Media Meltdown in a Time of Crisis

Amy Goodman, co-founder, executive producer and host of the independent news program “Democracy Now!,” writes a syndicated column that appears weekly on Truthdig. As a veteran journalist and new-media pioneer, she knows the stakes are high: “…the media are the most powerful corporations on Earth—more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile.”

Chris Hedges, an exclusive Truthdig columnist and former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, has reported from more than 50 countries and was part of the Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. In a recent commentary on the decline of media, Hedges warned: "The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind."

Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig, the award-winning progressive online news magazine, will moderate the panel. Scheer was a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for 17 years and in 1993 launched a syndicated column now based at Truthdig.