Comment by combatentropy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by combatentropy | Hacker News Reader

> "we need more at the policy level,” said Napoli, who believes public funding could alleviate the local news crisis

Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government. Also, artificially propping up old ways of doing business is a rickety foundation. Newspapers as we know them occupy a narrow slice in world history. It's not like we have always had newspapers from the beginning of time up until now.

Let's investigate natural ways to accomplish the same goal of newspapers, but with our current technology. The internet has obliterated costs to publish. Compare a building full of typesetters, Linotypes, and printing presses, to WordPress and server rental. Now that doesn't address all of a newspaper's old expenses. There is still the staff: reporters spending days and weeks investigating a story, editors organizing and refining. But what does the Press, invented from scratch with our current technology, look like? I think you have to consider the different sections of an old newspaper one at a time:

1. Product reviews. Seems that there is still plenty of that, between the various specialized websites and bloggers and vloggers.

2. Lifestyle. Again, we are drowning in such coverage, like on Youtube.

3. Sports. I don't know, I don't keep up with sports. How is sports news faring?

4. Business news. Again I don't know and don't care. Someone else comment.

and finally, biggest of all:

5. The main example and, to many, the raison d'etre for news: keeping government and businesses honest, by sniffing out corruption.

Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak himself.

Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved.

Nor is there any conflict of interest between receiving money from the government and covering the government. If you believe the courts can be independent then you can believe that newspapers can be set up as independent entities. If you don’t believe that the courts can be independent then you are essentially saying that you don’t believe in the existence of liberal regimes, which takes us into a discussion regarding how much purity needs to be achieved by an ideal before one is willing to recognize its existence — an interesting topic but too broad to be discussed in comments on a website.

The government should not be funding media that reports on government. No matter how independent the intent, there is an inherent conflict of interest.

I oppose using my tax dollars to fund reporting about my tax dollars. NPR, for example would never report fairly on debates to eliminate subsidies for NPR. Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests. Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never. To think otherwise is to live in a dream world.

We should be careful of falling into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."

It is the fundamental job of the government to provide all of the essential services that a society needs -- healthcare, courts, police, housing, information gathering, transportation, mail, water, electricity, garbage collection, protection of the environment, flood control, social insurance, and so much more -- all human activity.

Some of the decisions regarding these activities should be handled by decentralized decision making. That is, sometimes the government governs best by outsourcing some of the decision making to other entities. But when we speak of the private sector, we are speaking of just one kind of decentralized decision making. It can be very convenient in some cases to make use of the private sector, but we should not make a fetish of it. There are many other forms of decentralized decision making, including all of those forms that have yet to be discovered, but which will be explored in the future. To say that this one particular form of decentralized decision making is the only form which should be allowed is the same kind of mistake that leads some computer programmers to insist that Ruby On Rails is the ultimate solution to all forms of computer programming, and therefore Ruby On Rails should be used to solve all problems of computing. That kind of fetish can only lead to bad results. Wisdom dictates that we examine the issue on a more general and broader level.

Many would disagree with your definition of the 'fundamental job of the government' Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia provides a relatively good argument for why that would be.

I read and enjoyed most of Nozick's Anarch, State and Utopia, however I don’t have the energy to post my full response today. I will write up my thoughts at some point and post them to my blog.

> Their reporting will never support going against their own best interests.

Even if that's true, wouldn't their budget be the only thing that applies?

If you could guarantee that NPR/PBS/BBC/CBC/ABC was a completely independent entity, publicly funded but otherwise completely divorced from the government, then the only issue with which they would have a direct conflict of interest would be themselves / their budget.

That seems like a much better situation than what we currently have, where only large multinational corporations fund media, and therefore almost everything is a conflict of interest every single day.

The fact that they did, in fact, report fairly on the debate over ending NPR subsidies disproves your entire point.

> Would the BBC be trusted to fairly report on any proposal to cut the budget for the BBC? Never.

