The next press

By Bill Kraus

Even though the business model for the traditional newspaper business no longer works, we are told we needn’t worry because the internet delivery system will soon be universal.

More and more newspapers are delivering more and more often and even exclusively via the internet, which is fine but not good enough.

The internet is like a library. It is a social center. It has all the knowledge in the world at hand. It has newspapers. It has everything a library has, and it has it on steroids.

The internet is a scholarly medium, newspapers are a sciolistic one.

Like a professor lecturing in a classroom, newspapers are a quaint, ancient way to transmit knowledge and information. Both are widely criticized. Neither has been surpassed. The other mass media are time and content limited. Only newspapers are designed in ways that inadvertently widen the readers’ worlds.

The jock who starts with the sports section can stumble over the story in the society section about Bill Veeck’s widow and her friend whose husband covered baseball when Veeck integrated the American League. The social butterfly is exposed to a story about the remarkable Mary Fisher who taught a Republican Convention about AIDS.

Voters must take time to fact check about nation's debt crisis

By Cal Potter

Now that we are in the midst of a political campaign season, we are faced with a blizzard of accusations, many lacking any factual base. Such is the case with the causal factors for the nation’s debt.

When President Clinton left office, this nation had a balanced budget. And had the succeeding Bush administration not cut taxes on the wealthy, entered us into two unfunded wars and the nation not been cast into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the fact is this nation today would have no debt at all.

Not only did the recession begin during the later Bush era, but the expensive bailout measures also began during that previous administration. Economists tell us the Democrat and Republican supported bailouts prevented this nation from falling into a full-fledged depression, as well as saved and returned to health, the American car industry.

So, the political rhetoric accusing President Obama, the inheritor of political and economic mismanagement, including that of our Wall Street stock and bank private sector decision-makers, is either deliberate fraud on the part of the accusers, or an example of gross ignorance of happenings over the past 12 years.

As we cannot avoid the billions of right-wing corporate and affluent individual media dollars to be spent in the weeks ahead to character assassinate an intelligent and honorable president, voters should at least take time to fact check accusations. There are a number of very reputable political fact-check sources on the Web. An educated electorate, who know the facts, is an essential ingredient in a truly functional democracy. Without that condition, special interest individuals and groups will successfully manipulate the system to serve their own selfish interests and financial gain, at the expense of the majority of average Americans.

Calvin Potter is a member of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board and a former Democratic State Representative (1975-1991) and State Senator (1991-1998) from Sheboygan Falls.

13% is no solution

By Bill Kraus

This is being written almost two weeks after the Wisconsin primary election.

I have contacted every imaginable media source and have checked the website of the Government Accountability Board (GAB) in an attempt to find out what the statewide voter turnout was for that election.

No one seems to know. The not-so-current posting by GAB tells us the primary election will be held on August 14.

A helpful soul who seems to be in charge of the public television website--wisconsinvote.org--has made several inquiries and come up blank.

I concede that it is a small thing--like an unrepaired broken window--but it seems to me to be symptomatic of larger problems that beset us: the localization of news and the partisanization of elections.

My interest was aroused when the guests on Joy Cardin’s talk show on the Friday after the primary agreed that the turnout was around 13 percent. Neither cited a source, but both seemed confident that they had it right. If they did, the next obvious question is why doesn't anyone in the news business consider this extremely low turnout newsworthy enough to deserve a story or more, like a lament.

Is this yet another symptom of what has happened to the information flow in our reporter-deprived democracy?