Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 63
Exposed to a steady diet of right-wing talk radio, many Americans
are misinformed about the major issues of the day, including
climate change.
A third change would be to reverse the Telecommunications
Act of 1996, which allowed corporations to buy up newspapers,
radio, and television stations serving the same media market. The
stated purpose was to encourage competition, but instead the act
led to what media scholar Robert McChesney describes as “a
massive wave of consolidation throughout the communications
industries” (McChesney, 1999, p. 74; Bollier, 2003, pp. 148–153).
Entire regions of the United States are now blanketed by highly
biased and distorted news coverage provided by a single company,
with no dissenting voice on the airwaves. That goes a long way to
explaining why Americans are among the most media-saturated
but worst informed people in the world and why we have been
so confused and apathetic about impending climate destabilization.
The notion of a public service is, in McChesney’s view, “in
rapid retreat if not total collapse” (p. 77). The International Press
Association, unsurprisingly, rates the U.S. press 27th freest in the
world (Gore, 2005).
Failures of the media and press, however, result from the rising
tide of money that fl ows through the political system, corrupting
everything it touches and compromising every politician,
some more than others. A long time ago, Will Rogers noted that
we have the best Congress that money can buy. But he hadn’t
seen anything. From his time to ours the situation has grown
from a problem to a national disgrace, corrupting virtually every
aspect of our public life, climate policy not the least. We’ve tried
tinkering with the system to no avail. The solution, however, is
straightforward: remove money from politics entirely. At the heart
of the matter is the strange 1976 decision by the Supreme Court
in Buckley v. Valeo that expenditure of money in political campaigns
is a form of free speech and therefore protected by the
1st Amendment. As a result, a very few have a very large say in