I heard this sto­ry a long time ago, grow­ing up in Choctaw Coun­ty in Okla­homa before my fam­i­ly moved to Texas. A trib­al elder was telling his grand­son about the bat­tle the old man was wag­ing with­in him­self. He said, ​“It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sor­row, greed, self-pity, guilt, resent­ment, lies, false pride, supe­ri­or­i­ty and ego. The oth­er is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, seren­i­ty, humil­i­ty, empa­thy, gen­eros­i­ty, truth, com­pas­sion and faith.”

Without a free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy

The boy took this in for a few min­utes and then asked his grand­fa­ther, ​“Which wolf won?”

The old Chero­kee replied sim­ply, ​“The one I feed.”

Democ­ra­cy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our soci­ety, media pro­vides the fodder.

Our media insti­tu­tions, deeply embed­ded in the pow­er struc­tures of soci­ety, are not pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion that we need to make our democ­ra­cy work. To put it anoth­er way, cor­po­rate media con­sol­i­da­tion is a cor­ro­sive social force. It robs peo­ple of their voice in pub­lic affairs and pol­lutes the polit­i­cal cul­ture. And it turns the debates about pro­found issues into a shout­ing match of polar­ized views pro­mul­gat­ed by par­ti­san apol­o­gists who triv­i­al­ize democ­ra­cy while refus­ing to speak the truth about how our coun­try is being plundered.

Our dom­i­nant media are ulti­mate­ly account­able only to cor­po­rate boards whose mis­sion is not life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness for the whole body of our repub­lic, but the aggran­dize­ment of cor­po­rate exec­u­tives and shareholders.

These orga­ni­za­tions’ self-styled man­date is not to hold pub­lic and pri­vate pow­er account­able, but to aggre­gate their inter­lock­ing inter­ests. Their reward is not to help ful­fill the social com­pact embod­ied in the notion of ​“We, the peo­ple,” but to man­u­fac­ture news and infor­ma­tion as prof­itable con­sumer commodities.

Democ­ra­cy with­out hon­est infor­ma­tion cre­ates the illu­sion of pop­u­lar con­sent at the same time that it enhances the pow­er of the state and the priv­i­leged inter­ests that the state pro­tects. And noth­ing char­ac­ter­izes cor­po­rate media today more than its dis­dain toward the frag­ile nature of mod­ern life and its indif­fer­ence toward the com­plex social debate required of a free and self-gov­ern­ing people.

Let’s look at what is hap­pen­ing with the Inter­net. This spring the cable giant Com­cast tried to pack a Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion (FCC) hear­ing on net­work neu­tral­i­ty by hir­ing strangers off the street to ensure that advo­cates of net neu­tral­i­ty would not be able to get a seat in the hear­ing room.

SaveTheIn​ter​net​.com – a bipar­ti­san coali­tion – and its sup­port­ers helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a new hear­ing, this time with­out the ger­ry­man­der­ing seat­ing by oppo­nents of an open Internet.

Now Rep. Ed Markey (D‑Mass.) has intro­duced a bill to advance net­work neu­tral­i­ty, and it has become an issue in the pres­i­den­tial campaign.

We must be vig­i­lant. The fate of the cyber-com­mons – the future of the mobile Web and the ben­e­fits of the Inter­net as open archi­tec­ture – is up for grabs. And the only anti­dote to the pow­er of orga­nized mon­ey in Wash­ing­ton is the pow­er of orga­nized peo­ple at the net roots.

When Ver­i­zon tried to cen­sor NARAL’s (Nation­al Abor­tion Rights Action League) use of text mes­sag­ing last year, it was quick action by Save the Inter­net that led the com­pa­ny to reverse its posi­tion. Those efforts also led to an FCC pro­ceed­ing on this issue.

Wher­ev­er the Inter­net flows – on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion sets – we must ensure that it remains an open and nondis­crim­i­na­to­ry medi­um of expression.

