The First Amendment to our constitution guarantees, amongst other things, freedom of speech and of the press. This has also been interpreted by our lawmakers to guarantee varying degrees of freedom of information (embodied, naturally, in the Freedom of Information Act).
I believe we have the right to total transparency in our government. I am not a supporter of state secrets or executive privilege. We have the right to be informed of what our government is doing (and our corporations, but this is a discussion of public information). Of course, attempting to follow everything the government does would be impossible. To this end, we have the mass media.
One of the primary duties of the mass media is to keep the public informed of the doings of its government, at the local, state, and federal levels. Of course, this is one of its duties, and not necessarily one of its goals. By its nature, the main goal of private media is to make a profit, and public media needs to maintain its membership and subscriptions. Money makes the world go round, after all.
Nevertheless, this duty exists. The proper functioning of our country depends on having a public able to make informed decisions. Only an informed public can hold its elected officials accountable, and so a democracy cannot function without some way to disseminate information. In fact, many of our current major problems were caused by a lack of, or faulty, information: the war in Iraq and the sub-prime housing crisis that caused the current economic recession being two major examples.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but that power carries with it the responsibility to exercise that freedom. America's founders, for all their flaws, recognized the need for the media to inform American citizens. The fact that it appears before the right to bear arms shows that the founders saw informed citizens as more important and more powerful than armed citizens. (Although this was taken to an extreme with literacy requirements to vote, but this was more about class control than maintaining an informed voting bloc).
With the guarantee of freedom of the press comes the guarantee of freedom of information for citizens. Any American citizen can become informed about politics and current events simply by reading a newspaper once a day.
And like freedom of the press and freedom of speech, that right carries a responsibility. Specifically, the responsibility to be informed. Failing to educate yourself about current events, failing to be informed about the issues is failing to do your part for your community and country. Willful ignorance is the reason so many citizens work against their own economic interests, the reason the entrenched political power structure is never challenged, the reason America has a tiny voting population. A majority of Americans say they are "disillusioned" with their leaders, yet a majority of Americans also never vote and do not take the time to be informed about major issues.
A central tenet of most conspiracy theories is the cover-up. The idea that the people in power, be they the government, corporations, the Illuminati, or the Mole People (actually, this last one is real), are hiding important information from the American people. The truth is that important facts are rarely hidden. Instead, they are simply ignored. The Bush administration did not cover up warrantless wiretapping, Guantanamo waterboarding, corporate deregulation, or the infrastructure failures of Katrina. The stories were reported. But once again, a majority of American citizens simply didn't care to follow the issues, to become informed about what was going on. There is no need for cover-ups when making the facts publicly available has the same effect.
Becoming informed won't solve all of America's problems. But it may finally stop us from ignoring them. I implore everyone to find a reporter, a newspaper, a radio station they trust, and start paying attention. It doesn't take long. Take an hour a day and become informed. You'll be doing more than just improving yourself: you'll be doing your part as an American citizen to help your country.
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