2 ms·

> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good journalism. It just means journalism is

by pdonis 2y ago

> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good journalism. It just means journalism is biased in favor of the state, instead of biased in favor of whatever ideology the private owner has. If anything, bias in favor of the state is worse. Pravda and Isvestia in the Soviet Union were even less reliable than our mainstream media is now.

dns_snek 2y ago
Can we at least try to acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between: - news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda - news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda If you squint a little, these are essentially the same. There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful? At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government. This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and government that considers themselves democratic.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful? The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of the rich and powerful is to enforce freedom of speech for everyone, so anyone who is being screwed by the rich and powerful can say so, publicly, and not get canceled. "Publicly funded journalism" does nothing of the kind, because the funding of "publicly funded journalism" comes from...the rich and powerful. Either through the government (who do you think runs the government? certainly not the poor and powerless) or through "nonprofit" organizations that can't survive, let alone pay the costs of journalism, without donations from the rich and powerful.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    Yes, the government is powerful, but you ignored the 2nd part of my comment which addressed the concern you're repeating again. > At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > If you squint a little, these are essentially the same. So are all the "shades of gray" in between. Every source of journalism we have is funded by someone who wants to further their own agenda. We have no source of journalism whose purpose is to just report the truth and let the public draw their own conclusions. Let alone one that can actually stick to that purpose in the face of the temptation to push a favored narrative.
dredmorbius 2y ago
State-support for media can take a wide range of forms, several of which are fairly resistant to control, coercion, and/or curruption: - Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin. - Tax breaks for publsihers. - Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate. - Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those. Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.

by pdonis 2y ago

dns_snek 2y ago

Can we at least try to acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between: - news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda - news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda If you squint a little, these are essentially the same. There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful? At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government. This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and government that considers themselves democratic.

pdonis 2y ago
> There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful? The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of the rich and powerful is to enforce freedom of speech for everyone, so anyone who is being screwed by the rich and powerful can say so, publicly, and not get canceled. "Publicly funded journalism" does nothing of the kind, because the funding of "publicly funded journalism" comes from...the rich and powerful. Either through the government (who do you think runs the government? certainly not the poor and powerless) or through "nonprofit" organizations that can't survive, let alone pay the costs of journalism, without donations from the rich and powerful.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  Yes, the government is powerful, but you ignored the 2nd part of my comment which addressed the concern you're repeating again. > At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
pdonis 2y ago
> If you squint a little, these are essentially the same. So are all the "shades of gray" in between. Every source of journalism we have is funded by someone who wants to further their own agenda. We have no source of journalism whose purpose is to just report the truth and let the public draw their own conclusions. Let alone one that can actually stick to that purpose in the face of the temptation to push a favored narrative.

dredmorbius 2y ago

State-support for media can take a wide range of forms, several of which are fairly resistant to control, coercion, and/or curruption: - Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin. - Tax breaks for publsihers. - Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate. - Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those. Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.