By 2011, the mar­ket ana­lysts tell us, the Inter­net will sur­pass news­pa­pers in adver­tis­ing rev­enues. With MySpace and Dow Jones con­trolled by News Corporation’s Rupert Mur­doch, Microsoft deter­mined to acquire Yahoo!, and with adver­tis­ers already telling some blog­gers, ​“Your con­tent is unac­cept­able,” we could poten­tial­ly lose what’s now con­sid­ered an unstop­pable long tail of con­tent offer­ing abun­dant, new, cred­i­ble and sus­tain­able sources of news and information.

So, what will hap­pen to news in the future, as the already tat­tered bound­aries between jour­nal­ism and adver­tis­ing is dis­pensed with entire­ly and as con­tent pro­gram­ming, com­merce and online com­mu­ni­ties are rolled into one prof­itably attrac­tive package?

Last year, the invest­ment firm of Piper Jaf­fray pre­dict­ed that much of the busi­ness mod­el for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it ​“com­mu­ni­tain­ment.” (Oh, George Orwell, where are you now that we need you?)

Across the media land­scape, the health of our democ­ra­cy is imper­iled. Buf­fet­ed by gale force winds of tech­no­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal and demo­graph­ic forces, with­out a tru­ly free and inde­pen­dent press, this 250-year-old exper­i­ment in self-gov­ern­ment will not make it. As jour­nal­ism goes, so goes democracy.

Merg­ers and buy­outs change both old and new media. They bring a fren­zied focus on cost-cut­ting, while fat­ten­ing the pock­ets of the new own­ers and their investors. The result: jour­nal­ism is degrad­ed through the lay­offs and buy­outs of legions of reporters and editors.

Adver­tis­ing Age reports that U.S. media employ­ment has fall­en to a 15-year low. The Los Ange­les Times alone has expe­ri­enced a with­er­ing series of res­ig­na­tions by edi­tors who refused to turn a red pen­cil into an edi­to­r­i­al scalpel.

The new own­er of the Tri­bune Com­pa­ny, real estate mogul Sam Zell, recent­ly toured his new prop­er­ty Los Ange­les Times, telling employ­ees in the news­room that the chal­lenge is this: How do we get some­body 126 years old to get it up? ​“Well,” said Zell, ​“I’m your Viagra.”

He told his jour­nal­ists that he didn’t have an edi­to­r­i­al agen­da or a per­spec­tive about news­pa­pers’ roles as civic insti­tu­tions. ​“I’m a busi­ness­man,” he said. ​“All what mat­ters in the end is the bot­tom line.”

Zell then told Wall Street ana­lysts that to save mon­ey he intends to elim­i­nate 500 pages of news a week across all of the Tri­bune Company’s 12 papers. That can mean elim­i­nat­ing some 82 edi­to­r­i­al pages every week just from the Los Ange­les Times. What will he use to replace reporters and edi­tors? He says to the Wall Street ana­lysts, ​“I’ll use maps, graph­ics, lists, rank­ings and stats.” Sounds as if Zell has con­fused Via­gra with Lunesta.

For­mer Bal­ti­more Sun jour­nal­ist and cre­ator of HBO’s The Wire, David Simon, chron­i­cled the effect that cross­cut­ting and con­sol­i­da­tion has had in media busi­ness­es and on the com­mu­ni­ties where those busi­ness­es have made so much mon­ey. He wrote in a Wash­ing­ton Post op-ed, ​“I did not encounter a sus­tained peri­od in which any­one endeav­ored to spend what it would actu­al­ly cost to make the Bal­ti­more Sun the most essen­tial and deep-think­ing and well-writ­ten account of life in cen­tral Mary­land. The peo­ple you need­ed to gath­er for that kind of sto­ry­telling were ush­ered out the door, buy­out after buyout.”

