Independent Press is to Democracy, what bees are to agriculture.

[ThoughtCriminal]

When they die out, the results are catastrophic

Newspapers were once the means of an informed public. Once they were taken over by corporate ownership with CEO-powered agendas, 24-hour TV news bites, and replaced by social media echo chambers, journalism became an endangered species. We are seeing the consequences every day.

[SheltieLover]

1. Great analogy!

And I couldn't agree more!

[usaf-vet]

2. You mean with out the first the second dies which then sadly ends our existence.

Without bees and other pollinators, life itself will end.

[Igel]

3. That's the meme.

The science is a bit different.

https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence has a good summary and then a lot of wordage to provide details.

This isn't a new finding--this was known many years ago, before CCD and other trends were observed.

Don't like that source's science, try https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8396518/ : "Around the world, 5–8% of crop production would be lost without animal pollination [25], and pollination also provides many services to ecosystems, such as enhancing biodiversity and increasing food production without threatening the environment." Bees are animals.

Now, bees enhance the output quite a bit. They are especially important in crops that aren't sold en masse, like corn and wheat and barley--cocoa, peppers, almonds, a lot of crops that have greater cash value and are economically but not that incredibly calorically or nutritionally important. Even those aren't 100% dependent on animal pollination for survival because a lot of agricultural products that have yields greatly increased by pollinators like bees still have some production without them. Even my poor suffering pawpaws, which "require" cross-pollination for any fruit production, still selfs and sets the occasional pawpaw while I try to get a peer pawpaw to survive long enough to produce a flower and pollen (between drought and dogs and simply too much heat the li'l saplings just give up, go dormant, and never awake). (I have yet to see a honeybee near the pawpaw flower, though; ants and some wasps and other kinds of bees, sure.)

[misanthrope]

4. Are you familiar with a movie entitled "Citizen Kane"?

Newspaper magnates and conglomerates aren't new and neither are their sometimes nefarious aims. That said, you're right in that independent press is an indispensable check on power. But even they maintained their influence through most of the 20th century.

What killed our media model and the role of print was the internet. It gutted revenue streams like classified advertising that provided the funding for investigative reporting and healthier sized newsrooms.