Citizens need to hold media accountable

David Klamann, Las Vegas

Saturday, April 25, 2009 | 2:02 a.m.

After reading recent letters in the Las Vegas Sun about the debate over news bias, I couldn’t help but disagree the most with the individual who told the bickering parties to redirect their energy to “feeding the poor or removing graffiti.”

It’s too bad more people don’t demand better of information outlets.

If the corporate press had been doing its job and asking tough questions, instead of acting as a mindless cheerleader for the George W. Bush administration, we wouldn’t be wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of American tax dollars in Iraq.

Or if more business journalists and “financial gurus” had questioned why lending institutions were gambling insane amounts of money on people who couldn’t possibly repay their loans, while letting their CEOs loot their companies, maybe we wouldn’t be spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars to salvage our nation’s banking system.

What we need are editors who are willing to put aside the in-depth coverage of Britney Spears and expose the pathological greed-heads who are running our nation into the ground. From what I’ve seen in the past dozen years, we don’t have hard-hitting “journalists” who expose evil — we have lazy, uninformed “information stylists,” who parrot news releases and go for the lowest common denominator.

Demanding better, honest and more complete information is never a waste of time. I have a feeling that if we’d stopped useless wars such as the one in Iraq and watched financial institutions more closely, we’d spend less time making sandwiches for the hungry and scrubbing walls clean.