Save local newspapers

I think by now we are all aware of how media can shape public opinion and even decide what is fact in the face of alternative facts. When control is concentrated in the hands of a few this process can be less than balanced.  We have all watched the death of newspapers some iconic but gone none the less. There are so many problems this country faces yet saving local papers needs to demand attention. For starters subscribe to your hard print local paper.  Then adopt one from the city or town of your choice .   DO SOMETHING!  Below are other suggestions from an article in the LA times. There are a number of steps the federal government should consider that could make the local news business more sustainable without compromising its independence, including:

• Making it easier for commercial news organizations to convert into nonprofits, building on the example set by the Salt Lake Tribune last year. Such a shift could open the door to treating subscription fees as tax-deductible charitable contributions, which would be a boon to readers.

• Amending federal bankruptcy law to let courts give weight to community benefits, not just the interests of creditors, when overseeing the restructuring of insolvent newspapers. 

• Providing no- or low-interest government loans for news start-ups and community publications.

• Recognizing that when newspaper mergers reduce investment in local reporting, consumers may be harmed to an extent that violates federal antitrust law.

• Expanding the Corp. for Public Broadcasting’s mandate to include local public-interest news media organizations, such as Berkeleyside and Voice of OC.

• Classifying local journalism as a public service profession and making journalists eligible for federal loan forgiveness, just like lawyers, nurses, teachers and veterinarians who work in underserved communities.

In the longer term, lawmakers and regulators are going to have to grapple with the damage Google and Facebook have inflicted on the publishers whose content they have leveraged to attract advertisers. And philanthropic foundations and private benefactors should consider the establishment of a “deconsolidation fund,” or community-based media fund, that could be used to help newspapers ease into nonprofit status, represent the public interest in bankruptcy proceedings or even buy local newspapers from chains. Courageous work is being done by journalists across America, but locally owned newspapers are ultimately more accountable to their communities than chains owned by hedge funds and private equity firms.

Finally, although outright government funding for the news sets off alarm bells, we are encouraged by state-level initiatives — the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Colorado Media Project and Your Voice Ohio — that treat accountability and watchdog journalism as a public good and provide financial and organizational support for independent, factual, nonpartisan, solutions-oriented reporting. At the same time, states should take care not to exacerbate the problems faced by the news business, as the California Legislature did last year by passing AB5. The law, which codifies a state Supreme Court ruling on employee classifications, requires newspaper carriers to be treated as employees rather than as contractors, imposing ruinous costs on already strapped publishers. So far the publishers have been given until 2021 to comply, but they should be exempt altogether from AB5 or given more time to transition away from print delivery.

I believe that people who come together to solve problems can solve problems. Let’s figure this out!!

Demanding the truth

I’m reading Arguing with Zombies by Paul Krugman.  Everyone should read it but that’s not why I am writing this. The point of this piece is to challenge all of us to demand the truth from policy analysts and politicians.  The facts instead of my truth, your truth.   Maybe the American public was never told the truth.  We certainly have had less access to it for decades. Is it the result of 24 /7  news cycles? Entertainment news? It doesn’t matter but somewhere along the way we lost our critical thinking. As a result pundits can spin the truth to suit their policy goals.  As a result we turn into sheep herded this way and that. The polarization is now obvious and the negotiations almost unheard of.Compromise? Hardly! 

What are we to do? We need to ask more questions.  The media has to vet what they say. We don’t need entertainment news.  We need facts and thoughtful discourse.  Let’s have the facts about health care. The post office.  Voter suppression. We at least need to have the discussion about truth and facts and about spin. 

Not the country I know

I no longer recognize my country.   I say that because as we have witnessed the protests across the country we have also witnessed police brutality.  Behavior that is callous, uncalled for, and in violation of our constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Beside that it brings into question our basic humanity! Yesterday an elderly man was shoved to the ground By police in Buffalo,  New York and left bleeding on the ground as a phalanx of police walked past him.  Protect and serve? And the police said he tripped and fell. And the mayor talked about their training. There was no violence or looting going on! It was broad daylight.  50 cops then resigned in protest to support their suspended colleagues because after all they were only following orders and doing their job. Protect and serve?
We have known as a country that their is something fundamentally wrong with our police. Their culture their training, whatever... We have excused this brutish, murderous behavior stating 99 % are good cops.  No, they re not. If we witnessed this same pattern in health care , or sports or anything else we would have concluded something was systemically wrong instead of blaming “bad apples “.
Let s call it what it is and fix it. Part of what it is , is a basic loss of human decency and civility. Basic personhood.  We see that we have lost it in our discourse, our partisan politics , our leadership and our racism. This is OUR problem. The police are showing us who we have become as a country. They are the empowered authority we have paid to protect and serve. They have failed us and we have failed them.

Health care failure

Farhad Manjoo wrote an opinion piece in today’s NY Times.(March 26). He asked how is it that this country can’t  produce a 75 cent mask?  It occurs to me that this crisis is an opportunity for this country to bring back manufacturing.   A start might be critical medical supplies. Even if the government had to subsidize. How much of the military budget should be redirected to be prepared for the kind of war that the Coronavirus represents?  The greatest country in the world can’t make it’s own masks? So how do ordinary people like myself begin to get this idea out there? What advocacy group would embrace this idea? What are the politics of this?