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In the West privately funded media has increased polarisation over the last 50 years, so having stronger public investments in media could be helpful to stop th

In the West privately funded media has increased polarisation over the last 50 years, so having stronger public investments in media could be helpful to stop this pervasive divisiveness. China has the opposite configuration where the state controls all information and you'll be re-educated if you say the wrong thing loud enough. These are both extremes that are undesirable IMO.

johnebgd 5y ago
The west just needs to reimplement the fairness doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
I’m not sure many in the west would see divisiveness as a negative, in so much that it seems necessary to reach an stable equilibrium. Yes, one side will find the other side’s position infuriating, but China is the result of what happens when one side completely wins over the other. Because there is no equilibrium to be had, they can only emphasize unity.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  Not defending China's idea at all, but with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. They have the right to do it sure, and they should, but if a good portion of a populace lives in a fiction, that isn't great. And to be clear while leftist stuff can be extreme, sure, the current major problem is right wing extremist lies are clearly more detrimental just because of their popularity. It is not really a both sides issue.
  - More-nitors 5y ago
    > with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side. And... not attacking China's great political unification, having and using politics to censor out a lot of government corruption that ultimately hurts its own people... doesn't look great (no 'political balance-of-power' + no freedom-of-speech/press + no-election: the government officials can de facto do whatever they want, from small things like accepting bribes for not noticing fake-food factories, to uh... ok I'll stop now.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      >> with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. > That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side. It's entirely possible to counter balance something with a lie, neither the original or response being the truth, which doesn't help inform the viewers either.
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      None of that is refuting what I am saying. I agree with all of that.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  If you want to balance a system dynamically, you want negative, not positive feedback loops. The latter will just grow until they shake the system apart. In other words: polarisation is useful when it's transient. Some issue causes people to divide and work out some consensus, and then divisions die down. A persistent divison that becomes its own end is destructive.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear. Actually, doesn’t China do that? It paints it’s people’s struggles as them vs the rest of the world. Maybe they don’t need political competition because the CIA gets the blame for many of its domestic problems.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear. Yeah, but what's the system efficient about? Not figuring out correct solutions - the internal competition demands both sides to define themselves in terms of doing/believing the opposite to what the other side does/believes, so the system is just doing a random walk. The way I see it, it's primarily efficient as a way to grow the market - ever-increasing campaign budgets and ongoing political shouting matches are just funding advertisers and news agencies.
- gremloni 5y ago
  It’s a question of degrees of divisiveness. If the population is divided enough to kill each other there probably needs to be some sort of regulations to temper the extremes.
pasabagi 5y ago
It's not really opposites, though. Private media is highly centralized, and the people involved are also highly involved in politics (Rupert Murdoch, for instance). In China, high up party members are generally very wealthy, and wealthy people generally are highly involved in the party, so it's the same politically-well-connected elite that would be involved in media in the west in any case - it's just backed up by formal censorship, explicit government rule, etc. China is more extreme, and more explicit about the link between politics and media, but it's broadly speaking the same system. PS: this is especially true of countries like the UK, where extremely stringent and abusable libel laws regularly cause financial troubles for small presses that upset powerful people.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  What do you think of France where the media is highly political, but politics no bi-polarized (13 parties in big elections, 5 large movement/ideologies)? We even learn at school that no writing can be objective since humans write them but what matters is to identify ideological stances and read enough subjective angles to have at least an opinion on where stakeholders stand if not "the truth"?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Sounds like a mature approach where many voices are heard and allowed to be shared and understood. France puts faith in citizens while other countries try to control those choices and voices.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Sounds nice. One of the things I've been dwelling on recently is the degree to which economic geography creates the conditions for an effective press. Germany and France are both really regional, in the sense that you have loads of competing regional elites, each with their own take on things. In the UK, it's very centralized, so there's a much greater penalty to your career if you ruffle feathers, and the views expressed in the media are necessarily fairly narrow (for instance, Jeremy Corbyn, despite getting about 40% of the popular vote in 2017, had basically no positive media coverage throughout his tenure).
_pmf_ 5y ago
