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Comment by binthere | Hacker News Reader

Let's do a thought experiment: Imagine if a company had enough power to inject money into all of the major media outlets, to the point where they depend on this company to stay alive. Now, if this company threatens to pull the money out if the media outlet says anything that goes against it, the company will effectively have control over the opinions of all major media channels. This is obviously not acceptable in a society that considers itself "free speech". It's free from legal consequences but when you shut opinions down due to "other consequences" you end up with the same result. A muted society.

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The funny thing there is we worry about someone having enough money to exert soft power on the media while allowing Murdoch to control a huge chunk of the media market in the UK (and US...).

He has far more control of the media than any single company could hope to buy indirectly (and it'd be cheaper to just buy it directly at that point I think).

Why do you think Jeff Bezos brought the Washington Post - he saw how Rupert Murdoch works.

Google should have brought the independent when it was up for sale cheap

And Clinton's top financial backer bought "The Onion".

Shrug. It's got to be owned by someone.

And look at how he's made it much worse. Clickbait headlines, political pandering. They have some good content but I'm so sick of the bad stuff I go elsewhere.

I don't see your point.

Somebody is going to own the media. It just so happens that Murdoch started some media outlets.

It's much better than the media being state-run.

>Somebody is going to own the media

Disagree. Why do you think anyone "owning the media" would be a giood idea, let alone an acceptable one.

And your proposed alternative is?

Lots of people own lots of media.

Awesome. You have your wish. Surf around.

I didn't say anything about a good idea.

I definitely think it's better for individuals and regulated corporations to own it than for the media to be state-run.

The difference between now and say 30 years ago is many media companies were independently owned, now, like food in supermarkets, there are a few conglomerates that own all the media companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_conglomerate

If you go to the local level, John Oliver did a segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group that owns a bunch of local news stations and pushes political propaganda to them.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/john-oliver-local-news-cons...

The point being is you have all our media digestible content, particularly news, controlled by a handful of corporations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexstar_Media_Group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

Sinclair, the one Oliver mentions, covers 40% of US households and is only the second largest next to Nexstar.

And John Oliver is owned by Time Warner/Turner Broadcasting.

You don't think Oliver is above propaganda do you?

No, he has an agenda as well. His position is a little less influenced now though because HBO's business model doesn't involve advertisements. I'm sure he doesn't bite the hand that feeds him either.

You can make a similar argument about land: if one person owns all of the land, the rest of the people won't be very free even if the laws are the same.

But neither argument is very convincing. There's a lot of cheap land, and there are a lot of cheap ways to publish your opinions widely.

As long as you don't piss off cloudflare.

Well, the same mentality spills over from Think Tanks to regular people on YouTube.

On YouTube, if your account is suspended, you are severed from your audience that you worked hard to build.

Sure, you can find cheap/free land, but don't you think you would feel that someone stole your work, robbed you of the fruits of your labor, if the land you toiled for years to make fertile is taken away from you?

This think tank situation is tip of the iceberg of what Google is doing in terms of censorship (suspensions/terminations/demonetization) on their platforms.

> Sure, you can find cheap/free land, but don't you think you would feel that someone stole your work, robbed you of the fruits of your labor, if the land you toiled for years to make fertile is taken away from you?

If I voluntarily chose to took away on land owned by someone else under express terms that allowed it to be taken away arbitrarily, I’d kind of expect that risk, and wouldn't view it as theft.

There's a reason plenty of people making a living selling video content use YouTube to distribute promotional material but some other mechanism to monetize the content.

Let's say the customers, that you sold your produce to, know that you sell at your farm: the YouTube channel.

You may be willing to toil the earth at new location, but not having those same customers who want to buy from you at new location, is the biggest loss, more so than the land.

The land owner, didn't mind what you were doing, it's even legal what you were doing, but then one fine day the landowner dated a girl who didn't like that you cultivated onions, she hates onions, she convinced the landowner to get rid of you. And the landowner owns 70% of the land in your country and 90% of the produce buyers are also residing on the same lands. Going to new land is much much unfair proposition. At these scales the legal system, which still exists and has power, should step in an break apart the land owner or impose rules which forces him to play fair.

Anti-trust laws exist for this very reason. Break up Google.

Like that law that says you can't own more than x radio stations? But what if you don't "own" them, just fund them. I think we need to stretch the legal definition of ownership to influence.

Isn't that what happened to Fox News (although indirectly)?

    Fox criticized Trump
    Trump said Fox sucks
    Viewership went down  
    "Oops, Trump is great"  
    Money are back in.

This according to Vox, anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYMIgnw2FPU

This is how media and entertainment already bended to clients. Pull advertisements or sponsorship = lost revenue. A large parent corporation (e.g Verizon) can do this. Whether this is wise to lose coverage is another assessment.

we don't need a thought experiment, Google has just been shown to have demanded a site to take down an article they did not the author of. they do this by withdrawing adsense income and with a dominant position they can shape the content of the web. while initially at the behest of their corporate needs its easy to see how it will become co-opted by politicians

> This is obviously not acceptable in a society that considers itself "free speech". It's free from legal consequences but when you shut opinions down due to "other consequences" you end up with the same result.

Which is exactly why the principle of free speech (as opposed to "the first amendment to the US Constitution") doesn't just apply to legal consequences, and free speech absolutely does require freedom from some consequences.

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