Fixing the MSM

Yesterday I blogged about the Responsible Plan to End the War, and to me the most striking part of it is that they do take the media to task for not doing their job. However, the Plan is fairly limited in suggestions for how to fix the MSM, and so I wanted to reprint an idea I had that was buried in my longest post ever.

The real difficulty in disseminating truth lies in the reality that most people out there do not read blogs. Television news and print journalism are not going to go away for a long time, if ever. A great many people like their news fed to them passively, so I don't think the blogging community will overtake the MSM completely any time soon. Also, there are a great many blogs with no editors - some will be heard, some say truly inane things, and some will just be lost in the shuffle. Only our readers' willingness to fact-check gives us credibility. If the MSM were somehow just replaced by blogs everyone would go deaf with the noise. We need some sort of hybrid of the two.

Here's an idea: The government could establish a national Ombudsman department, under either the FCC or DOJ, with subpoena power. Hopefully they could be independent, just as we hope in the future the DOJ will also be. The department's first task would obviously be checking on the government's behind the scenes connections to the media and finding ways to sever them. More generally, they'd be checking that national media outlets were living up to some journalistic standard, and would perhaps air a 30 or 60 second report on each news program with their most current accuracy rating and breakdowns of how their news reporting time is spent. Maybe the report could include a "breakthrough score" to indicate how well the station does on investigative journalism - to bring that back into style.

With enough media outlets to choose from, this could actually be a sort of free-market, competition-based media solution. The news stations would stop telling us what we want to see, and instead, we choose to watch the stations that we want to watch, complete with ratings and reminders about how accurate and relevant they are. The stations will be forced to tailor their content to compete. Right now, there is not enough competition in the media to make this work, and people are forced to watch or read something. But that's where the blogs come in. Television and internet are converging, and soon the playing field between the MSM and the blogs may be leveled. To help that goal, along with the creation of the national Ombudsman, if it is possible to lower the barrier to entry further to allow blogs to catch up to the MSM in production capability, that will foster the competition needed to hold the news accountable. Maybe, for example, the government could create low-interest loans to start a new national news station, and limit what the distributors could charge for a good news station (remember, there are ratings now). I'm sure this is not the perfect solution, but maybe between the Ombudsman and competition, or some other method, we can fix the MSM, and make sure that we are not lied into an unnecessary war again.

The Responsible Plan talks about FCC regulation of media ownership. It seems the idea of killing off the oligopoly is the one they want to take. But they are talking about new ownership, not dismantling the current model like Bell Telephone. I think if we could find a way to break the current national media oligopoly, it is another alternative. Though we can't do it based on region like Bell. We have local news already, and it serves a different purpose. Anyway, I'm guessing that reducing barrier to entry further will create the same effect if not give better results, and may be inevitable given technology, but I'd be willing to explore either option.