The American public has become largely confused by believing that we need to look to the media to provide solutions to our political problems.

In reality media’s role is to be the diagnostic compartment of the solution. They diagnose the problem, and then through a presentation of the facts they allow the public to come to their own conclusion for the solution.

Next the people as citizens go out into the public square, organized as a popular movement, and seek out the representative that agrees to implement the determined cure for the given aliment.

This is the angle from which our founding fathers approached government. They did not want men with rigid ideologies running for office, trying to persuade the public for the duration of their campaigns.

The way our system works right now, the public gets the whole shebang on the front end. They first have an ideology spoon-fed to them and then have ideologues in the media prop up and support these ideological candidates, who are for the most part transfixed in the left-right paradigm.

This is where somebody like Amy Goodman does a great job as a journalist at presenting the facts and offering a clear diagnosis. Examples of her great work cover a variety of topics from her various pieces on the wars, torture and the trashing of civil liberties. Even though it is not a secret that Amy Goodman is a full fledged liberal, she doesn’t repeatedly preach solutions; she covers stories and presents facts.

And most importantly the viewer/listener gets the sense that she truly has the best interest of the country in mind. I disagree with her solutions, but I engage her ideas because her desire is genuine. She is unlike those who preach ideologies because they hope to corner a particular market of the newspaper or television news. While she may give a voice to her ideology she doesn’t sit there and read the platform. And that is a key difference.

Goodman is consistently attacked by Libertarians and the Right, but she attacks the left/right paradigm as much as any person in the alternative media. She has candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader on her show consistently. A Libertarian would be much better served having a public debate between a Ron Paul and a Ralph Nader or a Dennis Kucinich than an Obama/McCain slaughter in the mainstream media.

The public is served better by viewing a fight between two sides to an argument in which both have the best interests of the public at heart, rather than both sides openly serving corporate interests and Wall Street.

Goodman gives voice to the issues that are agreed upon and off the table in a mainstream McCain/Obama or Bush/Kerry debate. Contemporary issues that demonstrate this point are the relevancy of the occupation of Afghanistan, the war on drugs or the prison industrial complex.

The real crux of the issue that we need to be willing to deal with in the alternative movements and the alternative media is that we are not going to go from an economic partnership of federal government and corporations in private industry, which results in economic fascism, to a libertarian utopia at warp speed. We need to make incremental steps and that happens through discussion involving both ends of the spectrum.

Nobody would question Goodman’s exposing of the Bush administration. But for evidence that she has been at both sides of the corporate elite for many years one needs to look no further than
“>this interview (the interview starts at 3:55) with then President Bill Clinton on the day George W. Bush was “elected” president.