How Fame, Fortune and Education Ended Objective Journalism: A conversation with Batya Ungar-Sargon

Too often when talking about the media and journalism we engage in a board discussion of ideas, policy, and how the levers of power really work

What we often forget is that all of this is made up of people. People who bring to the exercise of power and of reporting on it, their own values, education, and personal history.

In that fact lies much of what is wrong with the media today. It's how we lost sight of the power of class in journalism, why we’ve tried to bury class differences inside racial differences and wokeness.

If all of this sounds too nuanced, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of of Newsweek, helps us understand how it’s shaping our media and democracy in her new work Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

My conversation with Batya Ungar-Sargon

What If The Solution to Fix Democracy is Actually Less Democracy

According to a report just released by Freedom House, a watchdog group that advocates for democracy, political rights, and civil liberties became weaker in 68 countries. The report also says the U.S. freedom score has declined by 8 points (from 94 to 86) over the past eight years.

At the same time we know that voters are unhappy, We are told that democracy is collapsing, that fascism is on the rise. We hear particularly from the left about the need for more direct democracy. For greater citizen participation, for more direct referendum and initiatives. One group, on this program recently called for citizen assemblies that would supplant representative government.

Yet it seems the more of this do it yourself politics we have, the more anger there is, the more divided we are.

What if we are going in the wrong direction? What if the answer to democracy’s problems is not more democracy, but more appreciation for the system of parties and representative government that our founders passed down to us.

It seems today that this is a very contrarian view. Perhaps that’s why it just might be correct. It’s put forth by Yale Professor Ian Shapiro in Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself

My conversation with Ian Shapiro:

Is It Time For an Autopsy on American Democracy?

Last week in a debate between the two candidates running in the special election in Georgia’s 6th district, Karen Handel, the Republican candidate, said quite proudly, “ I do not support a livable wage.” Also last week, the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVoss, said that the department of education has no obligation to protect LGBTQ rights in the classroom

In these comments lies a fundamental divide in American politics. A divide about the role of government, the supremacy of the individual, and role of corporations in the body politics.

It’s important to remember that there is nothing about American democracy that makes it sacrosanct or immortal. That like other democracies before us, our system, our American experiment, can simply vanish or morph into something entirely different.

It seems the fundamental question is, have we changed as a nation? Is the reality of what the founders gave us incompatible with modernity, and/or is there simply something in the DNA of America that makes us not exceptional, as some would have us believe, but the exception in the form of the non democratic democracy that we have today?

Professor Corey Dolgon wonders if it's already too late in Kill It to Save It: An Autopsy of Capitalism's Triumph over Democracy.

My conversation with Corey Dolgon:

Can Democracy Survive Social Media?

There are many forces transforming our modern world. Some driven by technology and some by increased knowledge.

On the one had we are relearning the value of collaboration. In classrooms, in Silicon Valley and in successful partnerships of any kind. We are discovering that knowledge and success rely on sharing experiences and shared information.

Concurrently technology and it’s child social media, has given us the world's most powerful tools to communicate and collaborate with each other. It seems like it should be the perfect marriage

Unfortunately in the context of the social and political times we live in, these two forces have come together in an almost perfect storm, to drive a deeper wedge into the way we are divided politically, economically, racially and socially.

The result is devastating for the institutions of democracy. Rather than enhance what the founders gave us, the long tail of the internet has sliced and diced our biases and given us the ultimate tool for self reinforcement. What it means for the future of democracy and of this republic is an open question. One taken up by Harvard law and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein in his new book #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.

My conversation with Cass Sunstein:

Nation on the Take

Money and politics have become synonymous. Politicians spend that majority of their time raising money, (which they claim they hate) while the cost of campaigns escalates and more money is needed and more money needs to be raised. And where does that money come from….not usually from small contributions, but from large and vested special interests.

The result is a system that is inherently corrupt and tilted toward big money. Even when it is practiced by the most sincere and dedicated elected officials.

We all seem to know this...what we don't see as clearly is the way in which this simple, fundamental and relatively recent development is responsible for so much that’s wrong with our democracy. Our wealth gap, political gridlock, inaction on some of our most pressing environmental issues,

For focusing on this core idea, Bernie Sanders has been accused of being a single issues candidate. But no matter where you stand on Sanders, it’s increasingly clear that this single issues is the foundational idea underlying the paralysis of 21st century America.

This is the issue that Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman take head on in Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It

My conversation with Potter and Penniman: