The media used to be called the Fourth Estate that kept the public informed. Our media is no longer fulfilling that function.
For a democracy to flourish, the public must know and understand what is happening on the local, state, federal and global stage. What went wrong?
When President Reagan overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking that FDR put in place to prevent another Great Depression, he also changed our economic system from Keynesian economics that favors the middle class to the Chicago School of Economics, which favors the wealthy. These two changes made monopolies not only possible but drove small businesses out of the market through predatory pricing.
Remember all the airlines we used to have? You could commute from LA to San Francisco for $19.95 because there were dozens to choose from. Now there are a handful. There were many banks, supermarkets, and mom-and-pop stores offering plenty of competition. Think about how Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta dominate. But the worst is the five corporations that parse out the TV news. Most local newspapers are gone, and local radio stations have been turned into local shock-jocks by their corporate takeover. Even some local television affiliate stations across the nation are required by their parent corporation to include a scripted segment during their local broadcast that are often right-wing talking points.
When Trump came down that escalator and announced his candidacy in 2015, the press didn’t know quite how to cover him. Normally, the media would try to be fair to all candidates. But Trump had been groomed for 14 years on The Apprentice to be a media star, and his chaos and outrageous behavior brought eyeballs. On Feb. 16, 2016, the CBS CEO, Les Moonves, said at a media conference in S.F. about the inordinate amount of coverage of Trump, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
And so we’ve had wall-to-wall face time of him for eight years. It didn’t help that other candidates had less than exciting personalities. Even as mundane as Hillary was, she still won the popular vote. Were it not for our archaic Electoral College vote system that dates to the horse-and-buggy days, Hillary would have been our first female president.
It took The New York Times four years to call Trump’s lies as lies. They said very little about the Access Hollywood tape, accusations of rape and sexual abuse, his decades running a mafia-style crime family that specialized in money laundering for Russian oligarchs, and his flaunting of the rule of law in his businesses.
Last May, Trump invited two dozen Petroleum Industry CEOs to Mar-a-Lago where he offered to roll back all of Biden’s environmental restrictions if they would collectively give $1 billion to his campaign. In other words, for this, he would allow Big Oil to finish destroying the planet. And yet, to my knowledge, only The Atlantic and MSNBC reported on this. Crickets from the rest of the media.
Now we have the 900-plus page Project 2025 from The Heritage Foundation, which is a detailed plan to shift many powers of the government to the president. They want to make the millionaire tax cuts permanent, which the Congressional Budget Office says would add $4 trillion to the national debt. Most of the authors of the 30 chapters of this “policy bible” are former members of Trump’s staff and various state department appointees, such as Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro. The media is beginning to report on this, finally.
How about covering Biden’s top 10 accomplishments? Medicare is now allowed to negotiate drug prices making insulin now affordable. More Americans have health care than ever. The stock market keeps breaking records. Three-thousand dead/day from COVID to normal death rates now. He helped strengthen NATO, making us all safer. The Infrastructure Act is finally fixing our potholes, bridges, roads, and dams that have been neglected for 40 years, and in the process creating jobs. The Inflation Reduction Act did just that. It brought inflation down from 9 percent to 3.3 percent. Wages are growing faster than inflation for the first time in 50 years. He has repaired international relations from damage done by Trump.
As opposed to the ton of coverage of shoplifting, crime is way down first quarter 2024 from first quarter 2023. Down: violent crime, 15.2 percent; murders, 26.4 percent; rapes, 25.7 percent; aggrivated assaults, 12.5 percent; robberies, 17.8 percent; property crimes, 15.1 percent (according to the FBI).
We deserve better than this from our corporate media and the echo chamber that follows.
We need an informed citizenry. The stakes are too high.
Dan Dennis writes to the Sun from Orcutt. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.