News in America

News media exert a powerful influence on political matters as they are the source of all popular political knowledge. Without a functioning news media a democracy is harmful, tolerating high levels of incompetence. An essential criterion of a complex adaptive system is a judgment mechanism that prohibits harmful behavior. Due to their power, incompetent politicians are harmful and can create strong negative consequences.

An essential responsibility of news media is to enforce accountability, as without extensive coverage a legislature would be useless. It is the citizens who provide the final judgment of accountability. It is however impossible to make an intelligent decision without a clear understanding of the salient elements. Politics is basically a very simple system as only a few people are involved in final decision-making. As long as there is a way for citizens to understand everything the government does, which is fairly easy, a democracy will self-improve. But without a mechanism to discard incompetent decision-makers, regression becomes much more likely.

Influential news media, despite their large budgets and resources, are unable to provide the duty they are responsible to deliver. Fox News leads the way (All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing)— as satire to what news media is supposed to deliver. Access to information relies too heavily on subjective sources. Instead of having access to valuable information in clear and systematic processes, journalists have to hunt for their information. While it may provide a poetic legacy to the profession of journalist, the information bandwidth is simply too small for important information to receive the attention it deserves.

The evolving Internet is most likely to become the source and medium of transmission, a complex adaptive system provided with the tools to generate sufficient computation and communications capacity to access intelligent decision-making networks.