Planetized Journalism

Meta-democracy III

By John Taylor; 2008 March 15, 14 Ala, 164 BE

Today I want to speculate about how a meta-democratic polity might come into being. In the two previous essays, Meta-democracy I and II, we finished off discussing how popular liberation movements around the world are strangulated at birth by so-called "transitionologists," a cadre of globe trotting economists and other experts implementing a narrow, fundamentalist conception of what they call globalization. They operate without check because the international scene is a desolate no-man's-land, largely ignored by education and even the mass media. The first goal of a democratically elected world government should be to domesticate this savage territory beyond national borders, first of all by changing the nature of the trades and professions.

Journeymanship

Although many professions are important, in the early stages of implementing a world government the most crucial by far is journalism. The press and mass media are the eyes of humanity. No advanced organism can afford to place the eyes anywhere but right next to the brain. The amount and speed of processing of visual information is just too great to allow for any distancing, delegation or privatization. And so it must be in a world polity. To use yesterday's example from the history of the 1990's, it is unlikely that the liberation movements of Russia and South Africa would have been so easily plundered if there had been effective reporting on the fate of previous "transitions." So I will use journalism as my first example of how meta-democratic journeymanship might bring a profession up to world class standards.

Media corporations are the main trust to bust. The first act of a world government will be to put an end to private ownership of media corporations. Legislation would ensure that the public always maintains a controlling interest in every medium, be it print, broadcast or internet. Daily operations on the local level would be strictly mentored and staffed by the teaching profession. As it is now, press organizations intentionally pay entry level reporters less than teenage kitchen workers at fast food outlets so as more easily to control the content and ideological slant of what is reported on. Instead, local teachers would elect entry level reporters from among their ranks, and since they have a wider influence, the reporter would be on a higher pay scale than rank and file classroom teachers. And, as with university professors, tenure would protect the freedom of speech of experienced reporters.

Local reporters would be encouraged to study for regional qualification by means of apprenticeships with regional news organizations. Since they are already experienced teachers, part of their regional qualification would include teaching classes in regional civics to members of other trades who are also working for journeymanship in their respective specialties. Editors and other managers of regional press organs would be freely elected from among journeyman regional reporters. These managers would report to a board of publishers with diverse representation from the region, including government, civil service, business, agriculture, faith groups and so forth.

A reporter would earn the right to call herself a journalist by earning a doctorate in international studies and serving a concurrent apprenticeship that would include living for a time in selected cities on other continents and reporting for the world press from the world parliament. This qualification would help assure that world issues are reported on by qualified writers, and since any reporter at any level could earn a higher pay scale by becoming a journalist, the local level would be systematically illuminated by first-hand knowledge from the global level.

The qualification of journalist would also give a regional reporter voting privileges to elect continental journalists, editors and managers. These would work in press organs at the continental level, and they in turn would vote for permanent members of the planetary press corps.

This model of professional meta-democracy would apply for every other profession. As for the trades, these would have a different career path to the journeyman level. I will discuss this later.