China proposes prohibiting private investment in news service sector
bloombergquint.com
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That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side.
And... not attacking China's great political unification, having and using politics to censor out a lot of government corruption that ultimately hurts its own people... doesn't look great
(no 'political balance-of-power' + no freedom-of-speech/press + no-election: the government officials can de facto do whatever they want, from small things like accepting bribes for not noticing fake-food factories, to uh... ok I'll stop now.
> That can be balanced-out with other media outlets voicing other side.
It's entirely possible to counter balance something with a lie, neither the original or response being the truth, which doesn't help inform the viewers either.
In other words: polarisation is useful when it's transient. Some issue causes people to divide and work out some consensus, and then divisions die down. A persistent divison that becomes its own end is destructive.
Actually, doesn’t China do that? It paints it’s people’s struggles as them vs the rest of the world. Maybe they don’t need political competition because the CIA gets the blame for many of its domestic problems.
Yeah, but what's the system efficient about? Not figuring out correct solutions - the internal competition demands both sides to define themselves in terms of doing/believing the opposite to what the other side does/believes, so the system is just doing a random walk. The way I see it, it's primarily efficient as a way to grow the market - ever-increasing campaign budgets and ongoing political shouting matches are just funding advertisers and news agencies.
China is more extreme, and more explicit about the link between politics and media, but it's broadly speaking the same system.
PS: this is especially true of countries like the UK, where extremely stringent and abusable libel laws regularly cause financial troubles for small presses that upset powerful people.
We even learn at school that no writing can be objective since humans write them but what matters is to identify ideological stances and read enough subjective angles to have at least an opinion on where stakeholders stand if not "the truth"?
Another threat is foreign ownership of media. In Poland, where public media is explicitly controlled by whatever ruling party happens to be in power, there was recently a big media circus around introducing some media investment restrictions by foreign companies. Over 80% of Polish media are foreign owned, much of it in German hands, but not only. Best of all, it's not presented as representing the interests of those countries or groups. That's a huge problem for national security and a symptom of the neocolonial control the country is under (Piketty once described Poland as "foreign-owned"). Recent media brouhaha was triggered by an American media company (owned by Discovery). It's one thing to read about another POV. It's another to have foreign interests presented as your own and concealing their true nature. The Western media meanwhile routinely convince the Western public that anything against Western oligarchic interest in that region is fascist and other favorite epithets. They groom the public to view what's happening in a way that is untrue and benefits oligarchs. Colonialism still exists. We just call it other things now.
Also, divisiveness is not the primary problem, but downstream. If we focus on division, we risk throwing truth under the bus, especially in this climate of subjectivist "narratives". We are vulnerable to saying "to heal divisions, we must accept a common narrative". Heh, sorry, nope. That's the tyranny of the lie and the narrative makers (hence the foaming at the mouth by those who are losing control of the "official narrative"). The only thing worth uniting around is something true and something capable and worthy enough to function as a unifier. You need enough in common to create a workable society where coexistence and cooperation are possible. If we can't find something like that, then sorry, but you have no viable society.
Do you really think that people who write about politics can ever resist the urge to try to shape politics?
Why would a government journalist be any better?
This goes back to the Enlightenment, and has historically been considered a good thing when contrasted to state or church doctrines.
Happy to help.
Anyone who's opinion exists outside of the current groupthink is forced to leave these big platforms. It makes it harder for the average person within this group to express themselves because these platforms make it easy. But many will and new platforms will form outside of big tech. These new platforms will have time and space to rethink how they operate and perhaps they will bring in a new era of consumer control.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-ce...
The HN discussion:
Which used to be the rule, but the rules weren't quite bulletproof enough so now Sinclair and a handful of others own far more news outlets than they should by a better metric. I'm not saying there's anything illegal about it, but I think it should be fixed.
