Mondo Times Media Poll Archive

This poll ran from September 3 to 9, 2007.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"What passes for news today is opinion and soothsaying." True 520/87% False 76/13%

Votes: 596

Julian Friedland, from the op-ed article "Opinion: Journalism's new economics" published in the August 15, 2007 edition of the Denver Post. Friedland teaches philosophy and business ethics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

He wrote: "What passes for news in this brave new media world is less cold hard facts and more opinion and soothsaying. Television "news" programs reveal precious few facts on the actual issues. Instead, discussants provide titillating predictions on which politicians and parties are likely to win. It's cheap and thrilling content, which has the advantage of alienating few advertisers while viewers are soothed by a veneer of fairness (however fake) representing two sides of a debate.

This pattern hurts us all. The media's primary mission is to inform, not entertain. Their rights are granted so they may elevate and educate by informing us of what are often difficult, nuanced and unwelcome truths. As it stands, this public mission is being forsaken in the name of private profit. It thus stands starkly before us as a modern market failure.

But there is a solution. Media represent an essential service like education and infrastructure. As such, media need to be protected from the corrupting influence of private interest, which has finally grown so massive as to exert a crushing grip on journalistic independence.

If we look to Europe we can see media independence there is protected by public funds. Take the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is mostly funded by taxes, permitting it to hold every corporation and government's feet to the fire. In France, two out of the three major networks receive no more than 40 percent of their operational funds from ads. The rest come from taxes. On our end, we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), but its budget pales in comparison to the BBC, which has bureaus all over the world. The CPB, which funds both PBS and NPR, has a yearly budget of only $480 million compared to $3.2 billion for the BBC. Still, PBS is widely considered our most trusted news service. Again, this is no coincidence."

Return to the Mondo Times media poll archive.