Opinion: Don’t like the media? Try it out in another country

The Denver Post: Greg Moore, who served as editor of The Denver Post for 14 years, retired in March. His leadership led to four Pulitzer Prizes and several freedom of information battles when public servants tried to keep information private. When he retired, he did an interview for The Huffington Post, where he said this: “I hope people are starting to realize how important it is to have a robust, independent news operation as part of the community fabric.”

The bad news is, they aren’t. A lot aren’t anyway. Since politicians started picking up speed to slam, stigmatize, sometimes even stifle the media, I’ve seen many Americans pretty much saying good riddance. That kind of thinking is shortsighted and, more alarmingly, un-American. Although Thomas Jefferson disliked reporters himself, he said, “The only security of all is in a free press.”

Historically the press has played a paramount role in the preservation of our republic. From crooked politicians to crooked CEOs to crooked charities, from ill-formed alliances to ill-conceived wars, the press has unmasked falsehoods and malfeasance and held miscreants’ feet to the fire. Not to mention sexual offenders in the halls of power. What’s more, most of what you know about the performance of government, about the state of the union, you know from the media.

And if you don’t like the so-called “mainstream media” because you think it is a tool of the left, you have another immense and influential institution these days: talk radio (and of course Fox News), a tool of the right. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity alone attract more than 25 million listeners a week. Nobody in this society is silenced.

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