John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Progressives Ask for Too Little, Not Too Much in Age of Plutocratic Rule

“One of biggest messages is that most of what people who discuss media policy focus on – cable news, right-wing talk radio, blogging and social media – misses the elephant in the room. Local television news programs remain dramatically influential. And, for the most part, they are dramatically damaging to the discourse. They actual warp the popular understanding of what matters so that people think the weather and crime, for instance, are more important than economic policy and public health. We don’t deny the need to know whether it’s going to rain tomorrow, and we respect that there are stories of crime patterns that really do need to be covered. But local news programs are so skewed toward simplicity and sensationalism that perspectives are warped.”

“If there is an essential point to our book – beyond exposing the extent of the current crisis – it is to suggest that the failure of progressives in recent decades has not been that they have asked for too much. It is that they have asked for too little. Polling tells us that Americans are deeply frustrated with politics as usual, with media as usual. We respect that frustration and propose an alternative that embraces the most powerful tools afforded us by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Tom Paine.”

Click on the text to read the interview