Body of Love, 56th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I have a question about the news. Why must it be delivered to us by big corporations? Print media, television, etc. - all the news outlets are owned by mega-corporations with profit margins, growth goals, and an understandable desire to minimize loss and liabilities. 

Follow-up question: what role (positive role, that is) do those billionaire owners have in the delivery of news to the public? Just what exactly, on a more-or-less daily basis, does Jeff Bezos do at the Washington Post?

Obviously, these billionaire owners want to imprint their own personal world views on the news that's delivered to us, and as the mega-conglomerates get larger and larger, we get fewer and fewer owners and fewer and fewer points of view.

Worse, the corporations own other companies and to meet their growth goals, they have to acquire still more companies, to the point that they've gotten so big and monopolistic that further mergers require government approval and waivers of anti-trust laws, so the billionaire owners kowtow to the government and self-censor to curry favor. Instead of holding the rich and powerful accountable, they end up being mouthpieces and propagandists for the powerful due to late-stage capitalism.

There are some independent journalists out there that bravely operate on low-cost to free platforms, like Substack and other social media. But each independent can only cover one or two news stories a day, and a full understanding of current events requires following a number of issues simultaneously for context, including politics, both national and local, economics, culture, and climate. As much as I can appreciate one writer's nuanced view on the situation in Gaza, for instance, and another's on warming trends in the Arctic, it's exhausting to endlessly search through social media for a full contextual understanding of all those events. 

Interdependence: What's happening in Gaza has a bearing on what's happening in Ukraine, which has a bearing on the Chinese intentions toward Taiwan, which will affect the production and cost of microchips and development of AI, which affects energy and climate change, which causes extreme weather events and could result in the cancellation of a game in the World Series. 

But I get it (I think) - it's expensive to operate a studio, even if you're "broadcasting" only on YouTube, there are costs in assembling and publishing an on-line  newspaper, and top writing and reporting talent understandably doesn't want to work for free or for life-of-poverty wages. Enter the big corporations and their built-in biases.    

If you're waiting on me to reveal the answer, sorry, I don't have one. The situation sucks. The government could step in Teddy Roosevelt-style, all rough-riding and trust-busting, and break up the news outlets and media companies the way they broke up Ma Bell, but since they've now got the media behaving the way they like, the government has little motivation to change the status quo. Someone else will have to take the lead.

Oprah? If she's reading this, a weary nation needs her help right now.