> over the last 50 years This goes back to the Enlightenment, and has historically been considered a good thing when contrasted to state or church doctrines. Happy to help.
qqtt 5y ago
A bit naive to assume there isn't quite a bit of centralized control of media in the West. Not only are the media largely owned by a scant few large conglomerates - the government itself also gets routinely involved in controlling the narrative. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
- ralusek 5y ago
  The west increasingly has completely independent news sources via places like YouTube.
  - ffwszgf 5y ago
    A lot of these channels will have to leave the platform as anti fake news and disinformation laws get tougher
    - cute_boi 5y ago
      I guess its already happening. Many channels were complaining of shadow bans & demonetization.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Maybe that's the silver lining. Anyone who's opinion exists outside of the current groupthink is forced to leave these big platforms. It makes it harder for the average person within this group to express themselves because these platforms make it easy. But many will and new platforms will form outside of big tech. These new platforms will have time and space to rethink how they operate and perhaps they will bring in a new era of consumer control.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    These are all corporate sources that openly brag about censoring content. My favorite is when they censored an academic conference on censorship. Straight out of a Monty Python skit. https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce... The HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217
dillondoyle 5y ago
I wish PBS was better funded and supported, maybe look to BBC as an example to emulate. Though BBC also has non-new programming (drag race!). The problem is trusting government. I don't trust either parties here so I would lean toward a for-profit system with heavier regulation. It looks like the Fairness Doctrine is no more? Anyone have better knowledge here than I do who can give some background? From what I kind of know it used to require broadcasters to dedicate programming to actual factual news in order to use govt spectrum. Also dictated journalism ethics like letting subjects comment. Also seems like this deregulation was the impetus for (what i consider dangerous and harmful) alt reality 'news' like the murdoch empire and Alex Jones characters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everyth... http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47669.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47669.html
- nradov 5y ago
  The Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast TV and radio because spectrum was a limited resource. It never applied to cable, satellite, or online services. Those were never really deregulated because they were hardly regulated in the first place.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    Makes sense. Broadcast is a shell of what it was in viewership. Interestingly it seems Republicans might be the ones pushing government intervention on those new platforms (FB) since they feel censored.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  BBC has shifted from being neutral in the recent years, and there are demands to stop public funding of BBC. No, BBC today is a bad example. BBC 50 years ago, I don't know.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
Publicly funded media will present the views of those in power. That does not mean it will be any less self-serving than private media. Government newspapers have a sorry history.
jollybean 5y ago
The current state of Western Media is not very nice, but it is far from 'extreme'.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Tell that to Alex Jones…
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Those hucksters are the price we pay for freedom of expression. In normal times, it's just a clownshow. Obviously it's more of a problem when there's a constitutional crisis, a war, or pandemic.
burrows 5y ago
> so having stronger public investments in media could be helpful to stop this pervasive divisiveness. Completely unsubstantiated nonsense claim. > China has the opposite configuration where the state controls all information and you'll be re-educated if you say the wrong thing loud enough. Alarmist gobbledygook.
jeswin 5y ago
> These are both extremes that are undesirable IMO. The problem with putting them in the same sentence is that it equates them, in the same way "very fine people on both sides" did. Being sent to a reeducation camp, keeping a billion plus population exposed only to propaganda, a total lack of free speech, and openly disappearing people (like Gedhun Choekyi Nyima of Tibet) is not in the same bracket as any of the other ills you were mentioning.
- 8note 5y ago
  I don't think those things can be attributed to the media system. The same things are present in both the chinese and American societies, under different names. Eg. The US prosecuted the "war on drugs" to house a ton of political prisoners and ensure they cant vote, and that their families cannot become wealthier without adopting the party line. The Facebook moderation team remove your direct message to a friend is not materially different from the government moderation team removing your wichat direct message to a friend. American society disappears people too; for an obvious example, you can look at the people painting red hands on their faces
guilhas 5y ago
I think a polarized society, means there is a big problem in that society that needs fixing. Like when a project is forked because people think it should have other goals/values. I don't think we can split society, so that problem needs to be found and addressed, so people can trust each other and the government again. Meaning having all the correct facts, and information, will not fix polarization, only societal evolution

johnebgd 5y ago

The west just needs to reimplement the fairness doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

