Commercial media: Problems and solutions

The Texas Tribune turns 1 today, and I've been very interested in what they're doing and curious about where they're headed. It's pretty clear the mainstream commercial media system has failed and continues to fail us in a lot of ways, and I'm happy to see the Tribune going at it in a different way with an ideology based on the public good.

"We have to make public policy accessible and understandable to the average person," Tribune CEO and editor-in-chief Evan smith said during a Mass Comm Week session called "Why We Need Public-Supported Media."

The Tribune is a web-only product, but they share their content with major newspapers, including the Austin American-Statesman, the San Antonio Express-News and the Dallas Morning News. And it's completely free. Smith said collaboration is the key to survival in a free content distribution model.

The upcoming legislative session will be the first for the Tribune, and Smith said they have big plans, including live-streaming the House and Senate with searchable transcripts to follow. He said people will also be able to easily follow specific bills.

Beyond that, the questions during the session were mostly superficial. However, the student questions were pretty well-informed, and I wish they would have had more time to ask Smith what he really thinks of the current media climate.

Dr. Robert Jensen, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin who also spoke during Mass Comm Week, called the Texas Tribune an "interesting experiment" whose content doesn't look too different from what the mainstream commercial media produces. However, he said they have a great team of reporters and the potential to offer a different kind of journalism. But they need to step outside the system in order to critique it.


Jensen during his session, The Impact of Media Conglomeration on Global Issues.

Jensen said a possible solution to the failings of the current media system is diversification. There will always be commercial media, he said, but we need other types of journalism that aren't maximizing profit at the cost of the public interest.

"In a new system, I have some hope that journalism could do better," he said, though defining that new system will be difficult. Government grants, foundations and public support were discussed during the session.

Like many other media critiques (Bagdikian and McChesney come to mind), Jensen said journalism is a product but it's not like selling shoes.

"Journalism makes a claim to a special status in a democratic society," he said.

It is traditionally an independent and critical source of information, but commercial journalism hasn't provided the information citizens need, Jensen said, and that is one reason for the current crisis.

But in times of crisis, there is opportunity to attack the failures of the business and professional models of journalism. Jensen said it's important to remember that "even when journalism was riding high, there was a crisis in journalism." He used the mainstream media's long-held hostility toward the labor movement as an example. Working within a for-profit system doesn't allow journalists to critique it.

One of the most recent failures of the news media, Jensen and others have said, is the coverage of the Iraq invasion.

"The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was unlawful. It was illegal," he said. Without being hyperbolic, Jensen said the leaders who planned and executed the invasion are war criminals and should be tried in The Hague. Yet the mainstream media hardly ever discussed or explored this, he said.

"It's a failure not of individual journalists, but of the system."

Watch an interview with Jensen during Mass Comm Week.

After his session, Jensen played a documentary that he produced about friend and lifelong activist Abe Osheroff. Only about a dozen students stuck around to watch "Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing."



It was a really moving film and I'm glad I stayed. Here are some Abe quotes from the movie that stuck with me:

"The courageous thing to do is to look into yourself and find what is most authentic and then act on it."

"Authenticity is finding a connection between what you think and what you say and do."

"This empire is falling apart."

"A better world is not only possible, it's necessary. Is it probable? At this moment, it is not."

"History is made by organized anger."

"There is a better way to live."

Activism is not a sacrifice. "If it becomes a sacrifice, get out of it."

"Fight the good fight not because you know you will win. Fight the good fight because it's the right thing to do."

"Solidarity is love in action."