Fraudcast News: How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies (Electronic book text)

With riots and demonstrations on the streets and protest camps in dozens of cities around the world, political systems everywhere are in the spotlight. For Western representative democracies, that means people waking up to the illusion of influence in occasional votes versus their lack of any real power. They are finding how money acts via corporations, financial markets and a minority elite to occupy the vacuum. Fraudcast News, the confessions of an ex-Reuters reporter, dissects media's failure to highlight people's powerlessness. It shows how journalism, far from acting as a popular watchdog, suffers just the same problems of capture as governments themselves. Yet this book is a work of optimism and promise. Its conclusions lay out how ordinary citizens can revolutionise their democracies by revolutionising journalism, building from the grassroots upwards.