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Can it be solved? Well, I think it can. I've worked for years with a number of people not just in the United States, but in Canada and in Europe on plans to do it. We think it should be a publicly funded budget. People in local communities would vote every year for whichever non-profit media they wanted to get it. So, you know, if it's $200 per person, it would mean you do it at the county level because then counties are the core unit. Everyone in the county could vote for how to allocate the budget for that. You pick a few and then everyone who gets over three percent of the vote qualifies. For however many votes they get, they get that amount of money. And you have it every year, so it's competitive. No one gets to just lock in a position and ignore the public. But something like that, starting with that principle.
Now, maybe it can be done at the state level first, but I think we ought to really think nationally. I guess we're at a point now where you look at the information level of American politics today compared to what it was even in the Reagan era, and it's frightening. There's no other word for it. It's utterly frightening to see QAnon and to see this other stuff that's being widely circulated as legitimate. The reason for that is that conspiracy theories are the only theories trying to make sense of the world. [Laughing.] No one else is trying to explain how to understand the world. You don't have journalism. We've got to get journalism, in competitive groups, back in communities explaining the world to people. Not just one voice, but multiple voices.
Paul JayModels of public support like this already exist in Europe. In Scandinavia, I believe, there are some countries where they have actual elections and based on who wins, they have three or four channels that get resources. In the United States there is a structure that exists that could be built on, which are these community cable channels where cable companies have had to open up channels as part of their obligation to cities to put up their cable lines. But they're completely under-resourced. The idea that cable companies had to pay money so these channels could function has been so whittled away that most of these cable channels, outside of a city like Manhattan or San Francisco, have very few resources.
But there actually is space. There are channels that exist. If they were really resourced" And they have a bit of democratic structure to them now because at least I believe some are supported via elections in the communities who runs these community channels. That infrastructure could be built on. I think the national politics is just too screwed up right now but maybe at a state level, or a city level, even, there could be some breakthroughs.
Robert McChesneyYou might be right. I'm open-minded. I don't want to stop any city or state from pursuing something like this. But at the same time, I do think it's time that whenever someone talks about media that we inject this conversation at the beginning. Unless we get the resources to have an independent, uncensored news media that's actually covering our communities - unless we get that right in the middle of everything - then everything else we're doing about democracy is pretty much irrelevant. This is the foundation of democratic theory, not just in this country, but globally. You've got to have some semblance of a credible, independent press. We don't have one anymore. And so, I'm fine for everyone to do it.
But that's probably why I answered your question about media ownership in the way I did. We've got a bigger problem than just who owns the media. Not that that isn't a problem. We don't have media to be owned. I mean, we don't have the resources there that are doing the job.
In the 1970s, there was no term for homelessness. That is, homelessness didn't exist really. By the 1980s it was commonplace. We had millions of people who couldn't afford housing. And now we're have a new term that's never existed in America before. It's become the fastest growing concept in journalism. It's called the "news desert." These are places in America where there are no reporters covering a community. None, zero, nunca. And no newsroom, certainly. And if you expand news desert to mean that you have to have a minimum number of reporters per hundred thousand people, then a wide portion of this country is now a news desert where there's no really credible journalism covering your state, your community.
You know, the difference for anyone our age, Paul, is that even given the problems of journalism as it used to be, if you read your local newspaper and listened to the AM news, you had a pretty reasonable idea of what was going on in your community. You had a baseline. There's none of that today. Most people don't have any clue of what's going on in their city or their community.
And that's what happens. Boy, you just really can't" The system is not going to work very well as long as that's the case. In fact, we're seeing the results now: it makes possible someone just like Donald Trump. And it's not an error that the far-right in this country, the far-right parts of the world - the Mercers, the Bannons - revel in the collapse of journalism. They revel in the idea that they can basically control the narrative and not have really a voice they have to contend with. They can just dismiss it as baloney, as fake news. This is a serious issue.
Paul JayAnd nothing more serious than the lack of coverage of the climate crisis even if there's a certain amount of action by the Biden administration. Some leading scientists from the IPCC a couple of years ago published a report that said that even if every country that signed the Paris Accords fulfilled all of their commitments, by 2050 we would still hit two degrees warming above the pre-industrial average. Well, the science is getting pretty clear now that if you hit two degrees, you have an effect called "runaway."
In fact, I have an interview I'm publishing in the next couple of days with a climate scientist. Runaway is, for example, more forest fires, more carbon emission from the fires, more melting of the Arctic, more methane released. You start getting this runaway effect after you hit two degrees warming. It gets difficult if not impossible to prevent hitting three and then four, and you essentially have an unlivable planet. How is that not the most compelling story night after night after night? It's not just a politics story.
Robert McChesneyIt's an extraordinary story. Obviously, going back to the point of departure for this interview, the framework for American journalism is sort of what elites consider relevant issues, what they're debating. And this clearly is not especially relevant issue for the elites of this country because they're not encouraging this debate whatsoever. Their politicians aren't encouraging it. They're not paying for politicians to encourage it. And we're living with the consequences.
Theoretically, in a democratic society, even if the people who run the country don't want to talk about it, there's a news media that's focused on the issues that aren't always going to be popular with people in power. That's what a free press is for, and they would be doing exactly this. They would be beating the drum on this issue, publishing the work, talking to people, talking to activists about what they're doing. So, if you live in a community, you'd know what people are doing in the community on this issue. Right now, most Americans are living in a closet, so to speak, with the light off because they have no idea what's going on in their community. There might be lots of people actively organizing on this. They'll have no idea. They'll have no idea why it's a big deal. They're clueless and it's not their fault. I mean, you say, well, they should know. How are they supposed to know about something if you've never heard about it?
Paul JaySeventy-four million people just voted for Trump.
Robert McChesneyI mean, there's a bunch of related issues right up there. Issues of war and peace, which are also potentially catastrophic for our species, are completely off-limits in our commercial news media and in our mainstream news media: NPR as well. You know, the range of debate, to paraphrase Jeff Cohen's great line, is from GE to GM. [Laughter.]
Although I must say the Republicans are caught in this new fascist element, which is really their special contribution to the last decade. You know, the range of debate used to be narrowly within a sort of corporate-liberal viewpoint on foreign policy. Now, we've edged into the isolationist, you know, racist, screw the rule of law - I mean, just the dark underbelly of neoliberalism. And so that's our range of debate now. It's, like, well, those are your two choices. It's no choice at all.
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