But I also think that if someone made their fortune in industry, they probably shouldn't own newspapers. It's so much conflict of interest... it seems like sometimes it can be okay, but only if there's a really well enforced legal firewall between the interests of the owner and the news reporting. That's hard to manage if the owner isn't disconnected from decisions about what to fund or whether to promote staff critical of them.
There could be a middle ground, but if we can't define what rules constitute a fair middle ground it seems to just get worked around until effectively a few private voices dictate an awful lot of the spin applied to stories.
Plenty of dissenting folks using non-traditional outlets like podcasts and YouTube that have an audience that rivals or is larger than legacy media.
Of course, this would not be possible in China where any dissenting voices would quickly be extinguished.
The problem is trusting government. I don't trust either parties here so I would lean toward a for-profit system with heavier regulation.
It looks like the Fairness Doctrine is no more? Anyone have better knowledge here than I do who can give some background?
From what I kind of know it used to require broadcasters to dedicate programming to actual factual news in order to use govt spectrum. Also dictated journalism ethics like letting subjects comment.
Also seems like this deregulation was the impetus for (what i consider dangerous and harmful) alt reality 'news' like the murdoch empire and Alex Jones characters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everyth...
No, BBC today is a bad example. BBC 50 years ago, I don't know.
I don’t pay for TV license (out of principles) and I’m annoyed I cannot legally watch SpaceX launches live on YouTube.
Completely unsubstantiated nonsense claim.
> China has the opposite configuration where the state controls all information and you'll be re-educated if you say the wrong thing loud enough.
Alarmist gobbledygook.
The problem with putting them in the same sentence is that it equates them, in the same way "very fine people on both sides" did.
Being sent to a reeducation camp, keeping a billion plus population exposed only to propaganda, a total lack of free speech, and openly disappearing people (like Gedhun Choekyi Nyima of Tibet) is not in the same bracket as any of the other ills you were mentioning.
The same things are present in both the chinese and American societies, under different names. Eg. The US prosecuted the "war on drugs" to house a ton of political prisoners and ensure they cant vote, and that their families cannot become wealthier without adopting the party line. The Facebook moderation team remove your direct message to a friend is not materially different from the government moderation team removing your wichat direct message to a friend. American society disappears people too; for an obvious example, you can look at the people painting red hands on their faces
Meaning having all the correct facts, and information, will not fix polarization, only societal evolution
https://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-language-newspapers-...
The recent nuclear submarine deal makes a lot more sense with that world view.
It wasn't for lack of trying.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3151549/c...
But that only speaks to the total values, not substitutability or importance.
Given that most of what China imports from Australia are raw materials, and China is still a primarily manufacturing and construction economy (in dollar terms), it seems like a shortsighted move.
Especially since Australia generally has good relationships with the West (especially the UK and US) due to shared culture.
The proper time to try to bully Australia into line would have been 20 years from now, once China's economy has fully developed and Belt and Road has had time to play out.
But I imagine the Chinese were looking at Australia through the optics of (1) what the US was doing & (2) how a Chinese reaction to Australia's stubbornness would be read by other, smaller SE Asian countries.
China, seeking to make an example in the region, escalated.
https://www.hudson.org/research/17228-how-china-overreached-...
"Since 2018, China has refused to accept cabinet-level meetings with Australian counterparts, and for the past year is refusing to even accept phone calls. Since 2020, Beijing has imposed punitive measures against Australian barley, coal, timber, beef, cotton, sugar, copper, wool, lobsters, wine, and liquefied natural gas. These export sectors bring in around $15 billion a year from China. State authorities have issued arbitrary travel and safety warnings to Chinese students hoping to study in Australia."
Most recently saying with these new subs we are a potential nuclear target now. Or the paper cat will soon learn its lesson type articles. Quite a few of these over recent years and while many are probably bluster, it's hard for people on the end of this to not think its best to prepare for them being more than empty words.
