Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then they won with it in 2020.

During a lull in yesterday’s blizzard, I went for a walk with a friend of mine, a professor at one of Boston’s universities. We talked about a variety of topics, from snow removal to dogs, from music to Aristotle, and as our conversation wound down, we discussed the media.

I told him that while I was studying at Brown University, I was friends with Arthur Gregg Sulzburger, who is now the publisher and chairman of the New York Times. Unfortunately, Arthur and I lost touch more than a decade ago, but I paid attention to the Times over the years, hoping to reconnect someday with AG.

The question my professor friend and I debated on our snowy walk was about the quality of mainstream media coverage today, in America and around the world. Certainly more and more people are criticizing the media for being corporate, supported by advertisers and therefore biased.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGL-34IWZUg

But is that really true? Journalists go to school for years and are supposed to abide by a code of ethics. And even if the media is biased, what is the solution? Even independent, nonprofit news organizations such as Democracy Now have their biases.

We’d like our reporters, writers, and TV and radio anchors to be completely objective and free from corporate influence, like a scientist, or blindfolded Lady Justice. But is that realistic? The New York Times is competing with so many other media outlets, so it needs sensationalistic, attention grabbing headlines and stories. For example, today it’s trying to get us riled up about Democratic politicians taking dark money – presumably true, but what about newspapers and other media outlets taking corporate money?

The media reform movement has been around for a century. In 1922, in his book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippman argued that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images in the minds of the public. He stated that the media has an ability to infuence the thoughts and opinions of the members of the public consuming the content. More recently, the movement for media reform has led to the rise of citizen journalism and the blogging culture. That’s exactly what I am trying to do with my Health and Healing blog – to provide my own independent media voice, in my spare time, always for free.

Future directions for this blog include plans to translate some of the posts into Spanish. I would also love to find someone to help me translate some posts into Chinese, Korean, or Russian, to continue to build a more global audience. Since my blog is mostly focused on preventive medicine and health, it would be great to connect with nurses and physicians in other countries. I already have many links across the globe and would love to have many more connections. I’m not competing with Arthur and the New York TImes with my little non-profit one man show here, but in a way, I am.

Obviously I’dl like you to support my blog and share and comment on my posts, and help me improve the writing and video content, before you get engrossed in the latest scandal written up by the professional journalists at the New York Times and other outlets.

Well, thanks again to my professor friend for a stimulating conversation as we walked through the snow. Finally, to close out this blog post, I told my professor friend about the Regina Carter jazz concert in Boston on March 27. It’s going to be a great one…

If you have any thoughts about media reform or the blogging movement, or how to get Margo to do tricks on my videos, feel free to leave them below.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this blog post, please feel free to leave a comment or share with others. And remember, my blog is always free.