Chris Hedges: Bad Days for Newsrooms - and Democracy

http://www.truthout.org/article/the-internet-is-no-substitute

For Truthdig.com, Chris Hedges writes: "The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print."

So according to Hedges, we just transmit images and not text. What I saw this past weekend at Netroots Nation was far from Post-Literate. Post-Literate is cable television. If he is going to decry the end of something it is cable and network news. Not because it is slow, but because of no content, only opinion. Opinion is going to be the downfall of Television News. And I say, "the faster the better'.

However, there is one thing inherent in all of this to which we must be diligent. We must use the internet to make sure there is no "corporate state". Hedges is assuming we will not have net neutrality. I say we will when we get universal broadband which is available to all. It will happen if we demand it.

don