I Want My News Back

As I watch the course being plotted for the proposed health care reform being touted by the current administration I wonder what's missing. Why is it that the President of the US gets a low grade for the handling of the the reform proposal but yet when the respondents are told what the actual proposal is the same respondents that initially gave the President a low mark are actually in favor of it. So I ask myself where is the disconnect. Invariably the answer is the media and a total lack of interest by the common man in the politics that govern our lives.

With the passing of Walter Cronkite a certain nostalgia descended on the media and the extolled his grace, impartiality, and straight forwardness in the way he covered the news. Since I was not around to see Mr. Cronkite in action, I feel robbed of a kind of genius that is totally lacking in the newsrooms of media giants that have been entrusted with informing us, the masses.

I hope for a future where the newsrooms are no longer profit centers, where there are actual reporters on the beat, where opinion is not passed on as news, where the news is neither recycled nor suspended because an icon died, got married or flashed a little skin, a future where the masses are engaged in constructive discourse. I want to be educated and informed, not cajoled or talked down to. The media was granted a licence to perform a public good and collectively they have failed the American people. To get the kind of future that is needed we have to make our voices heard and make it know that we are mad about our present. It's our airwaves and damn it we should demand it back.