Cory Doctorow's Broken Promises is itself broken.
https://doctorow.medium.com/broken-promises-175b48418e4
The UNESCO report Many Voices One World, also called the "MacBride Report" of 1980 warned explicitly against what has happened, and is worth reading for its prescience and continuing truth.
Reagan destroyed this great report too, like Cory said. But this time by refusing to allow the USA to sign off on the report. Like Cory said. Read the Wikipedia article on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBride_report.
For example, to quote: "we have seen the extension of written communication from minorities to majorities; we have seen the press expanding from its elitist origins to a democratic style, at least in range and appeal; and we have also seen, in the countries where the mass press originated, the increasing predominance of a commercial structure and a commercial outlook. However, the pace of all these changes led to harmful disparities both between countries and within them, as well as [harmful disparities] towards diversity, pluralism and a great variety of communication patterns, both at various development levels and inside countries belonging to different socio-political systems. We may also conclude that such an evolution - in fact the roots of the present - merits close study and reflexion, as a stimulus for action at national and international levels. "
UNESCO itself failed its own report's mission by still denying free access to this report by everyone in the world in the form in which it can be readily communicated. While the report can be read as an 'image only' PDF file or online, it is very long.
Buying a published copy costs $144 which, I think some of you would agree is possibly not free. Just guessing, of course, but there might be a poor person somewhere in the world that does not have the $144 to buy a copy. UNESCO is a United Nations Agency. The copyright provisions are a mess of unclear CC things that have been clearly controlled by a few publishing interests. Even small players can be evil.
There is no audio version of this book, and no alternative digital versions, even on Google. No Audible, No Kindle. So much for both the book's promoted ethics and UNESCO's promoted ethics.
Even Doctorow is belittled in his abundance of wonderful words by the abundance of wonderful words in this report. 150,000+ words.
In its abundance of "proper hope," the book, which everyone should read, recognizes, predicts, explains, and emphasizes the dark forces we have seen in today's Media. It emphasizes that all processes including curation must be democratized for, yes, humanity to survive.
They get it right.
Doctorow fails to emphasize that commercial centralization has an alternative in the alternative media that the MacBride Report finds is the solution.
That said, the MacBride Report fails to understand that the curation and contextual predication of Media content needs to be democratized in identifying its natural and inescapable biases and outright lies.
And we know, free form and content blog comments don't work. Only enforced moderated dialogue works. We've known this about uniquely human communication at least since Plato, and certainly since Descartes...
The Internet Court of Lies is the only proposal out there, I believe, that proposes democratizing the control of the harms associated with modern media, without simultaneously creating yet another monster.
