Media has long been considered the de facto “fourth branch of government”, and economy has been the driving issue in countless elections—and yet we somehow refuse to take the lessons we have learned in creating democratic society and apply them.
Economically, we’re in the worst rut since the Great Depression. The government is talking about re-regulation, but there is no general idea behind it. Simply applying patchwork fixes to mistakes we’ve found in the past, and have caused recessions, is not the answer. It assumes no issue uncovered will be catastrophic. We lack a coherent theory of how the government should be involved in the economy. The Democrats are traditionally seen as heavy regulators (with the strategy of: “woops, screwed up, now let’s fix it”, as described previously) while the Republicans are moving for fiscal conservatism, specifically small government with a hands-off approach to the economy (free-market theory); which we’ve seen fail through deregulation. Neither work.
The media is widely criticized by both sides of the political spectrum. Fox News and MSNBC are the poster-children of media bias: very few outside the networks would deny that Fox News is incredibly conservative-leaning, and MSNBC is staggeringly liberal. A group of less than six organizations (and therefore six boards of directors) control 90% or more of American national media. While both sides of the political spectrum are equally represented by viewership, I would argue bias polarization has been and is still increasing consistently to unacceptable levels. Liberalism and conservatism are represented, but mostly in their ideologically extreme forms. Objectivity has decreased with the rise of fragmented, largely contextless flash news reporting. While the internet has contributed to this fragmented, quick-paced movement leading to the decline in objectivity, I would say that the organization structure of all media is mostly to blame.
I find the solutions to both problems in our current paradigm of Democracy. Representative democracy in the United States is not pure: the founders created three branches of government, all designed to fight with each other’s negative aspects, keeping all three in check. None can gain too much power. Humans are flawed; even democracy needs macro-preventive measures to make sure it doesn’t get run by one group of “representatives”.
In economics, we have the concept of trust-busting, monopoly prevention and conglomerate dissolution. Yet we never really follow it, systematically. A large majority of commercial industries have monopolies or unfair price fixing. The fact that some corporate institutions are too big to fail by the rules of bankruptcy applied to everyone else is insane. We already save institutions like banks based on the “good of the whole”—why not prevent institutions from ever reaching that point by enforcing the rules we have today and enacting more laws that prevent power consolidation.
The first amendment is clear: the government, nor individuals may not restrict free speech. Corporations are afforded individual rights, therefore they should also be afforded individual responsibilities, and this includes respecting the right of free speech. The media should not be allowed to monopolize the market and conglomerate as they have done.
Power consolidation and imbalance is the downfall of free democratic systems like the economy and the media, and they need to be regulated, just like they are in government.
by Zach Blume.