Or as jour­nal­ist Eric Alter­man recent­ly wrote in the New York­er: ​“It is impos­si­ble not to won­der what will become of not just news but democ­ra­cy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on news­pa­pers to invest their unmatched resources and pro­fes­sion­al pride in help­ing the rest of us to learn, how­ev­er imper­fect­ly, what we need to know.”

For exam­ple, we need­ed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that coun­try from rack and ruin, saved thou­sands of Amer­i­can lives and hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqi lives, and freed hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars for invest­ment in the Amer­i­can econ­o­my and infrastructure.

But as reporters at Knight Rid­der – one of the few orga­ni­za­tions that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly set out to chal­lenge the claims of the admin­is­tra­tion – told us at the time, and as my col­leagues and I report­ed in our PBS doc­u­men­tary Buy­ing the War, and as Scott McClel­lan has now con­fessed, and as the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee con­firmed in June, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion deceived Amer­i­cans into sup­port­ing an unpro­voked war on anoth­er coun­try. And it did so using erro­neous and mis­lead­ing intel­li­gence – and with the com­plic­i­ty of the dom­i­nant media. It has led to a con­flict that, instead of being over quick­ly and blood­less­ly as pre­dict­ed, con­tin­ues to this day into its sixth year.

We now know that a neo­con­ser­v­a­tive is an arson­ist who sets a house on fire and six years lat­er boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more reveal­ing mea­sure of the state of the dom­i­nant media today than the con­tin­u­ing ubiq­ui­tous pres­ence on the air and in print of the very pun­dits and experts, self-select­ed mes­sage mul­ti­pli­ers of a dis­as­trous for­eign pol­i­cy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can nev­er be too wrong.

The dom­i­nant media remains in denial about their role in pass­ing on the government’s unver­i­fied claims as facts. That’s the great dan­ger. It’s not sim­ply that they dom­i­nate the sto­ry we tell our­selves pub­licly every day. It’s that they don’t allow oth­er alter­na­tive com­pet­ing nar­ra­tives to emerge, against which the peo­ple could mea­sure the verac­i­ty of all the claims.

Now the dom­i­nant media is say­ing, ​“Well, we did ask. We did do our job by ask­ing tough ques­tions dur­ing the run-up to the war.”

But I’ve been through the tran­scripts. And I’ll tell you, you will find very few tough ques­tions. And if you come across them, you will dis­cov­er that they were asked of the wrong people.

John Wal­cott, Wash­ing­ton bureau chief for McClatchy, for­mer­ly Knight Rid­der, recent­ly said of his col­leagues in the dom­i­nant media, ​“They asked a lot of ques­tions, but they asked even the right ques­tions of the wrong peo­ple.” They were asked of the sources who had cooked the intel­li­gence books in the first place or who had mem­o­rized the White House talk­ing points and were pre­pared to answer every tough ques­tion with a soft eva­sion or an easy lie, swal­lowed by a gullible questioner.

Fol­low­ing the March 2003 inva­sion, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney dropped into a media din­ner to thank the guests for their all-the-war-all-the-time cov­er­age of the con­trived and man­u­fac­tured war.

Sad­ly, in many respects, the Fourth Estate has become the fifth col­umn of democ­ra­cy, col­lud­ing with the pow­ers that be in a cul­ture of decep­tion that sub­verts the thing most nec­es­sary to free­dom, and that is the truth.

But we’re not alone and we know what we need to say. So let us all go tell it on the moun­tains and in the cities. From our web­sites and lap­tops, the street cor­ners and cof­fee­hous­es, the delis and din­ers, the fac­to­ry floors and the book­stores. On cam­pus, at the mall, the syn­a­gogue, sanc­tu­ary and mosque, let’s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.

Democ­ra­cy only works when ordi­nary peo­ple claim it as their own.

This arti­cle was adapt­ed from Bill Moy­ers’ keynote address at the Nation­al Con­fer­ence for Media Reform Con­fer­ence in Min­neapo­lis on June 7. You can read and respond to the full speech at www​.pbs​.org/​m​oyers.