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Joe Biden must bust up the media

5 2
06.08.2024

Don’t look now, but we just witnessed a major seismic event in American media.

Monday afternoon a federal judge ruled that Google’s parent company violated U.S. antitrust laws. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in the District of Columbia opens the door to a second trial to determine potential remedies to Google's monopolization of the search market. It is the Justice Department's first victory over a monopoly in more than 20 years.

With this victory, Joe Biden now has in front of him a unique and historic opportunity. He can help end divisiveness, increase voter education, score a huge victory for the cause of diversity of thought and do it by correcting a problem created by Ronald Reagan. Biden can bust up the media monopolies and thus fix the biggest communication problem facing our country — he can fix the press.

Reagan began this slippery slide into a monolithic communication industry by erasing federal guidelines to media ownership. He did it, in part, to help out a friend, Rupert Murdoch. If that name seems familiar, congratulations; you haven’t been asleep. But Reagan did more than remove the guardrails, he ditched the Fairness Doctrine.

Every other president since then has been complicit in large and small ways in the destruction of the news industry. There are twice the number of people on the planet since the day I was born, and perhaps only a quarter of a number of reporters. Downsizing, consolidation, buyouts, newspaper, radio and television station failures are all a part of the media landscape.

The instability in the industry brought about by massive buyouts, shutdowns and failures has led to vast news deserts in the U.S. where little or no local news is reported. Nationally, with six companies owning approximately 90 percent of what you see, read or hear, we lack diversity and thus we get to watch national correspondents with little knowledge, writing skills or political acumen tell the rest of us what to think. The quality varies little from network to network; it’s mostly garbage.

Related

The ongoing reason often given for the demise of journalism is that it is all based on market trends: The people want clickbait, not news. Thus, logic dictates, that it isn’t a government problem, but an economic one. “We’re giving the people what they want,” is our lament.

The government created this mess. Specifically, Ronald Reagan created this mess. The media landscape, our current political divisiveness and the fact that cheesy, cheap hucksters like Donald Trump can worm their way into politics is all because of Ronald Reagan. By removing the guardrails that insured a robust journalistic industry dedicated to providing factual information, we’ve been gifted, via Reagan, the Fox Network that recently settled a $750........

© Salon


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