4 ms·

> I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the

• ekianjo 5y ago
  The BBC is more akin to a tabloid now than reliable news source. Complete decadence.
• 0xy 5y ago
  ABC in Australia is the opposite of objectivity, considering they take over a month to issue retractions on false reporting. I've reported dozens of issues with false reporting in a broad range of news outlets, and ABC is nearly the worst. ABC corrects mistakes in a month on a good day (worst case 2.5 months). Contrasted with the private sector, Fairfax and News Corp both issued retractions to my complaints in a timely fashion, at 3 days for Fairfax and 15 minutes(!) for News Corp. ABC simply doesn't care about journalism, why else would they have such lazy policies that ensure incorrect information is distributed as widely as possible?
  • square_usual 5y ago
    Wait, I feel like I have to ask: what do you do that requires contacting newspapers to issue retractions so often?
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      Don't know about him but I used to do it at a time when I felt obsessed with making information correct. It was a bit compulsive. But on the bright side, that's how I knew Bloomberg News was bullshit and that despite HN's frothy comments about how they always knew SMCI was backdooring chips I just grabbed some long options on the cheap and partied it up.
    • 0xy 5y ago
      I used to care about news media, now I'd prefer that corporate media die due to the massive damage they've caused to society and lives. They lie so blatantly that it's like they don't care that you know they're lying. ABC is actually worse, despite being propped up by government money. It's stunning how you can manage to be worse than corporate news media. I no longer consume media other than for business and tech news.
• Fellshard 5y ago
  This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars. This puts an explicit limit on what they can say and criticize, and what their bias will be: the ones holding the purse strings. Even if a majority of tax payers discard it at that point, the institution would have no incentive to change its messaging. This is very easily seen already in the existing public news and media organizations that have been formed.
  • RGamma 5y ago
    > This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars It's not an employer vs employee situation. In societies with rule of law you can endow public entities/broadcasters with rights that protect them from such influence. This, with a well-defined duty to inform and culture of journalistic integrity should go a long way.
    • Fellshard 5y ago
      Having rights is orthogonal to receiving funding. Whether it should be the case or not, it is within government power to withhold funding from a public entity if it, say, puts forth journalistic effort to uncover a majority party scandal. And that is unlikely to change in any other nation's context. As for journalistic integrity: take America as an example again, where integrity has been overridden across the board in favor of party line messaging. Very little journalistic work is now done, public or private. And indeed, again, the public entity would have even less incentive to poke the bees' nest that makes its honey.