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Radio Active Magazine
A locally produced program where activist groups in the Kansas City area present interviews, commentary, editorials, and other thought provoking content on a weekly basis.
Victor Pickard claims that information is a public good: It is in your best interests and mine to help supporters of our worst enemies get information they want, because doing so will make it harder for their leaders and ours to convince us to support policies that may threaten our lives and futures to please those who control most of the money for the media. Research suggests that better media reduces political corruption and improves the quality of life for the vast majority. News deserts, ghost newspapers, and major media conglomerates have the opposite effect, encouraging public officials to clandestinely reward campaign contributors to the detriment of the electorate. Major media are not likely to expose this corruption, because they make money selling advertising to the beneficiaries of that political corruption and from increasing political polarization and violence.1 Research by McChesney and Nichols suggests that most people alive today benefit from subsidies for newspapers in the US in the early 1800s, which encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which helped the new US stay together and grow both in land area and economically, while contemporary New Spain / Mexico fractured, shrank, and stagnated economically.2 People in other countries benefit from scientific advances that would not have occurred without that diverse media environment.
Pickard is a media studies scholar and a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on the intersections of US and global media activism and politics and the role of the media in political economy.3 He is also the Chair of the Board of Free Press. He has written or edited six books, including (2014) America’s Battle for Media Democracy and (2020) Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.4
copyright 2024 Victor Pickard and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.
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1. Victor Pickard (2023-05-12) “Another Media System is Possible: Ripping Open the Overton Window, from Platforms to Public Broadcasting”, Javnost – The Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, 30(2). Also, Victor Pickard (2020) Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press). See also, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government“, accessed 2024-12-06.
2. Wikiversity, “The Great American Paradox“.
3.Wikipedia, “Victor Pickard (professor)“.
4. Free Press Board.
