Let’s say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media — daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.
Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let’s have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation’s two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.
Uh, you might find yourself saying, especially if you weren’t sure that your party would get the 90 percent, maybe that’s not such a good idea. But that’s the news media we have today.
Read the whole thing. (Via Newsbeat1).