The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who I get to finally meet today in NYC, recently participated in a debate as to whether it was a good thing that the mainstream media was withering on the vine. Here's a snippet of her argument:
And the problem goes further than just what gets reported and what doesn't and can be seen not only at the level of the great national newspapers but also at the local level. A recent study of the consequences of the shutdown of the cincinnati post in 2007 found a decline in the number of people voting in local elections as well as the number of candidates willing to challenge incumbents. Loss of local newspapers seems to correlate with a measurable decline in the quality of local democracy....
So the fundamental problem remains. Without powerful media institutions to take on the powerful on behalf of the rest of us, we become more vulnerable as a society to those who would use their influence for private gain, damn the public consequences. We need a plan B. And we don't have one yet. Which come to think of it, reminds me of how the bush administration went into iraq. And we all know how that turned out.