The BBC is indeed trusted to report on this, as well as scandals within the BBC that have happened from time to time.

The BBC tends to cover itself more harshly that competitors cover the bbc. On the other had they often drag entertainment into news, strictly, bake off (when it was on bbc), etc.

To be fair, no small newspaper owned by a large corporation is going to report about their own closing fairly, but they have lots of other things they likely have to be careful about. Who would report badly on a parent company if they knew the company had a history of closing down papers that report badly on them or censoring those stories out.

On the other hand, if your political system by law cannot cut funding to particular papers serving x customer base without cutting funding to all of them, it is harder to do such things. A newspaper in a city of 40,000 in northern Indiana couldn't be cut for reporting stuff the government does without the same thing happening for all the newspapers of around the same size in that state - or across the country, if that was where the funding came directly from instead of block grants that are popular.

You can legislate some protections into the law, after all. And you can push for this stuff.

As far was the "I oppose using my tax dollars to fund..." Unfortunately, tax dollars aren't something one can line-item. Everyone pays for things with their tax dollars that they'd rather not pay for. It is part of paying taxes. I'd rather not pay for lifetime health insurance for a congressman that serves one term, for example. I'd rather not pay for unnecessary military gear nor wars for that matter. But I understand these are part of paying taxes. Even if one is politically active and they talk to their representitives often, these things will always be the case. Just because everyone doesn't agree with everything doesn't mean much.

The court system is not a business, and it takes a lot of work and regulation to keep it relatively independent, and even then it's not foolproof. There are strict rules that apply to judges, lawyers, jurors, and everyone else involved in court proceedings to safeguard against conflicts of interest.

The country's legal foundations have been constructed from the ground up to support and allow for a relatively-independent judiciary. You can't have just hand-wave all that away and act like the same level of independence will apply to private entities that take government subsidies.

East Texas district figured out how to run the court as a racket to cash in.

> Newspapers overlap with 100% of the era when democracy has been the norm in the West. Studies have shown that people who read newspapers, as opposed to watch news on television, remember more details about political events. So it is newspapers, specifically, which need to be saved.

It sounds like it's "remembering more details about political events" that you really want to save. Are you sure newspapers are the only way to accomplish that?

> Sounds like a conflict of interest, to get money from the government

There's a way to fix that. Until recently, it was common for certain announcements, requests for public comment, etc etc to go in the paper, which meant buying classified space. (Whether it's on physical paper or on your phone is sort of a moot point.)

This has no conflict of interest concerns. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it gives you away to boost a public good without being a direct subsidy.

Assume I'm working at the regional government and I have a really nice example of corruption, with copies of documents to prove it.

I can put it up on my web site. Nobody will see that, unless I sneak it into the urandom article, and 99% of its readers wouldn't care, because most don't even know where in Germany that region is.

I can post on Twitter. My circa 100 followers probably won't retweet it. Now what?

> Maybe the new way is without the middleman. Instead of government insider speaking anonymously to a reporter, the insider anonymously posts the leak himself.

This doesn't replace journalists/reporters as witnesses to local government activities.

Regarding sports news, major collegiate and all professional sports are doing fine. Small collegiate and high school sports suffer without local media coverage. ESPN covers high school sports very, very selectively. The days of a mom clipping out the high school soccer coverage of her daughter or son are coming to and end.

Is that necessarily a bad thing though? It would seem to me (non-American) that high school sports news would at most of interest to the parents of those playing, so it doesn't seem feasible for it to obtain wide coverage.

Thinking back to my hometown's newspaper, I don't think it ever covered high school sports, only professional sports.

I plays sports through the UK equivalent of high school, and it never occurred to me that it would get any kind of media coverage.

Even village-level sports rarely got more than a passing mention (if that) in the local paper.

If that is currently happening in America, it doesn't seem like a huge loss.

