There are various element of it in various countries. Like national offices of statistic. There are stuff like the BBC and variety of EU initiative to inform about various processes. Democratic government keep complete record and have public service already make analysis and summary for ministers to work with. So it's not like it is out of the realm of the achievable. Maybe an official rating could be created based on a service like politifact that independant newspaper must display on their frontpage like the food safety rating for restaurants. Teach the kid at school that anything not rated is basically fiction and that will take care of the majority of the population.
There is the risk of it becoming a propaganda arm of the government, sure, but you can have the same argument with every branch of the government. There is no intrinsic reason to trust the judiciary, the military or the police, except a tradition of being trustworthy which is really what maintain the whole system running: a lot of honest people everywhere. In any case, that's a moot point since the journalism it replaces is dying, and we know the new media that is killing it is not even pretending to have any kind of integrity.
In theory or in practice, because what we have now (and what many would argue we have always had) is not very independent.
The judiciary is nominated by the executive, which I can’t see working well for this. Presidents from both parties would universally opt to staff the branch with journalists that were soft on government and politicians in general.
Same problem if they get appointed by congress.
As for elections, yea what could go wrong there? America is pretty level headed. We would never elect some kind of partisan maniac to an important position like this.
All the branches of government are inherently political.
But if they did, one option would be to hire an editorial board from nationally esteemed people from outside the political system. You know, draw the membership from Nobel prize winning scientists and authors, Olympic medal winners, people like that. They would then hire and oversee journalists who knew how to journalism.
If you're worried that would lead to olympic medals becoming politically biased, you could have the committee appoint their own replacements.
"Entirely unbiased" may be impossible, but "relatively less biased than Fox News or The Guardian" sounds achievable.
Both the BBC and CBC have a history of government influence in their reporting - this is not a civil society function I can trust to government.
Citation absolutely required. The BBC have always sought to be impartial - which brings its own, occasionally absurd, biases. Their charter has always required they separate from government and impartial.
They've managed to piss off almost every government, of every colour, in almost equal measure.
And private media, controlled by unaccountable billionaire capitalists and funded by corporate advertising, can be trusted?
With publicly funded media, there can be far more scrutiny, openness and criticism. I mean, look at the UK and compare the BBC, which has its flaws, to the absolutely repulsive, dishonest and dogmatically right-wing private press.
Do you have a link for this? The govt can’t tamper with the editorial output of the BBC, that’s not how it works.
First D notices apply to all media, second they are a voluntary "government request" to not publish. Various outlets, including the BBC, have plenty of history ignoring these. Some are actioned. Essentially the media body has to be convinced there is a national security case to follow the request. They're not mandatory and not following one results in no government or court action. Just words.
Cameron emptily threatened to bring in tougher measures to restrict all media, not just the BBC, during Snowden.
The quality is mostly good, but it isn't sufficient to be really informed.
The services for rating accuracy of news isn't really a solution in my opinion, since they only shift the problem, even if they slow down the news cycle a little bit. They will also be wrong at some point, like any news outlet.
You cannot really have free independant journalism and put heaps of regulations upon them.
> There is the risk of it becoming a propaganda arm of the government
It is inevitable. If there are honest people everywhere, we can keep governmental involvement to a minimum. The real problem is monetization and education. Even renowned outlets use clickbait in this day and age.
I also do think that a lot of "new media" will vanish again.
edit: They also tend to develop into expensive behemoths which quickly develop their own interests.
* which includes classical censorship.
Lots of people scream they are pro-left/pro-right (often without evidence) but I think if you look at their history what they are is pro-whoever is in power.
They know who writes the cheques.
Removing all political influence is hard. I also am certain there was a case of some politician calling an editor, but don't remember the details beyond the politician getting booted because of it. But that sounds like bullshit or at least highly exaggerated. I'd like a source on that.
Worse than their bias, though, was the defunding for investigative reporting. These days the front page is covered with lazy reporting, clickbait and reprinted press releases.
Right now there's this story on the front page - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-47884273 - which appears to be original investigative reporting into a Tory MP.
What are you basing your opinion on?
I think there is some value in having a network like this, however, in that it adds to the diversity of networks in that it's not just "yet another privately owned network".