I’m not sure many in the west would see divisiveness as a negative, in so much that it seems necessary to reach an stable equilibrium. Yes, one side will find the other side’s position infuriating, but China is the result of what happens when one side completely wins over the other. Because there is no equilibrium to be had, they can only emphasize unity.

th0ma5 5y ago
Not defending China's idea at all, but with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. They have the right to do it sure, and they should, but if a good portion of a populace lives in a fiction, that isn't great. And to be clear while leftist stuff can be extreme, sure, the current major problem is right wing extremist lies are clearly more detrimental just because of their popularity. It is not really a both sides issue.
- More-nitors 5y ago
  > with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side. And... not attacking China's great political unification, having and using politics to censor out a lot of government corruption that ultimately hurts its own people... doesn't look great (no 'political balance-of-power' + no freedom-of-speech/press + no-election: the government officials can de facto do whatever they want, from small things like accepting bribes for not noticing fake-food factories, to uh... ok I'll stop now.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    >> with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. > That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side. It's entirely possible to counter balance something with a lie, neither the original or response being the truth, which doesn't help inform the viewers either.
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    None of that is refuting what I am saying. I agree with all of that.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
If you want to balance a system dynamically, you want negative, not positive feedback loops. The latter will just grow until they shake the system apart. In other words: polarisation is useful when it's transient. Some issue causes people to divide and work out some consensus, and then divisions die down. A persistent divison that becomes its own end is destructive.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear. Actually, doesn’t China do that? It paints it’s people’s struggles as them vs the rest of the world. Maybe they don’t need political competition because the CIA gets the blame for many of its domestic problems.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear. Yeah, but what's the system efficient about? Not figuring out correct solutions - the internal competition demands both sides to define themselves in terms of doing/believing the opposite to what the other side does/believes, so the system is just doing a random walk. The way I see it, it's primarily efficient as a way to grow the market - ever-increasing campaign budgets and ongoing political shouting matches are just funding advertisers and news agencies.
gremloni 5y ago
It’s a question of degrees of divisiveness. If the population is divided enough to kill each other there probably needs to be some sort of regulations to temper the extremes.

pasabagi 5y ago

It's not really opposites, though. Private media is highly centralized, and the people involved are also highly involved in politics (Rupert Murdoch, for instance). In China, high up party members are generally very wealthy, and wealthy people generally are highly involved in the party, so it's the same politically-well-connected elite that would be involved in media in the west in any case - it's just backed up by formal censorship, explicit government rule, etc. China is more extreme, and more explicit about the link between politics and media, but it's broadly speaking the same system. PS: this is especially true of countries like the UK, where extremely stringent and abusable libel laws regularly cause financial troubles for small presses that upset powerful people.

secondaryacct 5y ago
What do you think of France where the media is highly political, but politics no bi-polarized (13 parties in big elections, 5 large movement/ideologies)? We even learn at school that no writing can be objective since humans write them but what matters is to identify ideological stances and read enough subjective angles to have at least an opinion on where stakeholders stand if not "the truth"?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Sounds like a mature approach where many voices are heard and allowed to be shared and understood. France puts faith in citizens while other countries try to control those choices and voices.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Sounds nice. One of the things I've been dwelling on recently is the degree to which economic geography creates the conditions for an effective press. Germany and France are both really regional, in the sense that you have loads of competing regional elites, each with their own take on things. In the UK, it's very centralized, so there's a much greater penalty to your career if you ruffle feathers, and the views expressed in the media are necessarily fairly narrow (for instance, Jeremy Corbyn, despite getting about 40% of the popular vote in 2017, had basically no positive media coverage throughout his tenure).

