Publictakeover's Weblog

The Hidden Casualty of the Debt Deal

The political process that empowers the people of the United States of America with self-government.

Illyse Hogue, writing for

Sunset

Sunset is often beautiful, because of the light that continues to color once deep day. But such beauty signifies past illumination and imminent darkness descending.

Chris Hedges rips the corporate media with the perfect balance of investigation, reporting, and reflection to shed fireworks on their shadowy connivances, yet signaling the finale of the time of enlightenment.

This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable.

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing.

The death of newspapers means, as Schanberg points out, that we will lose one more bulwark holding back the swamp of corporate malfeasance, abuse and lies. It will make it harder for us as a society to separate illusion from reality, fact from opinion, reality from fantasy.