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.

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.

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.

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.

America's Founding Fathers thought freedom of the press important enough in preserving our constitutional liberties that they added the guarantee of a free press into the Bill of Rights.

At that time, there was no "big media." The "press" was literally a printing press, most often run by the local printer (think Ben Franklin).

Today we might think of it as an individual who writes a pamphlet and takes it down to the corner copy store, then sells a few hundred individual copies. There was no such thing as a mass audience. No radio. No television. No Internet. No Nielsen ratings. No audience demographics. The biggest audience went to the person with the best ideas and the biggest voice on the local street corner.

Yet somehow – against all odds – the press of that day got the job done. Information was disseminated, and people drew their own conclusions by talking with friends and neighbors and listening to political candidates who stood on the street corner and gave their speeches.

Fast forward to the growth of big media, Nielsen audiences and advertiser demographics. Big media became big business. News was disseminated from the top down: Big media controlled what became news because they reported, or failed to report, it.

Through the opinion pages, big media also told a less connected, more harried society what to think about the news big media reported. This slowly moved off the opinion pages and onto the news pages, where it was labeled "analysis."

Freedom of the press had become a method of controlling people – primarily how they would vote at election time. Our freedom now depended on the morals and ethics of the people who worked for big media.

Big media have eliminated the middle man – the citizen – and now seek to directly control what our elected representatives see and hear, and what they think about it. And because of the cozy atmosphere in Washington, D.C., this works, more often than not.

Voting stockholder shares in most big media are controlled by small groups of uber-wealthy, old-money families. Most shareholders have no vote. These families have lived off the previous generation's wealth-creation efforts, and they have no idea of how a nation's wealth is created and grows. But they still "know" what is best for all the rest of us commoners, based on their long history of leaching off earlier family generations.

Don't believe me? The sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch is very instructive. Even when these few families sold the paper and got the money, they still wanted an agreement in place to control how the news was being reported.

From a bedrock of freedom to a tool of totalitarianism, the Fourth Estate has turned into the Fourth Reich. It's been quite a journey for freedom of the press. And quite a journey for America.