_pmf_ 5y ago

> over the last 50 years This goes back to the Enlightenment, and has historically been considered a good thing when contrasted to state or church doctrines. Happy to help.

qqtt 5y ago

A bit naive to assume there isn't quite a bit of centralized control of media in the West. Not only are the media largely owned by a scant few large conglomerates - the government itself also gets routinely involved in controlling the narrative. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html

ralusek 5y ago
The west increasingly has completely independent news sources via places like YouTube.
- ffwszgf 5y ago
  A lot of these channels will have to leave the platform as anti fake news and disinformation laws get tougher
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    I guess its already happening. Many channels were complaining of shadow bans & demonetization.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Maybe that's the silver lining. Anyone who's opinion exists outside of the current groupthink is forced to leave these big platforms. It makes it harder for the average person within this group to express themselves because these platforms make it easy. But many will and new platforms will form outside of big tech. These new platforms will have time and space to rethink how they operate and perhaps they will bring in a new era of consumer control.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  These are all corporate sources that openly brag about censoring content. My favorite is when they censored an academic conference on censorship. Straight out of a Monty Python skit. https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce... The HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26008217

dillondoyle 5y ago

I wish PBS was better funded and supported, maybe look to BBC as an example to emulate. Though BBC also has non-new programming (drag race!). The problem is trusting government. I don't trust either parties here so I would lean toward a for-profit system with heavier regulation. It looks like the Fairness Doctrine is no more? Anyone have better knowledge here than I do who can give some background? From what I kind of know it used to require broadcasters to dedicate programming to actual factual news in order to use govt spectrum. Also dictated journalism ethics like letting subjects comment. Also seems like this deregulation was the impetus for (what i consider dangerous and harmful) alt reality 'news' like the murdoch empire and Alex Jones characters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everyth... http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47669.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47669.html

nradov 5y ago
The Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast TV and radio because spectrum was a limited resource. It never applied to cable, satellite, or online services. Those were never really deregulated because they were hardly regulated in the first place.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Makes sense. Broadcast is a shell of what it was in viewership. Interestingly it seems Republicans might be the ones pushing government intervention on those new platforms (FB) since they feel censored.
asteroidbelt 5y ago
BBC has shifted from being neutral in the recent years, and there are demands to stop public funding of BBC. No, BBC today is a bad example. BBC 50 years ago, I don't know.
- dillondoyle 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

Publicly funded media will present the views of those in power. That does not mean it will be any less self-serving than private media. Government newspapers have a sorry history.

jollybean 5y ago

The current state of Western Media is not very nice, but it is far from 'extreme'.

johnebgd 5y ago
Tell that to Alex Jones…
- jollybean 5y ago
  Those hucksters are the price we pay for freedom of expression. In normal times, it's just a clownshow. Obviously it's more of a problem when there's a constitutional crisis, a war, or pandemic.

burrows 5y ago

> so having stronger public investments in media could be helpful to stop this pervasive divisiveness. Completely unsubstantiated nonsense claim. > China has the opposite configuration where the state controls all information and you'll be re-educated if you say the wrong thing loud enough. Alarmist gobbledygook.

jeswin 5y ago

> These are both extremes that are undesirable IMO. The problem with putting them in the same sentence is that it equates them, in the same way "very fine people on both sides" did. Being sent to a reeducation camp, keeping a billion plus population exposed only to propaganda, a total lack of free speech, and openly disappearing people (like Gedhun Choekyi Nyima of Tibet) is not in the same bracket as any of the other ills you were mentioning.

8note 5y ago
I don't think those things can be attributed to the media system. The same things are present in both the chinese and American societies, under different names. Eg. The US prosecuted the "war on drugs" to house a ton of political prisoners and ensure they cant vote, and that their families cannot become wealthier without adopting the party line. The Facebook moderation team remove your direct message to a friend is not materially different from the government moderation team removing your wichat direct message to a friend. American society disappears people too; for an obvious example, you can look at the people painting red hands on their faces

guilhas 5y ago

I think a polarized society, means there is a big problem in that society that needs fixing. Like when a project is forked because people think it should have other goals/values. I don't think we can split society, so that problem needs to be found and addressed, so people can trust each other and the government again. Meaning having all the correct facts, and information, will not fix polarization, only societal evolution