Where I'm living the local newspaper covers sports (mostly soccer and handball) of childrens' teams extensively, and they know they had better mention almost every player by namein the article or at least the photo caption.

Young parents will subscribe to the paper for that reason alone.

Exactly. Think of it almost like advertising. Local newspapers mostly don't run routine local sports because they like to or think there's any great societal value in it but because it helps to pay the bills--in this case through subscriptions they otherwise wouldn't have.

At the end of the day, it's the coverage of government and related things that directly affect the lives of the citizens. Human interest etc. is nice but it's optional (and is relatively easy in any case).

Surely game scores are posted in a highschool bulletin, or a team could have a twitter/facebook/Instagram account to announce scores/highlights.

at least in Texas, a lot of the high school scores are all wrapped up in MaxPreps.com

There are a couple of sites competing in the space to be the crowdsourced local sports scoreboard. MaxPreps, CoachT, etc.

Be careful with what you call rickety.

Web advertising only became viable with the birth of persistent tracking. Twitter’s struggle to monetize underscore that. Persistent tracking is only possible because government in the US has adopted a prevailing policy of remaining hands off for most business matters.

That can change with the stroke of a pen. If Google or Facebook found themselves unable to gather comprehensive dossiers on all humans, their business models would implode.

Every news organization has a conflict of interest, and that conflict of interest concerns whoever owns the organization.

As much as I love NPR, the last entity you want to own or fund a news organization is the government, because it's very easy to slip towards state propaganda.

There's one big problem about the "new way without the middleman", and it goes to the central function of a news organization, which is judgment, curation, and sniffing out BS. When we lose local news orgs, we lose that filter (for better and for worse).

The filter has several functions:

* tell us what a seasoned reporter thinks is true after years on a beat, by not including the BS;

* connect the dots between current news and other events (tell the bigger story to help me understand why something matters);

* save the readers time, because the readers don't have time to wade through all the verbose, partisan, poorly edited anonymous blogs. News organizations exist to highlight and synthesize and summarize. When they die, we lose that. Removing the middleman is really removing the people doing the labor of condensing many disparate points of view and the flat confusion of facts.

As local news organizations die, we will have less engaged communities on every level, and more corrupt local institutions, and that will lead to greater stagnation and inequity in the US. It's already a huge problem, and it will get worse.

>>As much as I love NPR, the last entity you want to own or fund a news organization is the government, because it's very easy to slip towards state propaganda.

The federal government does not own NPR. It is a 501c3 organization. It does not receive any direct federal funding, though it does receive competitive grant funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which amounts to a low single digit percentage of its $200M annual revenue.

So if their funding is so tiny, then calls to eliminate that funding ought not be worrisome? Whenever that federal expenditure is brought up, there are rabid campaigns that government wants to kill Seasame Street. So clearly the funding is significant enough to warrant extreme protectionism of that funding. If NPR has a product people want, the free market should support it just fine.

If the funding amount is so insignificant, then it shouldn’t matter if it is cut right? Yet, propose cutting that spending and we quickly see that government funding is pretty significant in importance, if one listens to the impassioned arguments defending it.

It’s a “low single digit” of their revenue, but apparently that low single digit is so significant that you have near riots over killing Big Bird if it were cut.

I see it as more like, the defenders of public broadcasting are infuriated that public radio ($4M) is put on the chopping block and the DoD ($600B) is to be increased.

It's not that cuts to public radio is unthinkable, but when someone proposed they will fix the federal budget by cutting NPR (0.0001% of the budget) they are looking for a fight, not really trying to solve the problem.

I misspoke. Funding by government is just as dangerous as ownership. Both create a conflict of interest. NPR receives more than 10% of its funding from the feds. As an NPR listener since the 80s, I've observed a long, slow shift towards including whacky rightwing viewpoints as the organization has come under threat of defunding from GOP-dominated Congresses.

What made those specific viewpoints "whacky"?

This is not the place to get into it.

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