Comment Re:The medium is NOT the message (Score 1) 249
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
This is, strictly speaking, not true. It's not that no one is interested, it's that almost no one is.
And that's not practically the same thing, either. Transparency makes it so the good journalists and bloggers, those who actually somehow like sifting through all that tedious data, can, and then report the upshot to us. Transparency allows the press (when it's working correctly, which one could argue, I admit, it isn't right now) to do its job.
But it is not true that this necessarily renders everything down into sound bites. There's a world of differences between insightful commentary and five seconds of video.