I find it interesting, however, that Channel 4 is state owned yet they (maybe I just mean Jon Snow in particular) seem to have an easier time being more critical of the government. It is likely that this is because it's not totally dependent on any one form of revenue given that it also has adverts on its main channels, but also it probably sees less pressure because of its smaller viewership and I suppose generally less serious tone of programmes.
Ah, yes. Maybe we could call it The Ministry of Thought.
40 years ago, there were several nationally recognized publications (NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc.), and all of them had a bias. NYT editorial leaned left, WSJ editorial leaned right, and everyone knew this. The political leaning was baked into brand of the publication.
This all changed in the internet era. The collapse of print advertising decimated the industry. Publications became more incentivized to publish questionable reporting because clickbaity headlines brought more ad traffic. The Trump campaign was covered ad nauseum because having his name in a headline significantly increased traffic to an article, and thus revenue.
The online advertising model is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of journalism you're looking for, but we as a society are hooked on it because it means we don't have to pay for the content.
This is a big problem, because no one else sits through those hours of local meetings that mean so much to our cities in terms of transportation, housing, schools and so on.
https://www.marylandmatters.org/
Maryland Public Television sends three reporters, plus an anchor and all the associated production staff, to cover the Maryland General Assembly each year. They sit through the hours of debates. They interview lawmakers.
The newspaper never was the only source of local news, and now more than ever there are places to get local news if people bother to look.
But also, you're talking about state-level reporting in a state with 6 million people.
I'm talking local papers in towns of 10K, 50K, 100K, 200K. They used to exist, and now they're going away, and we're worse off because of it.
That's a bit like saying scientists are biased in favour of anthropic climate change: it's a rational bias based on 200 years of evidence.
The FT has come out and said that if most of the economics literature was in favour of Brexit, they would have been too, but it wasn't, so they weren't.
There was a lot of concern with Nikkei's investment in the FT that that would no longer be the case and that it would kowtow to it's corporate owners - if proved not to be the case.
>That's a bit like saying scientists are biased in favour of anthropic climate change: it's a rational bias based on 200 years of evidence.
The economics profession is biased in favour of that because the think tank money, sourced from corporate wealth, wants that.
It's a pretty irrational bias which has led to, among other things, the mainstream of the profession being completely blindsided by the financial crisis (famously called out by the normally apolitical Queen) as well as the meteoric rise of China via highly managed trade (an anti free market policy treated by most economists in the 90s/early 00s as largely self defeating).
In fact, I think it's almost impossible to write an unopinionated news story as choosing to write a story is an opinion of itself - the clearer we can isolate these opinions the better.
As I said, it's a hard problem. I like the discussion on trying to find an answer though!
Stick to what people did, what they said, and let people draw their own conclusions.
Story selection is also a form of bias.
<<The usual tensions between reporters and government representatives have escalated to extreme levels in the Trump age, due largely to the President's near-daily attacks against the media. His portrayal of the people who cover him as his "enemy" and the "enemy of the people" has been denounced by historians, press freedom advocates and politicians in both parties.>>
No, it's not. All of those companies are extremely averse to putting boots on the ground, preferring software solutions instead.
Proper journalism worthy of the name (e.g. stuff beyond formulaic reporting like sports scores and financial prices), can't be done by software.
I know they won't, because they don't care about the quality of content on their platform. But there's no reason they couldn't hire actual journalists to do actual reporting for their platform, except that nobody is demanding it of them.
Lots of entities have enough capital to get a news company going, the problem is profitability and long-term sustainability. Not to mention running an actual news agency. Just because a company is profitable in one area doesn't mean they're guaranteed success in another.
How are companies like Facebook supposed to solve this problem? Where is the money to pay for these journalists going to come from? The ad revenue generated by that wing of their company? If it was that easy, then existing media companies wouldn't be struggling.
If you're counting on there being synergy between their existing userbase then I don't think it's worth it because there's so many risks. If a company starts pushing a certain type of news, their credibility and their brand would be so closely tied together with their news branch that either the news would be very bland and have a n agenda while also potentially alienating a large portion of users. This could very well lead to killing their main product.
Companies like google are already under fire for being partial. Add in them actively writing about things like politics and it'd be like adding a barrel of oil.
Not to mention the anti-trust laws involved. Companies like the ones you mentioned are already overpowered let alone giving them the keys to present actual news.