Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

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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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