Perhaps my distrust of media mirrors yours?

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Below are seven reasons why the author’s (John Sudds) distrust of America’s mainstream media holds an overwhelming 80/20 ratio. Perhaps the media should reconsider its role in America’s democracy. Needless to say, the author’s news-censuring idea (“all things STUPID about the news”) has caused the media considerable anxiety. If the idea’s intellectual property is either funded by media-hating billionaires or sold to China, Mexico, or Turkey, where freedom of the press is under increasing attacks, then it could further put traditional media in a spiraling decline once the global public grows a robust userbase.

1. The U.S. mainstream media has expertise in videography. Likewise, it has a close working relationship with Hollywood, which means it is in the business of movie-making, where fictional storytelling may interfere with a total commitment to covering real-life events.

2. The U.S. mainstream media is a profit-based industry that is corporate-owned and controlled. Thus, it is motivated by profit, brand expansion, political influence, power grabs, information control, narrative dominance, and persuasion of the general populace.

3. The U.S. mainstream media has an obscured working relationship with prestigious government institutions and municipalities. Similarly, it has interrelationships with individual government officials and politicians alike, which cannot dispel the notion that the media is likely privy to some of our nation’s darkest secrets and will take advantage of them at its own volition.

4. The U.S. mainstream media, historically, has proved itself to be corrupt, yet it’s able to hire as consultants some of our nation’s brightest and highest-ranked professionals who are former government officials and employees. This reiterates concerns that are alluded to in item 3 above.

5. The U.S. mainstream media’s investigative powers are grossly under-regulated, which means the privacy of Americans, inclusive of their financial records, health records, and day-to-day private lives, is at extraordinary risk for intrusion. Whether or not the media’s proclivity to intrude into Americans’ lives is decided on a whim or methodically planned for convenience, its inherent powers (that are characteristically protected by freedom of the press) are disturbing, to say the least.

6. The U.S. mainstream media has demonstrated a palpable inability to maintain its integrity over the years, with glimpses of that ineptitude notoriously evident today. How can any reasonable American citizen entrust a public broadcasting industry like that?

7. The U.S. mainstream media is essentially a monopoly. It is an industry that has little tolerance for being either censured by the public or audited by the U.S. government (ref: abandonment of the 2014 CIN Study) to determine exactly how it aggregates, prioritizes, and disseminates the news to targeted communities it serves.

This may also interest you: “What Is Investigative Journalism?“