By Mackenzie Madison
<[email protected]>

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the decline of print media and the push toward online news sources. But as that decline becomes more prevalent, the “real” news becomes less prevalent, especially the news concerning the government.

As media declines, the public becomes less informed since the media does not have the means to get the information they need that turns into the stories they publish. Because they are not getting this information, the public is left in the dark. Now that’s okay when the public is not receiving the latest news on “Brad-Jolenia” (trust me, the world would be a lot better without those types of publications). But this lack of information is sort of scary when it has to do with a lack of information coming from the government.

If that wasn’t enough, it is also frightening to have an administration in office that supports more government control. The government could easily take over the media if it pleased in the current weak state that the media is in.

Pardon my biased views, but I see a second coming of the Pravda (The Pravda was the only newspaper in communist Russia and was controlled and censored by the government).

For instance, earlier this year, in March, major cell phone provider AT&T dropped all it’s employees’ health care benefits. Under Obama’s new health care plan, everyone has to be covered by health care, or health care from the government would be supplied for them at the expense of the company (if the company is not/no longer supplying health care benefits). But AT&T realized that by dropping all their employees’ benefits, they would actually be saving money, a major loophole in the system. Once Congress found out about this lucrative loophole, they wanted to meet with AT&T. They hoped to settle this before the media got word of this to come up with a solution so that other companies could not reap the benefits.

Obviously Congress didn’t succeed at stopping the word from getting out.

We can thank our media for that. Fortunately there is enough left of America’s media that someone picked up on it. But with the decline of media, if this had happened a few years down the road, this event could have been easily over looked.

Luckily, the new online frontier for news also sheds some hope. The web can be changed at anytime (news flashes and updates) and there is also a little more free reign on the web, but even that doesn’t won’t save the media if it is controlled by the government.

Overall, there is always a question whether or not we can trust the media, but certainly with this decline, the question becomes more prevalent.