“ I feel change comes slowly a lot times but all it takes is one person.”

–Diana Lopez, San Antonio resident.

Diana Lopez was born and raised in a San Antonio neighborhood that bordered Kelly Air Force Base. As a child, she watched the military jets take off and land from her front yard, dreaming of a day when she could take the reigns and fly high as a military pilot. She did not realize that dream because of a more pressing and devastating reality.

People started getting sick in Diana’s neighborhood.  Friends were diagnosed with cancer and ALS. Neighbors died young, unexpectedly. The very place that Diana believed would give her a new life now stood accused of environmental violations so severe that it may have sent deadly ripples through the residential areas that surrounded the 4,000-acre base. Toxic chemicals were discovered seeping from KAFB into the soil and groundwater under the surrounding neighborhoods, the result of Air Force crews dumping a chemical cocktail into open pits on the base for decades. More than 20,000 homes sit in this area now referred to as the “Toxic Triangle.”  While tests to determine if the dumping at the base caused the medical maladies have been inconclusive, the Air Force acknowledged that it is responsible for environmental contamination in the area and promised to clean it up. The clean-up continues today, two decades after the contamination was first discovered.

The history of environmental dumping and its lasting impact sent Diana in a new direction. She began working for the Southwest Worker’s Union.  At the Union, she helped engineer “The Roots of Change Community Garden.” The garden provides organic fruits and vegetables to residents in an area of San Antonio that has no outlet for pesticide-free foods.

Diana believes mainstream media often ignores stories on the environment and fails to cover issues in economically disadvantaged areas of our communities.

“On a daily basis, you hear misinformation and facts that have been essentially sort of wrung, wrung out  to paint a certain picture people want to make.”

–Dr. Michael Pramenko, Family Physician

Dr. Michael Pramenko is nationally known for his work with health care policy. A graduate of Dartmouth Medical School, he is a family physician at Primary Care Partners in Grand Junction, Colorado.

As an outspoken proponent of Grand Junction’s unique health care system, Dr. Pramenko has appeared on PBS, NPR, and NBC News. In Grand Junction, medical spending is realatively low, but healthcare quality is high. The city of 45,000 residents established a non-profit HMO that offers some free services and promotes preventative care.

Dr. Pramenko began focusing on health care policy during medical school. An interest in tobacco education led to a health policy fellowship in Washington D.C. in 1992.

He continues to pursue health policy interests. Dr. Pramenko has served two terms as President of the Mesa County Medical Society and has helped write a health reform proposal for Club 20, an organization representing the twenty counties of Western Colorado. In 2007, because of his ongoing efforts on health policy issues, he was named Family Physician of the Year by the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians.

Dr. Pramenko now serves as President-Elect of the Colorado Medical Society where he co-chairs a committee that is writing a health reform plan for consideration at the state and federal level. Dr. Pramenko believes reform efforts have been stymied by the lack of reliable reporting on the issue.

Video Photo Credits: Creative Commons

Dan Hiscocks is leading the development of pressfothePeople’s business operations. He is a successful, serial entrepreneur on his way to jump starting his seventh business. Hiscocks set up an independent book publishing company 16 years ago (www.eye-books.com) in the United Kingdom. Eye Books champions people who are “living” as opposed to merely “existing” in an increasingly mechanized world. More recently, he started another publishing services company, Can of Worms Enterprises (www.canofwormsenterprises.co.uk) seeking to harness the passion and drive of independence while offering the economies of scale of the big corporate publishers. Hiscocks is involved in a broad range of content issues and campaigns, working to decipher how to aggregate content across multi platforms to drive meaningful returns. Contact Dan at dan@pressforthepeople.com.

Please help us establish a pressforthePeople by taking our survey.

We asked: “What business model would you be willing to support to guarantee that you and others have access to high quality, rigorously non-partisan, and original news reporting about issues you care about?”

The possible answers were:

I think journalism should always be free and fully supported by advertising.

I think journalism should always be free and fully supported by the government.

I think journalism should always be free and fully supported by volunteer contributions.

I’m willing to pay a modest monthly fee, perhaps as much as a coffee drink, to guarantee that truly independent reporting occurs on issues that I care deeply about.

I’m willing to pay a little more per month, perhaps as much as a dinner at a restaurant for one, to guarantee that truly independent reporting occurs on a range of issues that are important to society.

I think the answer is a combination of the above.

I think the answer is something entirely different from the options listed above.

Survey Takers said They’d Pay:

One-out-of-three survey takers volunteered that they would pay a subscription fee as a primary guarantor of their access to reliable, non-partisan information. A combined one-in-ten said journalism should be free and fully supported by either advertising, the government or donations.

The willingness of pressforthePeople survey takers to pay for news is more dramatic when it is part of a collection of revenue streams meant to guarantee the existence of reliable information in the future. Eight-three percent of survey takers either opted for subscriptions as the outright solution or as part of a solution that also included revenue from advertising, government and donations.

We asked our survey takers to explain their opinion, and many dove right into an issue that seems as difficult for news consumers to answer as it is for news companies to solve.

Bob Pendleton of Alameda, California says journalism should be free and supported by the government. “It’s taken me years to lose faith in advertiser-supported journalism. But I have seen so many examples of biased reporting that I must blame advertising. In a country with a vibrant democracy, government-supported journalism can work, because the interest groups will keep journalism honest. But this model would not work in a dictatorship.”

One survey taker from Havana, Florida advocated for a completely new model: “I like the approach that part of the purchase price of certain items (radios, TVs, computers, books, kindles, etc.) be used to finance media — along with government sponsored tax breaks as another source of funding. Caveat being that news sources that are funded in this way MUST be assiduously nonpartisan. If you want to finance partisan, that must be paid for totally privately and labeled as such.”

