Repeat

Sorry for the repost. This is a record of another Truthout comment. They seem to be censoring me...

Truthout may be censoring my comments. I wrote this in response to another post but much of it is relevant here - terms have been adjusted to reflect this. It has been on 'pending' status for close to three business hours at this point... 

The media is not fully at fault here. Nor, for that matter, is fault at the foot of the First Amendment. The problem is the concentration of power. Concentration of economic power => concentration of political power => continuous feedback to increase power concentration (greater media consolidation) => fewer media voices/viewpoints. This is the step wise consequence of the elite doing everything they can to increase their power. In 'open' economies and countries, the elite are the capitalists (in modern parlance, corporatists); in China, the elite are generally members of the Central Committee; in Russia, Putin confers 'elite' status. 

The solutions offered by progressives, return to greater media regulation, primarily through government programs/policy, are short term fixes. They want to shift power to a (slightly) different set of elites while keeping structures of power (government & corporations) intact. This sets up a situation where the 'losing' elites will use the system to regain their lost advantages. That's the entire story of the Republican effort to reverse the New Deal. 

The real solution is to fully disseminate power to every citizen and individual. And the key to that is to maximize transparency so information is freely available. The elites have power because they control information. If their hold on information is taken away, neither they nor anyone else will be able to concentrate power in the future. From a media perspective, this translates to: all means of disseminating information should be essentially free. 

Warning to readers: Truthout may be censoring the content of allowed comments. In the more than 1 hour since writing this post, another comment has been written, approved and posted. This brings to question the 'journalistic' integrity of this institution. Bear in mind some issue I brought up elsewhere:
My comment at a piece Lewis Wallace wrote called 'Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it':
In no particular order:
1. Textbooks are carefully vetted for their content. In recent years, there have been any number of partisan battles to rewrite a historical bent but these seldom occur in backrooms. This means what schoolchildren learn has undergone some degree of scrutiny. The information available to adults by way of media does not undergo an equivalent degree of scrutiny for accuracy; in fact, it is legal for media to outright lie. This placed the burden of critical evaluation on consumers who more often than not, do not have the wherewithal to carry out that responsibility. ‘You decide’ is by definition, not journalism. I am not knowledgeable of most topics, I need knowledgeable journalists to accurately *and* pointedly highlight lies, mis-directions and distortions.
2. Today’s news in tomorrow’s historical record. Consider how little we know about the past (very little is known about lives of slaves, women and poor) because only white male voices were recorded, often silenced by deliberately and maliciously enforced illiteracy. There’s is no excuse or justification for that in this day and age of near universal literacy and vast mechanisms of information dissemination.
3. Some examples of false binaries that the media promulgates by never deviating beyond their boundaries: (a.) Political ideology is not fully covered by the Democratic Party’s definition of ‘liberal’ and the Republican Party’s definition of ‘conservative’. Alternate models of organizing health insurance (user pays vs single payer) or childcare (private vs. state subsidized) or criminal justice (reform/punitive) for example. (b.) Social gender is not biologically defined by sex; neither is biological sex always clear cut. All issues related to sexual identity and sexuality. (c.) Socialism is always public and capitalism is always private. Private insurance providers run by socialist principles; publicly owned utilities operate much like capitalist corporations.
4. What it means to be ‘objective’ or ‘neutrality’, journalistically speaking? (a.) to not insert any voice outside of the news item — journalism by stenography or “ ‘you decide’ journalism”; (b.) insert ‘opposite’ voice of news item — journalism as sports commentary; (c.) insert corrections of specifically mentioned lies; (d.) insert relevant factual context — for example, “…the millions of dollars mentioned by the Senator lost to fraud accounts for less than 1% of the overall program.”; (e) insert long term context — future cost/savings; past injustices.
Your essay was couched primarily in terms of journalistic integrity; it’s critical to also include the responsibility journalism has to public and social integrity.