4 ms·

Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch ne

Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved. Nor is there any conflict of interest between receiving money from the government and covering the government. If you believe the courts can be independent then you can believe that newspapers can be set up as independent entities. If you don’t believe that the courts can be independent then you are essentially saying that you don’t believe in the existence of liberal regimes, which takes us into a discussion regarding how much purity needs to be achieved by an ideal before one is willing to recognize its existence — an interesting topic but too broad to be discussed in comments on a website.

briandear 8y ago
The government should not be funding media that reports on government. No matter how independent the intent, there is an inherent conflict of interest. I oppose using my tax dollars to fund reporting about my tax dollars. NPR, for example would never report fairly on debates to eliminate subsidies for NPR. Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. To think otherwise is to live in a dream world.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail." It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing, information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance, and so much more -- all human activity. Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results. Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.
  - dantheman 8y ago
    Many would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good argument for why that would be.
    - lkrubner 8y ago
      I read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don’t have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at some point and post them to my blog.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Even if that's true, wouldn't their budget be the only thing that applies? If you could guarantee that NPR/PBS/BBC/CBC/ABC was a completely independent entity, publicly funded but otherwise completely divorced from the government, then the only issue with which they would have a direct conflict of interest would be themselves / their budget. That seems like a much better situation than what we currently have, where only large multinational corporations fund media, and therefore almost everything is a conflict of interest every single day.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  The fact that they did, in fact, report fairly on the debate over ending NPR subsidies disproves your entire point.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. The BBC is indeed trusted to report on this, as well as scandals within the BBC that have happened from time to time.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    The BBC tends to cover itself more harshly that competitors cover the bbc. On the other had they often drag entertainment into news, strictly, bake off (when it was on bbc), etc.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  To be fair, no small newspaper owned by a large corporation is going to report about their own closing fairly, but they have lots of other things they likely have to be careful about. Who would report badly on a parent company if they knew the company had a history of closing down papers that report badly on them or censoring those stories out. On the other hand, if your political system by law cannot cut funding to particular papers serving x customer base without cutting funding to all of them, it is harder to do such things. A newspaper in a city of 40,000 in northern Indiana couldn't be cut for reporting stuff the government does without the same thing happening for all the newspapers of around the same size in that state - or across the country, if that was where the funding came directly from instead of block grants that are popular. You can legislate some protections into the law, after all. And you can push for this stuff. As far was the "I oppose using my tax dollars to fund..." Unfortunately, tax dollars aren't something one can line-item. Everyone pays for things with their tax dollars that they'd rather not pay for. It is part of paying taxes. I'd rather not pay for lifetime health insurance for a congressman that serves one term, for example. I'd rather not pay for unnecessary military gear nor wars for that matter. But I understand these are part of paying taxes. Even if one is politically active and they talk to their representitives often, these things will always be the case. Just because everyone doesn't agree with everything doesn't mean much.
cookiecaper 8y ago
The court system is not a business, and it takes a lot of work and regulation to keep it relatively independent, and even then it's not foolproof. There are strict rules that apply to judges, lawyers, jurors, and everyone else involved in court proceedings to safeguard against conflicts of interest. The country's legal foundations have been constructed from the ground up to support and allow for a relatively-independent judiciary. You can't have just hand-wave all that away and act like the same level of independence will apply to private entities that take government subsidies.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  East Texas district figured out how to run the court as a racket to cash in.
cle 8y ago
> Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved. It sounds like it's "remembering more details about political events" that you really want to save. Are you sure newspapers are the only way to accomplish that?

briandear 8y ago

The government should not be funding media that reports on government. No matter how independent the intent, there is an inherent conflict of interest. I oppose using my tax dollars to fund reporting about my tax dollars. NPR, for example would never report fairly on debates to eliminate subsidies for NPR. Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. To think otherwise is to live in a dream world.

lkrubner 8y ago
We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail." It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing, information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance, and so much more -- all human activity. Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results. Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.
- dantheman 8y ago
  Many would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good argument for why that would be.
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    I read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don’t have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at some point and post them to my blog.
maxsilver 8y ago
> Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Even if that's true, wouldn't their budget be the only thing that applies? If you could guarantee that NPR/PBS/BBC/CBC/ABC was a completely independent entity, publicly funded but otherwise completely divorced from the government, then the only issue with which they would have a direct conflict of interest would be themselves / their budget. That seems like a much better situation than what we currently have, where only large multinational corporations fund media, and therefore almost everything is a conflict of interest every single day.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
The fact that they did, in fact, report fairly on the debate over ending NPR subsidies disproves your entire point.
twblalock 8y ago
> Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. The BBC is indeed trusted to report on this, as well as scandals within the BBC that have happened from time to time.
- isostatic 8y ago
  The BBC tends to cover itself more harshly that competitors cover the bbc. On the other had they often drag entertainment into news, strictly, bake off (when it was on bbc), etc.
Broken_Hippo 8y ago
To be fair, no small newspaper owned by a large corporation is going to report about their own closing fairly, but they have lots of other things they likely have to be careful about. Who would report badly on a parent company if they knew the company had a history of closing down papers that report badly on them or censoring those stories out. On the other hand, if your political system by law cannot cut funding to particular papers serving x customer base without cutting funding to all of them, it is harder to do such things. A newspaper in a city of 40,000 in northern Indiana couldn't be cut for reporting stuff the government does without the same thing happening for all the newspapers of around the same size in that state - or across the country, if that was where the funding came directly from instead of block grants that are popular. You can legislate some protections into the law, after all. And you can push for this stuff. As far was the "I oppose using my tax dollars to fund..." Unfortunately, tax dollars aren't something one can line-item. Everyone pays for things with their tax dollars that they'd rather not pay for. It is part of paying taxes. I'd rather not pay for lifetime health insurance for a congressman that serves one term, for example. I'd rather not pay for unnecessary military gear nor wars for that matter. But I understand these are part of paying taxes. Even if one is politically active and they talk to their representitives often, these things will always be the case. Just because everyone doesn't agree with everything doesn't mean much.

cookiecaper 8y ago

The court system is not a business, and it takes a lot of work and regulation to keep it relatively independent, and even then it's not foolproof. There are strict rules that apply to judges, lawyers, jurors, and everyone else involved in court proceedings to safeguard against conflicts of interest. The country's legal foundations have been constructed from the ground up to support and allow for a relatively-independent judiciary. You can't have just hand-wave all that away and act like the same level of independence will apply to private entities that take government subsidies.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
East Texas district figured out how to run the court as a racket to cash in.

cle 8y ago

> Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved. It sounds like it's "remembering more details about political events" that you really want to save. Are you sure newspapers are the only way to accomplish that?