Monday, September 08, 2008
RIP US Representative Democracy?
Even though the Republicans and Democrats missed the deadline here in Texas to get on the ballot, and were not shown to be on the ballot the day after the deadline, magically they appeared a week later. I guess rule of law means nothing in this country anymore. Worse, I sent a letter to the editor to the Dallas Morning News last week about it, and so far it hasn't been run. I guess the two major parties getting on the ballot due to someone obviously breaking the law isn't news in Dallas. I would think it would at least have prompted someone in the news department to look into my claims, to do a little investigative journalism, but no . . . you can't count on the mainstream media to do their jobs anymore, either. The fact is that if they are allowed to stay on the ballot, that shows that we do not have rule of law, but rule of these two political parties. We should all be very frightened by that, because that essentially means our representative democracy is a fraud. I'm the first one to say i can't believe I'm saying this, but I fear it's true.
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2 comments:
Investigative journalism is a lot of work with an uncertain outcome. I've long wondered why anyone does it at all because my guesstimate is that it's not cost-effective. It may be a market niche, but don't expect any local newspaper to do it. They're businesses, after all.
To my mind, "investigative journalism" is almost a redundant term. If you're not trying to find out facts about things, you're not doing journalism -- you're just reporting gossip, which is what journalism in this country has in fact turned into.
The Dallas Morning News isn't exactly a local newspaper. It serves a metropolitan area of about 10 million people and is the largest paper in Texas. Its job is to do such things as investigative journalism. At the least, they ought to look into fact-based claims.
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