> ... can a democracy with no independent, local press be considered a democracy still?
Expanding this question: can a country where the government lies to its citizens, and withholds information from the press, and actively seeks to discredit news sources critical of it be considered a democracy?
If citizens cannot be informed they cannot make rational, democratic decisions.
I think those all pale in comparison to the freedoms lost from the Patriot Act. Complete and total government surveillance. Gag orders that make it illegal for you to disclose that your business is being forced to comply with surveillance. Government bullying when you try to build systems that are surveillance proof (Apple said to reverse course on end to end encrypted iCloud earlier this year due to government pressure). Not to mention extrajudicial killings of American citizens.
I agree that the Patriot Act was a sad day for America.
Whether it meant to or not the Bush Administration kicked off a lot of terrible stuff for America and for the world. I remember obsessively watching the news after 9/11 and just having a terrible sinking feeling about the road we were preparing for ourselves.
To be a bit fair to them, it's easy to imagine many other administrations, of both parties, behaving similarly, though not in such an extreme way, after 9/11.
I'd like to think that Al Gore specifically, if he was President then, would not have invaded Iraq, and, would not have passed something like the Patriot Act, but the truth is we don't know.
Plus Gore might have paid more attention the the CIA warnings about Al Qaeda.
But again - who knows. And America itself has a lot to work on, on both sides of the political aisle.
> can a country where the government lies to its citizens, and withholds information from the press, and actively seeks to discredit news sources critical of it be considered a democracy?
Such a country can be considered a democracy, as long as the government isn't too successful in suppressing information and the press. Especially if, in the end, the citizens vote that government out of power.
While the parent is getting down-voted because his comment is presumed to be supportive of the "enemy". I think he brings up an important talking point regarding the press/media. While I don't think lies are the right way to describe it I do think there is a truth problem in much of the media today left/right and both political and non-political news. Sensationalizing and Click-Bait is a form of dishonestly and leads to people having skewed understandings of events and their relative importance. I think this is not primarily driven by politics but the economics of the "attention economy." And the question of what is the effect of this on wider society is import to consider.
That is an oligarchy. Ultimately, it does not matter much if coercion is based on political or economic power, or the media.
That being said, in these cases media and politicians tend to align over time, either because media help compatible politicians, or because politicians created the media landscape themselves. Oligarchies tend to be symbiotic. For those close to power, anyway; for the rest of the country it’s more like parasitism.
IIRC Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman make the argument in "Manufacturing Consent" that basically consent can be manufactured in the U.S. because of the role that business and corporations play. Which is sort of a critique of capitalism, but I also recall Chomsky talking about how it's hard to really call the U.S. capitalist considering how much of the military industrial complex and academia (especially defense-related) is government funded, and how central those things are to the U.S. econonmy.
I'm not sure of the details but my takeaway is media consent can be manufactured in a corporatist/capitalist-like system, which may also be but is not necessarily an oligarchical one.
I think the thought that it’s not dangerous because it’s not the government is itself dangerous. As you say, private interests and multinationals have a lot of power to ensure compliance. Economic power is as powerful as political power.
I think that concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite is a form of oligarchy.
Right. It's excessive and unaccountable power that's dangerous --- no matter what form that power takes. Limiting your worries to abuses of state power and ignoring abuses of private power is like worrying only about being shot with a gun and so ignoring someone pointing a crossbow at you. Both will injure you.
For sure. When the book was written income inequality wasn't extreme as it is now.
Also the whole idea of a government / multinational divide gets a bit blurry, doesn't it, when you look at the longstanding U.S. government relationship with companies like G.E. , A&T, etc, and, I'm sure in one form or another, today with Google and Amazon.
I mean government-funded research created the tech giants.
Lastly, as much as people love to knock government, ideally it's how people organize to do stuff, and, has an accountability mechanism (elections).
I'm kind of riffing off of what you are saying but yeah. Power comes in many forms and can be abused in many forms.
Exactly. Power is power, whether it’s wielded by a government or a company. Money buys governments and elites give favourable conditions to their friends’ companies. This problem is not exactly new either, it was already the case e.g. with the East India Company and its equivalents (not to single out the English).
At the risk of breaking the rule on talking about votes, this comment would probably be more welcome if it dealt with a specific situation. Right now, it seems like a coy lead into a "gotcha."
The press needs to behave too. They need to report, not sensationalize. They need to be objective, not politically active. And when given the opportunity to sit before a president addressing a global crisis, and then granted the opportunity to ask questions they should not inject their bias and call him a racist. When subsequently shut down "you're a terrible reporter" the rest of the press should not claim they are being attacked.
It all boils down to defining the roles (on all sides) and then doing that job. It's when government, press, companies, or individuals make light of their responsibility that things fall appart.
Calling someone a terrible reporter didn’t shut anything down, and it is an attack (on a person not even an action).
Don’t answer the question, or call it out as a poor question.
There are many sources of news and media.
Name calling and attacks are not coming from just one side, but this doesn’t seem like an honest appraisal of how roles are being filled so much as just tribal finger pointing.
Where is the alternative or proposed solution? The person who possesses one of the biggest platforms and with the most reach in the world cannot articulate anything more substantive than complaining of persecution?
How a free press operate and what the people need are not necessarily aligned. The populace needs the sum total of the free press to result in something approximating objectivity. If that's not happening, the people aren't being served by the concept of a free press.
If all you've got is two sensationalising ends and nothing in the middle, it's very difficult to tell what's going on. Worse, if you've got one broadly accurate and reliable wing opposed by a group who will intentionally exaggerate, lie, and demonise, and the public think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle, the latter group win.
What's not clear or easy is how you might go about cleaning up such a situation.
If the people's needs aren't being served by the existing media, part of the 'free' bit of 'free press' is the fact that anyone can be a journalist. They can research, write and publish stories to fill any gap. The internet enables this even more than has historically been possible.
> ... when given the opportunity to sit before a president addressing a global crisis, and then granted the opportunity to ask questions they should not inject their bias and call him a racist.
Look - I know it's hard to say this and remove the judgement from the statement, and I certainly do have my own judgement in play here, but, empirically speaking, President Donald Trump is racist. Or at the very least someone who consistently makes racist statements over time. And at that point what's the difference?
So w/regards to that I think reporters should have been saying that more, tbh. Let's review the facts:
1. Trump's comments about The Central Park 5, back in the day.
2. Trump's pivotal role in racist birther conspiracy theories about former President Obama.
3. Trump's racist language about Mexicans / Latinos, U.S. judges who happen to be Latino, his coded racist dog-whistle language about cities like Baltimore, Chicago, etc.
4. "Very fine people."
5. Every single thing he's done since the murder of George Floyd.
Expanding this question: can a country where the government lies to its citizens, and withholds information from the press, and actively seeks to discredit news sources critical of it be considered a democracy?
If citizens cannot be informed they cannot make rational, democratic decisions.