“the group investigated the commodification of everything in a capitalist system and the fundamental illegitimacy of corporate structures? What if instead of pointing at “flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections,” Pro Publica journalists covered how the law legitimizes the everyday crimes of the powerful and how money-dominated pseudo-elections eliminate meaningful democracy?

My “what if” is much simpler and plainer than that. What if this group of journalists started with the premise that each human life on this planet was equally worthy and so the most important news stories are those stories which concern the greatest number of people in the most serious (life-and-death) ways? To see what this news looks like, see my website: http://www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org . What if journalists heeded the challenges presented to them 40 years ago by Martin Luther King Jr. just 4 days before he was gunned down - the challenge “to develop a world perspective” and the challenge “to rid our nation and the world of poverty.”

Pro publica advises that their “newsroom will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.”

Please tell me, Pro Publica, on how you can do that if your news stories don’t address the needless death each year of 11 million kids? Please tell me how any entity that calls themselves a newsroom or a news publication can claim to provide news when it doesn’t address the stories which affect the largest number of human beings in the most serious way? How many left wing alternative news internet & other entities will continue NOT prominently addressing THE MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS FACING HUMANITY TODAY - like the very dismal state of humanity itself, with 41 percent of it without sanitation; 17 percent without clean water; and 25 percent without electricity? That’s my litmus test for “TRULY IMPORTANT STORIES, STORIES WITH ‘MORAL FORCE’, those that address the most pressing problems facing humanity. What’s your litmus test?

Angie
http://www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org
P.S. - For a link to King’s complete sermon, and for footnotes for all the above statistics, as well as information on the accuracy of such statistics generally, see my website, http://www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org , and more particularly, to read a discussion on how those in power don’t even see fit to accurately count humanity or quantify its needless death & suffering even though everyone knows that to solve a problem you first have to know its scope, see http://mysite.verizon.net/vze25×9n/wnsb/id15.html . That story alone would make for incredibly important investigative journalism that still needs to be done. Is there anything more important than the daily UNNECESSARY death and suffering that takes place in this world today on an unimaginable scale? If not, then there’s no more important news story. It’s that simple.

But, in its naming of “business and . . . government” as “the two biggest centers of power”, with “product safety to securities fraud” and “flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections . . . also . . . such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and on the media” as the range of subjects to be investigated, I see avoidance, forgetfulness, and perhaps tooth-extraction. Certainly this prospectus ignores the breadth and depth (not to mention stench) of corruption in business, government, and named institutions (and deletions of uncorruptible ones). Banks and the military are left unmentioned, also aspects of the legal system other than those categorized as “criminal” — despite the fact that in the great majority of “crimes” prosecuted, there is no victim except the defendant/prisoner (the point at which all recourse to justice vanishes). Additionally, seemingly forgotten is the public document produced, signed, and published, in prominent newspapers of record in this country in 2000, by eminent lawyers, judges, and law professors, that declared that “criminal justice system” not “flawed,” but so utterly corrupt as to be incapable of reform, calling for its dismantlement.

Unconsidered: U.S. citizenry’s lack of familiarity with, much less practice of, solidarity; while a solidarity of resistance is to U.S. a foreign land and tongue.

Unaddressed: the technologically and psychologically sophisticated violences by which the security state/supra-state (the tip of an ever more solidly inter-locked iceberg?) operates, employing financial, spatial, and accessibility controls that approach the totalitarian in scope and scale; along with perverse consequences attendant on different forms of deviation or demur, rewarding (usually) the worst, and punishing (often) the best or the most vulnerable. The evidence suggests these controls and consequences to be sufficiently ubiquitous and swift, to confine to designated channels whatever flows of information the proposed investigations might set in motion. Moreover, how is one to evaluate these investigations, or those who make them, given the intent to collaborate with the five — or are we now down to four? — communications conglomerates and their Pentagonal ghost-writers? How is one even to guess at if/when independence and integrity may have been traded for something else?

Submitted with much appreciation and warm praise for, and respectful encouragement to, Robert Jensen and all the Dissident Voices.

Bob said…

“What if, instead of chasing the latest scandal, the real work of investigative journalism should be a sustained critique of First-World imperialism and predatory corporate capitalism in the context of white supremacy and patriarchy? What if that’s the analysis that really gets to the core of an unjust and unsustainable world?”

Yeah, what if?

http://blog.acton.org/index.php?url=archives/2153-Natural-Capitalism.html

Be sure to come back to THIS fine news-blog when you’re done reading there. Rem control-mousewheel is sometimes available for in-browser font-sizing… makes online reading easier. Bob, good article… interesting topic. Brian… I wish I could disagree with your comment… out of pure hope for mankind. But I can’t. Sigh.

Wingnut
Anti-cap
Michigan USA

We need to write off the corporate media as the trash that it is. Honor populist media like Democracy Now!, The Real News, and this very website. There is this insane longing for a time when mainstream media was respectable, but that golden age existed only in some people’s minds.

The sooner we all write off the corporate media, the sooner we’ll get to where we want to go.