Walter Lippmann and John Dewey argued over the character and quality of American democracy in the 1920s with each offering devastating but almost perfectly oppositional critiques. In many ways, they were both correct, but the problems each identified have only metastasized. The media are supposed to be the watchdogs of democracy and as well as our surrogates in its practice. This idea was always an idealized one, but increasingly it has become more and more difficult to sustain if one looks at the cold hard reality of both our media and our political system. Eric Alterman, prolific author, media critic, and columnist for The Nation, visits Zócalo to explore the emergence of what he calls America’s "pseudo-democracy."