In very broad strokes I think China spent 30 years trying to align Australia politically to them, now this has push back they have moved to make an example, not helped that our current leaders seem to have equally encouraged this new relationship. I doubt it will ever be military action but at the same time we should prepare for the unlikely. Nukes make sense for Australia and other small nations where there is threat. As much as they are horrible things and it may lead to nuclear proliferation, it's the only self reliant way for a small nation to protect itself from a large nation if things go hot.
Id actually like to see a world where countries agreed to serious limits to military. Maximum # jets, ships, troops and tanks type thing so a build-up to war would be harder, more obvious and give time to deal with fractured relationships.
Information is power, Xi wants 100% control over it. It's probably more important than controlling the Armed Forces in the long run.
If you put people in a bubble only let them see what you want to see, it's pretty easy to control them, it doesn't matter who they are.
And by messy I mean armed forces involvement and/or bodies in the streets.
The story is really simple - CCP wants to forbid any private control of information, that's it. It's not a new concept.
It's unlikely that anyone really knows what Xi wants. The narrative that 'he just wants what's best for China' plays directly into his potential megalomania, at the same time, I don't doubt that there is some truth to this as well. Nations can benefit from long-lived leaders.
That said, the whole thing does not look good. Actions further suppressing the spread of basic information are not going to be good for China in the long run. And Xi probably is just another kind of dictator, we have a very long run of world history that gives us innumerable examples. One thing he could have done when extending his term limits, was signal when he would leave, and making sure that the 'new rules' are just and equitable with respect to future leaders.
Highest priority: to stay in power. That China is his (he get to be the dictator) for all of his life.
Possibly thereafter: Make China stronger, economically, military, land area.
Destroying independent press damages and weakens China, but that's ok because a strong China is only 2nd priority for Xi (and his closest men I suppose).
Having a 'hole' in the information firewall can be useful for some things, but it's still a marginal effect.
Most of the population won't have any use for it - they'll have no reason to question what's in the mainstream.
When Xi bans any negative mention of him, or any mention at all of taboos subjects i.e. Tiananmen, or any material discussion at all of sensitive issues like Taiwan, Uyghurs or Tibet, Hong Kong, anywhere, at any time - then he'll effectively convince the general population of his will on the subject.
The population will ,by and large, believe what he wants them to believe, most people wouldn't consider dissent on the issue because there would be no point.
There are some people within every population that will chose to 'look outside' and 'seek unpopular truths' - but the mainstream population will take care of suppressing them.
Xi could do anything he wants to the Uyghurs, he could subsequently justify it in the press irrespective of how truthful that information was, and the general public would be fine with it. The small number of dissenters would have no means to disagree.
When you combine information control with the fact that there's a lack of any right to organize or assemble, then you have total control. FYI - this is why 'freedom of assembly' is a primary right in all modern constitutions, it's mostly a means of organizing around information.
Finally, it would be incredibly naive to not grasp the implications of this regulatory movement which further entrenches total government control of information, without any oversight whatsoever.
Exactly. The point of information control in closed society is not to avoid the exposure of particular events, but to suppress entire lines of thought.
F.ex. How would you begin a conversation with a North Korean about democracy?
Their very concept of the idea, inasmuch as they are likely aware of it at all, is alien to your concept.
Which means that conversation has to start all the way underneath, at the underpinnings and philosophical bases of democracy. Which is a much more difficult and lengthy conversation.
Which is the entire point, because most people won't make the effort. Anymore so than the average American is capable of and interested in learning enough to have a nuanced conversation on the differences between Soviet and Chinese communism.
> Taiwan, Uyghurs or Tibet, Hong Kong
These are not the types of issues that most Chinese people are upset about, when it comes to their government. These are the types of issues that play well to audiences outside of China.
There's a massive disconnect here. Most controversies, cultural trends, fads, etc. in China receive almost no coverage outside of China, not because it's intrinsically difficult to find out about them (all you need is an internet connection and Chinese language skills), but because the foreign media tends to focus almost exclusively on the types of issues you listed. The vast majority of people outside China simply have no idea what's going on in the country.
