Dale Maharidge Analysis

Journalism is the only type of media that is protected by the U.S. Constitution and is required by democracy. People often forget the reason for this; our country was built off freedom of press. Our forefathers fought to say and publish whatever they wished against the government and to keep people informed. Our media today is mostly in shambles and concentrates on entertainment more than anything. Real journalism, which talked about the serious issues, sought to inform citizens enough so that we may make our own decisions; apart from the shining few journalists that practice this principle, it has been all but abandoned. Dale Maharidge is one of those few. In his 2009 interview with the Huffington Post, Maharidge discusses the matters of the …show more content…
Maharidge comments on this by saying: “This is a poor country. We 're a nation of the working poor, and it 's something that people don 't want to acknowledge.” As people turn away from the issue, they leave the decision making to others, who aren’t informed on what’s really happening at the bottom of this country “– the bottom being the vast majority of Americans,” as Maharidge put it. Campbell’s text highlights this by stating: “As the advocates of public journalism acknowledge, people have grown used to letting their representatives think and act for them.” This act of letting representatives speak for a whole class of people can be tied to hegemony. Campbell’s book has a chapter titled Media Economics and the Global Marketplace, in where hegemony is described as: “the acceptance of the dominant values in a culture by those who are subordinate to those who hold economic and political power.” In a world where people aren’t as informed as they should be and leave everything up to representative to decide, democracy becomes hegemony. Basically, Americans and journalists are letting democracy slip which, in turn, only fuels our