Public Enlightenment Means A Healthier America
The failures of our democracy are failures of information.
“Whatever is your first priority, your second priority has to be media reform. With it you at least have a chance of accomplishing your first priority. Without it, you don’t have a prayer.” - Robert McChesney
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states that its members “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy.” I believe that too. So I made it my brand.
This new venture is about caring about each other and creating better outcomes for everyone by making media reform our nation’s first priority.
Here is my broad case for prioritizing better journalism through media reform.
Grim Realities
America endured another AR-15 massacre of children and teachers in Georgia on September 4th, our 45th school shooting of 2024. Firearms are now the number one cause of death for American children. These shameful conditions are unique to our nation. But our failure to protect each other does not end there.
We have some of the worst healthcare outcomes in the developed world, with the highest infant mortality rate of any high-income country. We have the highest overall poverty rate.
Highest gun deaths, highest infant deaths, mass poverty.
These are failures of democracy.
We can’t gather the collective will to petition our government to effectively address what should be intolerable conditions. This is not because we are a callous nation. Americans care about each other. We just don’t really know much of anything about what’s going on.
Bad Information, Bad Outcomes
In the world’s richest country we struggle to muster solutions because our national information system—corporate-owned and profit seeking—is woefully ill-equipped to provide consensus building journalism. The lack of attention our most prominent newsrooms give to our most pressing problems makes it impossible to come together around a common set of facts to solve them.
The profit-seeking news has already moved on from the shooting in Georgia.
Corporate newsrooms point our attention towards drama and discord then run away from the scene without offering any solutions. Unlike public media, they communicate narratives according to the agendas of media owners, not the public interest. The conglomerates that own our media benefit financially when the population is under-informed, and thereby disengaged, when it comes to issues like labor movements, wealth inequality, the pollution of our environment, and so much more.
The messages we receive from mass media are filtered according to who owns the media, and those messages shape our attitudes, beliefs, and outcomes. When the information we need most is deprioritized by commercial enterprises with little regard for democracy, distracting culture war bullshit takes its place. And the end result is a population making choices at the ballot box based on bad information.
Better Information, Better Outcomes
We cannot lift each other up because democracy failures are ultimately failures of information systems.
The world’s healthiest democracies—those with better outcomes—publicly fund their media systems at a cost of around $100 per capita, while the United States spends $1.40 per capita. According to scholar Victor Pickard, “public media has myriad social benefits, including more diverse news coverage, increased public knowledge about politics and public affairs, and lower levels of extremist views.” To solve our systemic problems we need an overhaul of our information system.
Public Enlightenment
Society improves when the public possesses the best information possible. We can fix our democracy if we fix our media system.
A better future with better outcomes for all requires that Americans take action on the following:
Media ownership. Who is empowered to pass on their agenda?
Promoting publicly-funded media and discouraging commercialized media.
Legislation to boost local journalism, the bedrock of our democracy.
Reforming our media diets to make healthier choices. Media companies are incentivized to feed us low-quality information when we engage with it.
Enforcement of regulations to protect us from those who would use their media power to spread disinformation—like lies about elections.
Like the founders of this country I believe that a free press is essential to democratic function. James Madison wrote, “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
It’s just plain hard to acquire the high quality information, by which we can best govern ourselves, within our current commercialized system for informing the public.
As an advocate for a better America my first priority is media reform because it is the best path towards a healthier democracy.
My goal is to make media reform your first priority too.
And so that’s what this space is all about. I’ll be writing about media issues as they relate to democracy and the media reform actions we can all be taking towards the creation of a better future.
Public Enlightenment goes beyond criticism of American media to share solutions to the problems plaguing our information ecosystem, highlighting emerging trends in the non-profit and citizen journalism space as well as regulatory and legislative fixes. We all deserve a healthy information environment and Public Enlightenment offers a window into how we can achieve it.
I’m so glad you’re along for the ride.