yes

. . .

James Deane politely fudges an answer as to which is more important - media or elections - but is bang on when he says the media is a low priority in democratic capacity building.

What he does not say is why.

If we hold up modern notions of "political correctness" to a mirror, our reflection shows ample evidence instead of corporate correctness - rampant, mindless consumerism chewing through global resources at many times more than we have resources for.

Global corporates have steadily and secretly downgraded the importance of elections by gaining control and then sidelining media voices, leading to less and less participation in the democratic process.

So yes, media are way, way more important to democratic processes than elections.

Elections are merely the means by which a theoretically informed citizen can cast her or his vote for the candidate of their choice, enabling a renewal of mandate for governing democracy. If there is no media, there is no information for most people, meaning democracy is for most purposes defunct.

Such is the state of play that we have today, with wars started on a lie, spread as thinly disguised propaganda by media embedded with public power structures whose primary motive is to deliver the maximum profit to those who support them best - private business people.

Anyone doubting such a scenario need to take a harder look at the world around them. They need to ask whether the global economic crisis we are currently experiencing would have happened if most media were not hopelessly compromised by a media scape dominated by private ownership, and ever dwindling numbers of journalists. Speaking of which, where were the world's journalists before the collapse? Mostly parotting neoliberal tripe about the endless potential of the free market.

Fact is, with trillions of dollars mysteriously disappearing from the global economy, and billions more following by the day, free markets are now proven not to work, not even for free markets.

Look harder.

Who is bailing out the free market private sector?

The public sector.

And therein lies the answer to preventing new wars, new meltdowns. It is time to reverse course on media marginalisation and instead approach global problems with a global solution - information and media centrality. A good place to start would be in the public sector, with massive reinvestment in public broadcasters.

Like the markets, or any other sector for that matter, this risks moving power from one ill-governed sector to another, as criticised by the post above about media credibility. As the second post suggests, a resurgent public sector media could tie itself more closely to the communities it represents, gaining mandate from their input rather than undue influence from the public purse of the day.

How to do that?

By broadening public broadcaster roles to include ethics-based training for communities, creating a web2 hand-up (not hand-out) mentality by using the experiences of those who interact more widely, to more depth, more regularly than any other sector alone.

Yes, that would be the media.

After all, how often do you get to vote?

. . .

Somehow we need to tie support of a free and independent media to the communities that this media represents. Perhaps first that media needs to recognise and acknowledge that it represents a community/communities and figure out what that means within the ethical, ideally objective world of the media. Communities, individuals need to feel both engaged and represented by the media in order to feel a sense of either ownership of them ("they are reporting my experience") or leadership by them ("they have the information I need - they will help me sort through the facts").