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> The purpose of news … … … … You conflated 'news' with 'for-profit news agencies'

• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  BBC, NPR, etc. are not for profit and receive some public funding yet fall into the exact same trappings. News requires resources to publish. Resources require money. You need to make money, or you're not going to exist for long. In times past the monopoly of the traditional media on news had the advantage of basically removing economic concern from the picture. Journalistic ethics come with a cost. One of the few examples of where a monopoly/oligopoly remained relatively benevolent. Of course on the other hand, it also opened the door to important issues being completely ignored - but it's hard to say if that was all that much worse than the vicious rat race that media has turned into today. A really great article I always recommend on these topics is Robert Kaiser's "The Bad News About the News." [1] Kaiser was a 50 year veteran of the Washington Post working as both editor and reporter. He retired briefly after Bezos bought the paper. It's a great article that gives an insider perspective on the rise and fall of traditional media, and how they reacted and failed to react to the internet in time. [1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-news.html http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...
• gmiller123456 8y ago
  I think he got it right, I think you've assumed that just because a news organization is legally given a "non-profit" tag that they aren't all about making money. The people that work there are still paid a salary just like the "for-profit" agencies, and they still base funding on ratings and how much money a given program brings in. My main news sources are PBS News and NPR News, and I can't tell much of a difference in coverage compared to NBC News or ABC News when I watch those.