It won't get fixed it you sit idly by

I was interested to read this piece, by Nicholas Kristof, in today's New York Times because I found the Boston Globe's coverage of its own ailments interesting.

The big news in the article today is that the Globe turned down a proposal to invest $1 million in the fledgling Monster.com in the mid-1990’s. That would have been a huge infusion of cash and value to the Globe, while diversifying its revenue sources.

So the Globe is run by stuffy, out-of-touch people - I think we already knew that. I can't find the article in today's Globe, by the way ...

But then I got down to the comments section and found this, from someone calling themselves "FreeDem."

Ultimately the Media business will diverge into two camps that Bill Moyers defined perfectly. Publicity and things that powerful people don’t want you to know (actual News).

Most Media has for quite sometime been almost exclusively Publicity and the existence of News barely accessible before there was an Internet to make actual news available, not just from the top down but bottom up and most importantly side to side.

Now that people have tasted actual news, fake news just doesn’t have the umph it used to and people are unwilling to pay for it. Publicity will always be paid for, but few will read it if actual news is available.

Actual News never was paid well and will increasingly be a part time passion from people whose actual job gives them access to that news. Being able to buy ink by the trainload doesn’t grant the power it once did to promote or block such revelations.

This bolsters my contention from last week that actual news does not make it into some newspapers because powerful people don't want you to know it.

Now that I've got the power of FreeDem and Bill Moyers behind me, will you think about it a little?

Here's a snippet from the keynote address Moyers gave in 2003, to the National Conference on Media Reform:

When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college student to define “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” When journalism throws in with power that’s the first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

So when do people who stand "fearlessly independent of it" get lauded, not vilified?

You want to label someone who is trying to protect your freedom to access the Merrimack River a "bully" because a newspaper said so? Fine.

You want to call people "NIMBYs" because they object to a hastily-entered-into turbine installation ordinance? Fine.

But how did apartheid end in South Africa? Because, as (singer/songwriter) Peter Gabriel said, the eyes of the world were suddenly focused on South Africa - by the media.

The media are here to serve you, not to spoon feed you pablum fed to them by people who could pull advertising.

Make every news outlet give you the news, not the publicity. As one of the people I quoted on here said, this isn't E! Entertainment Television, this is your freedom to know what's going on, unvarnished.

To quote John McCain (perhaps the only thing he ever said that I agreed with), "Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and fight!"