“Many people used to pay for their news in the form of the local newspaper, but when reporting became shoddy and irrelevant they stopped paying,” wrote one Texan who supports a subscription price for news. “I believe in capitalism, so I believe if someone offers a valuable service such as unbiased journalism, the market will pay a fair price for it. I also believe in the real time shift of news to an Internet environment, which is another reason for the collapse of the daily newspaper.

“This is the million-dollar question,” writes Bonnie Marshall of Minneapolis, MN. “I do not, at this time, have a definitive answer. I do know that we get the journalism we deserve, and so far we haven’t paid for anything other than subscriptions (that are then used to build advertising formulas). I think there should be a diverse income stream of both public and private support. Check in on how this model is doing: http://www.minnpost.com/ I believe after 1-2 years they are making it with private support, but they cannot afford to pay their reporters a living wage. Even the St. Pete Times is struggling with the private support they have. These are the difficult questions of post-modern America. Our information is fractured and muddy and overly commercialized. Our democracy is at stake.”

Our democracy is indeed at stake, and we need your help. Please add your comment to this conversation. If you haven’t taken the survey, please take it now. If you have taken the survey, please invite friends and family do the same. We feel an informed public is at the heart of democracy, and more than anything, our goal is to find a way to guarantee access to quality reporting on issues that impact our lives.

Paul

Team member Terri Chappell is an Emmy-winning journalist, with experience reporting from the field and the anchor desk, from locations around the U.S. and across the world. She has been recognized for her documentaries on Russia’s medical care crisis and overcrowded orphanages and the fight for religious freedom in Cuba. Most recently, she spent more than a decade anchoring the news at the Tribune-owned KDAF-TV in Dallas. She helped found the widely applauded “A Child to Love” project, a weekly series highlighting the plight of children in foster care. Contact Terri at terri@pressforthepeople.com.

Team Member James Moore is an Emmy-winning television news correspondent, an award winning documentary film producer, and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years and has covered every presidential campaign since 1976. He is a sought after voice in the political spectrum, with columns published in leading newspapers around the world, and is preparing to publish his 4th book.  Contact Jim at jim@pressforthepeople.com.

Jim Moore makes the case for our model of journalism on Dog Canyon.

Team member Jade Kurian has nearly 20 years experience in print and broadcast journalism, travelling extensively, domestically and internationally to cover some of the biggest stories. Most recently, as a national correspondent for HD News (High-Definition News), she reported from the tsunami in Banda Aceh, the Pope’s Funeral in Rome, Hurricane Katrina, and several Presidential campaigns. With experience on the ground in a start-up news operation and in a previous management role, Kurian intimately understands the current challenges of the industry, but believes that ultimately journalism is a public service that must be protected and encouraged. Contact Jade at jade@pressforthepeople.com.

“When the the stockholders’ bottom lines become more important than the product they deliver, then that product dies,” Steve Daniels of Dallas, Texas answered. “If that product is the ‘fourth estate,’  then you risk a country as we know it dying.”

Finances were also on the mind of one respondent from Boerne, Texas. “With the exceptions of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, the media seem to be suffering from a “bottom-line” mentality.  All that are attempting to do actual news reporting are losing financial support.  Most seem to be pandering to their particular audience and stopped being objective long ago.   Even those that make some attempt to tell both sides of an issue mistakenly give equal weight to each extreme and make little attempt to distinguish outright falsehood from truth.”

The idea that simply including two sides of a story approximated accuracy bothered a lot of people who took the poll. “With the media, everything is black or white,” Thomas Moon wrote. “For instance, if there is a discussion on major media networks, it is deemed “balanced” if a Democrat and a Republican go at each others’ throats.  The media no longer mediate civil discussions on any topic.  Moreover, they tend to exacerbate the possibility of unrealistic scenarios by the all-too-frequent teaser (ex: Will mouthwash give you cancer?  Answer at 11.)  As a scientist, I abhor most media outlets with the exception of NPR.”

Jeanne Burns expressed similar concerns by writing, “I’m frustrated that “fair and balanced” reporting equals the same coverage on all sides. For instance, I was at a rally where there were probably 20,000 people, and I saw 20 counter-protesters. But they got as much coverage in all the news outlets as we did. This applies to any public debate going on–the media doesn’t dig deep enough to get at what the real issues are in a debate. Someone on the right says “Obama isn’t a citizen,” and it gets coverage. Someone calls a public health care option “socialist” or “communist,” and the media leaves it at that. The same thing happens the other way around too.”

“I feel that the media today are only giving us the stories that they think we want to hear.  I’m tired of hearing biased reports and half stories.  I want the whole truth on subjects that matter to the American people.  I don’t care about Kim Kardashian’s sister getting pregnant. I don’t care if Jon and Kate Plus 8 are getting a divorce. I don’t want over-sensationalized stories or scare media (as in H1N1),” Jennifer Thorndyke commented.

The comments about the media weren’t all bad, though. One respondent complimented a specific journalist from Austin, Texas. “I think Jim McNabb does a nice job of reporting what’s going on in Austin with his blog. He’s a journalist with ethics who knows there are two sides to every story,” Cathy Conley wrote and she wishes others upheld the same high standard.  “Journalists are supposed to be held to a higher standard. Journalists are taught about libel and slander.   I am a former reporter who later taught reporting classes. I told my students I did NOT want to know their religion, political affiliation, or even their favorite food because they had to be objective reporters of fact.”

The media can change for the better, and you can help. Join the conversation and please spread the word so that others can also speak up.

Please voice your opinion on the media by taking our survey.