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Before these tech monopolies came into power, radio and tv have always been free and have been a way for people especially the poor to get informed and entertai

• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > radio and tv have always been free and have been a way for people especially the poor to get informed Informed? You mean manipulated, right? Watching open television makes me physically sick because of the constant agenda pushing. I can't watch 5 minutes of news without some person imposing their moral judgements on me and telling me what's right and wrong. It's made even worse by all the advertising, the open networks get the bulk of it. If banning advertisers kills these networks, we'd be doing humanity a favor. Facebook's election manipulation and clickbait news articles have got nothing on these folks.
  • meowface 5y ago
    Exactly. Advertising is a universal scourge, in my book. I don't care what form it's in. It's a manipulative intrusion and a pollutant. I'd legitimately rather you mine cryptocurrency on my machine than mine advertising photons on my retina.
  • asciimov 5y ago
    You can thank the Regan Administration for removing the FCC's Fairness Doctrine [0]. From 1949-1987 if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
    • geoduck14 5y ago
      >if you were broadcasting news you had to present both sides of controversial issues. Down here in Texas, we have a law where teachers have to teach both sides of controversial subjects. So, of course, someone is teaching both sides of The Holocaust. Because it is controversial. And that is the law.
      • isoskeles 5y ago
        Optimistically, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with a law like this because when engaged with lies, kids should be able to figure this stuff out. It’s not like they’re incapable of critical thinking. They can look up if the claims are true and find that nothing backs them up. But I get that most children won’t do this, so overall, yeah, it seems like a terrible law. Ultimately, it comes down to what TX defines as “controversial.” Is this interpretation (teach Holocaust denial) legal or is it some rogue teacher who decided it means they get to teach whatever they want because all their opinions make their family angry at Thanksgiving dinner?
        • hairofadog 5y ago
          My understanding is that it’s a law designed to allow teaching of creationism, since, to their understanding, evolution is “just a theory”.
          • isoskeles 5y ago
            That makes sense. Guess they think Intelligent Design or whatever they call it now is due for another challenge since the SCOTUS leans more conservative.
        • TchoBeer 5y ago
          What if they look up the lies and only find more misinformation and articles giving "both sides of the story".
        • lovecg 5y ago
          You’re asking a lot of children. Skilled people have been working on improving propaganda techniques for a very long time. It’s rarely just outright lies - there are more effective techniques. For example, it’s easy to find dozens of cherry picked examples and represent them as the thing that was common (instead of say something that happened only 0.001% of the time). Something like this is much harder to refute than an outright lie - you have to do a full blown study figuring out how common the thing really was, and before long you’re demanding everyone to do their own research and verifying everything (in an environment full of bad actors muddying the waters).
    • ch4s3 5y ago
      The fairness doctrine in practice boxed out any opinions outside of the mainstream and allowed both major political parties to control public discourse. It was also compelled speech by the government which plainly violated the first amendment.
      • samhw 5y ago
        Thank you. I hate this increasingly common attitude that free speech should be constrained because [political candidate or movement which I don't like] is in the ascendancy. You can really see someone's ideals in what they do under pressure, and apparently people's liberal ideals of free speech etc aren't very strongly held.
        • unethical_ban 5y ago
          Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public and use social media to amplify propaganda is clearly a public health threat. The question is if there is any cure that doesn't destroy legitimate political speech. (Illegitimate speech being the calculated, coordinated distribution of false information).
          • ch4s3 5y ago
            > Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public You're presuming that TV and news media never lied to the public before the end of the fairness doctrine, and the giving equal time didn't give undue weight to some bullshit ideas. The controlled messaging around the war in Vietnam is a great counter point here.
          • samhw 5y ago
            I'm alarmed by anyone who can genuinely talk of 'legitimate speech' and not see the issues here.
            • unethical_ban 5y ago
              I'm alarmed that you don't see any danger of intentionally, factually false speech being spread to tens of millions of people a day. Or that you don't have any desire to at least brainstorm on a solution.
  • ryan93 5y ago
    The fairness doctrine is anti free speech and evil.
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I never said anything about any fairness doctrine. I think we're better off without any open TV networks at all. I'd rather people remained ignorant than serve as pawns in electoral games. That's not even my opinion, it's how the prevailing political ideology of my country describes them. They're "masses" to be "maneuvered" into alignment with the proper ideology. The mass media are the means to do it. Killing mass media is a favor to these people. They would remain ignorant but at least they would not suffer the indignity of being manipulated, herded like cattle.
  • bestnameever 5y ago
    Open television can contain a lot than just news. Where I live, it has sports, scripted television shows, movies and more.
• pdpi 5y ago
  > radio and tv have always been free Yes. And they achieve this through advertising too.
  • samhw 5y ago
    I think that was their point (though I'm not altogether sure where they were going with it). Anyway, there's a case to be made that radio and television advertising are less malign by virtue of being less targeted. They can only run adverts which appeal to everyone in the region they cover, which is a much less powerful tool.
    • Intermernet 5y ago
      Until you consider groups like Sinclair Broadcast Group[1] who control enough region's media to start playing games. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
      • samhw 5y ago
        I've read about that. It's astonishing. That's much more of a worry, admittedly, the way they target local news. It's still much less potent than Facebook-grade targeting, but it's a rung above national news, granted.
• midasuni 5y ago
  Newspapers inform people and aren’t free. They are available in the library though.
  • Intermernet 5y ago
    Newspapers also misinform people. The content should be accountable. This accountability should be judged on provable factuality, provable profit, provable misinformation, provable conflicts of interest etc. The point of regulation is to, ideally, force societal institutions to adhere to set of rules. The point of government should be to make sure these rules are unbiased, based in fact, and equally applied to all sectors of society. It's a crazy dream. I don't know a single country in the world that gets this right, but certain individual countries get different elements of the equation right, so my hope is not yet in tatters.
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  PBS.