Got Real News? Got Public Financing?

In an article entitled Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. he points out,“While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.”

Interesting commentary. The one part I don't agree with is the "conventional wisdom" that most people are more interested in Britney's hair-do than the fact that they're being ripped off for billions. If stories like Bush's budget were written in the proper context, editors know such stories would be sensational enough to draw eyeballs. But you won't see headlines like BUSH WANTS MASSIVE CUTS IN SERVICES TO ELDERLY AND NEEDY TURNED INTO MASSIVE TAX GIVEAWAYS FOR SUPER RICH on the front page of any dailies anytime soon even though it's a very relevant and unequivical fact. Why? Not because no one cares. The fact is that corporate news blames Joe Sixpack for the inanity of its coverage while burying the lead and obfuscating the drama of the story's true implications. The agenda is obvious.

We’re not too stupid to realize that corporate news owners benefit handsomely from budgets like Bush’s in which estate taxes are slashed to the bone. And editors are not too stupid to know that if they used their resources to peak readers interests in such information they would soon lose their jobs.

How do I know the public is not too stupid to detect corporate news’ unspoken agendas? Because its obvious grasp of the situation is reflected in the surveys that show that the media's credibility has tanked and most people under 55 now get their news from the internet where they can skirt the dross and cut to the chase.

Frontline did a great series on this issue called "News Wars". The gist was that because stockholders want a 20% profit margin from the newspapers they own, the publicly traded news organization is becoming less and less viable as a legitimate news gathering model. Because to operate at a 20% profit margin you have to cut staff below what is required to collect serious news.

The unstated inference to me is that since real news is as important to a functioning democracy as a defense budget, maybe the country should help finance the takeover of a couple of major newspapers that have been made irrelevant by corporate greed. Then create a body to run them at only a 5% profit margin in order that they can maintain sufficient news staff to gather the information required to inform our “citizen deciders” how best to run their democracy.
The publicly financed model works. This is why NPR is the most trusted news source in the country and PBS (purveyor of Frontline) is the most trusted TV news provider. No wonder Bush wants to cut their budgets. A functioning democracy might funnel too much out of his base's trembling fingers.

We need legitimate newspapers (whether or not they are actually diseminated in paper form) to collect the news that the internet (read: savvy consumers in the form of bloggers etc.) organizes, analyses, and prioritizes. Who's gonna pay for that? As usual, we do in one way or another. So let's remove the mismanagement of corporate profiteers and hand papers like the L.A. Times that have been victimized by such characters back to publishers that give a damn. There will still be plenty of News Corps around to glorify fluff and the Republican party. But public financed news gathering organizations could guarantee that everyone will be served and not just a few.

If Brittany wants those cameras that are driving her crazy off her back in a hurry all she has to do is walk up to them and say, "Well, as long as I have your attention, did you hear about Bush's budget?" Believe, me the editors in charge of those news teams will quickly make an executive decision that the public is not interested in Brittany's shaved head.