Average U.S. Citizen

Those of us concerned about a sustainable approach to life on planet Earth should be very concerned about the wholesale decay in the way our citizenry gets its news and, consequently, how most of us form our beliefs about the world around us. In particular, we need to ask ourselves about the results of the concentration of over 90% of the news media in the hands of five or six multinational corporations like GE and Viacom, which, summarized, are as follows:

• News that is essentially entertainment, or, at best, a sensationalized quest for ratings, designed to increase the value for advertisers, at the expense of substantive content

• Virtually no investment in investigative journalism that might provide dissenting viewpoints to what these institutions want us to know

• Journalism, sometimes called “the fourth estate” for its use in providing a voice for the “little guy,” that goes out of its way to avoid portraying the lower class / working poor as real people with admirable human values

At the same time, we have mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and an ever-expanding use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who call attention to government wrongdoing. (As much as I approve of most of what’s happened in the Obama administration, it’s been a total nightmare in this area.)

In any case, here’s Chris Hedges speaking with Tavis Smiley on the latter’s public PBS show.