As a business model media is profitable and in some instances (TV-Radio) even immune from competition. However, when it comes to serving its (secondary) customer, the public, media blows. Is present media ready to topple? Does media's present business model make it an easy takeover target for a superior model?
The American Truth Project
By: mac Sperry
02/023/06
"The Press" has been called the fourth branch of government. Yet for all of its importance news media, has not progressed into more formal structures befitting a `fourth branch'. Indeed, as a business model news media has only marginally progressed in the last two hundred years.
There is still one, or a few people at the top of media whose ideas of things trickle down through their enterprise, ultimately being served up to the customer as "the way it is". You'd be hard pressed today to find a single person who won't confide "ya know, I don't think the media's telling us all there is to tell"
I assert that virtually all of today's problems could have been solved long before they reached their present intensity, had media simply been more adequate. That inadequacy can be traced back to at least three areas. One, the above mentioned top-down structure of media that makes possible distortion or omissions of truth, due to agenda or even coercion through greed or intimidation. Two, the simpllistic presentation of purported "facts", with little or no hint of other points of view. Three, little or no attempt to "rate" probable truth of particular stories, issues or "facts".
These three wholly inadequate aspects of medias present business model, make it unfit to fill the requirements of a `fourth branch of government'. A far better model is The American Truth Project which may be found at the author's website www.howtorescueamerica.com .
Essentially, the model spreads out control so broadly, that it makes agenda or coercion impractical. It does this by turning those media that adopt the model into employee-owned companies, in which editorial control is spread out equally among all employees.
This employee-owned company then creates within itself a "truth machine", I've dubbed The American Truth Project. It would take specific issues and deconstruct them back to there most basic form. Each element would then be "tested" using structured debate and formal logic, to yield a figure-of-merit system of "probable" "truth (0-100).
The results of all this would be archived into a relatively new way of visually understanding complex issues called a mind map. Resultant mind maps would be archived on the internet and would provide a common page from which we may all begin, if not a rational basis for the assertion of "truth".
Many such companies, all competing for the reputation of "most reliable source of truth", should maximize objectivity while minimizing subjectivity. The careful internal choice of employee-owners of integrity and character should go far to do the same.