3 ms·

I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to be dramatic and sensationalist bec

by atrus 2y ago

I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to be dramatic and sensationalist because that's what attracts attention and gets you those advertising dollar. Certain topics are off limits, because of those advertising dollars. It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.

gottorf 2y ago
> A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government. The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.
- jl6 2y ago
  The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally taken as a compliment to its neutrality.
  - AlbertCory 2y ago
    Um, no. The criticism from the Left is, "it's not Left enough." Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal, for instance, before it became a national story. Here's one afterward: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 > Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report. "not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.
- somishere 2y ago
  Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just as in private. But there are models where editorial independence is maintained .. including in Australia and the UK.
- DoctorOW 2y ago
  > After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
  - gottorf 2y ago
    > In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.
next_xibalba 2y ago
Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News, NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago before I, sadly, had to call it quits.
- atrus 2y ago
  It's a multifacted problem, so you're still going to have the attention problem. NPR is primarily user funded, so if your news is boring (as non-biased, non-slanted tends to be thankfully) you're going to lose out to the more..."exciting" sources.
eltoxo 2y ago
I don't see how it really matters. A bigger issue is that some days there is just going to be nothing to report if you want "real" news. "Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality. Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now. I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system. "News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me. I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.
Yodel0914 2y ago
Australia's taxpayer-funded news [0], while maybe not as bad as some commercial news sites, is still terrible. Clickbait headlines, lack of editing, lets-just-repeat-a-bunch-of-tweets-and-call-it-an-article etc. Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way. I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to. 0: https://www.abc.net.au/news https://www.abc.net.au/news 1: https://crikey.com.au https://crikey.com.au

by atrus 2y ago

gottorf 2y ago

> A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government. The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.

jl6 2y ago
The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally taken as a compliment to its neutrality.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  Um, no. The criticism from the Left is, "it's not Left enough." Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal, for instance, before it became a national story. Here's one afterward: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 > Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report. "not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.
somishere 2y ago
Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just as in private. But there are models where editorial independence is maintained .. including in Australia and the UK.
DoctorOW 2y ago
> After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
- gottorf 2y ago
  > In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.

next_xibalba 2y ago

Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News, NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago before I, sadly, had to call it quits.

atrus 2y ago
It's a multifacted problem, so you're still going to have the attention problem. NPR is primarily user funded, so if your news is boring (as non-biased, non-slanted tends to be thankfully) you're going to lose out to the more..."exciting" sources.

eltoxo 2y ago

I don't see how it really matters. A bigger issue is that some days there is just going to be nothing to report if you want "real" news. "Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality. Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now. I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system. "News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me. I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.

Yodel0914 2y ago

Australia's taxpayer-funded news [0], while maybe not as bad as some commercial news sites, is still terrible. Clickbait headlines, lack of editing, lets-just-repeat-a-bunch-of-tweets-and-call-it-an-article etc. Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way. I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to. 0: https://www.abc.net.au/news https://www.abc.net.au/news 1: https://crikey.com.au https://crikey.com.au