Elect your editor Voting for our media representatives is an idea with legs BY LISA CRAIG

Journalists are gatekeepers. They stand in uniform at the top of the community’s driveway and decide what vehicles can pass through. Some they wave in on arrival, smiling. Some they question and allow by. Some they ransack, turn inside and out at the checkpoint. Some they escort. Some they turn away.

It’s an important job, filtering information for the public. What the gatekeepers allow through becomes what we know, what we talk about, what we hear about. The articles on our newspaper pages define us like the rules of a gated community. It’s how we know when to mow our lawns, when to put out our garbage, what color our mailboxes should be, and when a block-party happens.

It’s a big job, providing all that important information and deciding what to disregard. A big job, but anyone can do it — because that’s all it is: a job. Factories hire assembly-line workers. Theaters hire ticket-takers. Communities hire gatekeepers. Newspapers hire journalists.

The people filtering the information for our communities are people a media company hires. Some are the First-Amendment advocating, bottom-of-the-story-getting, sensationalism-sensitive great minds. Some are political soldiers charging through gray areas to find the black-and-white story to print. Some are battle-weary: tired of politics, tired of deadlines, tired of truth-seeking — but also too tired to start a new profession. Some are parents. Some are the sons and daughters of media owners. Some are kids right out of journalism school. Some never went to school. But, the thing is, we have no way of knowing exactly who is filtering the information we get. And we should.

Just like political officials, journalists should be elected. We ought to be able to select who’s standing at our gate. Who’s greeting us, and how they are treating our visitors and our community. We should critique their credentials, their beliefs, their performance. If we like the job they do, we keep them on. If we don’t, we elect someone else to do it. It’s an important enough duty that we, as a society, need to have some control over it.

Every position? No, just as government has appointed officials hired by the people we elect, so too would we have to trust our elected editors and columnists to hire on decent obit writers (assuming we don’t charge for that service, in our perfect world). But editor of the local daily or uber-powerful alt-weekly? Every four years, we’d go to the polls (this could be an Internet-only or " Best of " ballot kind of thing, to save money). Same thing with national talking heads — or maybe we wouldn’t elect them at all, considering they’re not really reporting anyway. No one’s saying we should elect celebrities.

Columnists might get six-year terms. Beat writers would be more like congressmen, elected by their districts every two years (often, the turnover’s more frequent than that anyway). Everyone knows the editorial product doesn’t have anything to do with sales (it’s all marketing, baby), anyway, so there’s no reason to think this would affect a media operation’s business vitality.

By taking ownership of media by electing our gatekeepers, we will no longer be able to blame the media for all that’s wrong with America. It will be just as much our own fault as any. An election would allow us to be the sponsors of American journalism, not the media-buying corporate giants who have been the only party allowed to vote.

Lisa Craig can be reached at lcraig@phx.com