This isn't to excuse the lack of independent media in China, but just to point out that the foreign media is also doing the public a massive disservice on this count.
People within a 'closed system' (i.e. China) are going to have a view of an internal issue that the government wants them to have.
"There's nothing big happening here, just 'ABC' because 'XYZ', the Westerners a bit upset about it but that's their colonialist view, they should mind their own business"
So they justify their actions, don't allow debate, suppress the language of rhetoric, distract and use the 'foreigner' straw man, and make petty villains out of anyone challenging the authority.
That 'people don't care' is the result of that control.
The same thing is true in Russia. Putin has journalist and political opponents killed, and he's totally corrupt. And yet, he has an 80% approval rating.
If you can control the press and the narrative, you can convince people that your actions 'were necessary for the promulgation of the state', the plebes won't be able to make an informed consensus as to any situation.
Likewise, Russians seem to have an indifference to a lot of state corruption.
So I don't agree that 'The West' is doing a 'big disservice' by talking about issues that the average Chinese doesn't care about, or by highlighting how corrupt and murderous Putin is.
The whole point of the exercise is to contemplate that 'rights' are a material part of the equation - and, ironically - probably going to make them much wealthier in the long run anyhow. Hong Kong and Taiwan are considerably more wealthy on a per-capita basis, at least largely because they don't live under the sane ultra authoritarian system.
The Tiananmen protests were a very powerful and visceral display of where the power really lies in China, and the true consequences of challenging that power. It's an important bit of history.
Finally, we're all victims of this to some extent, western press has a number of potent institutional biases, and now we have the problem of completely fabricated news, which is another thing altogether.
I find that many Westerners believe that because they can read the New York Times or Washington Post, they know more about what's going on in China than people in China do. The problem is that those newspapers only cover a tiny sliver of what goes on in China, and they focus almost exclusively on a small set of negative stories (and very often, this reporting is extremely inaccurate, partial or exaggerated). Imagine if you didn't speak English and had never been to the US, and all you ever read about the US was how terribly prisoners are treated and all the wars it fights around the world. You would have an incredibly skewed picture of the country.
What do people actually care about? Things like the corrupt local officials who may be colluding with property developers (and consequently, the ongoing anti-corruption campaign is very popular), or the rat race to get ahead in an ultra-competitive society.
> Hong Kong and Taiwan are considerably more wealthy on a per-capita basis, at least largely because they don't live under the sane ultra authoritarian system.
The gap between the more developed parts of the mainland and Taiwan is rapidly closing, and is not that large any more. Beijing and Shanghai are not far behind Taipei, and may catch up in the next few years. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is considerably wealthier than either Taiwan or mainland China.
I just think that most of the Western press does a terrible job of covering China, and is actually significantly misinforming its audience in this regard. The quality standards for China coverage are just incredibly low (and because the audience is mostly uninformed on the topic, they mostly can't tell), and the geopolitical rivalry seems to color and shape the reporting to a huge extent.
So in other words... literally people all over the world, not in the US. Because that's exactly what happens in China, hell even in Europe where they speak English...
> […]
> The population will ,by and large, believe what he wants them to believe, most people wouldn't consider dissent on the issue because there would be no point.
> There are some people within every population that will chose to 'look outside' and 'seek unpopular truths' - but the mainstream population will take care of suppressing them.
The more effective approach by far is to condition people from childhood into believing that the ability to select from one of a few impotent political identities, all of which lead to the slightest variations of policy conclusions within the field of pre-determined acceptability, represents the universal best possible form of governance and the purest instantiation of such high-minded ideals as Freedom, Liberty, and Justice.
This way you can mollify a population into accepting almost anything as normal: endless wars, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, lifelong debt, a constant struggle to afford housing, education, and medical care, etc. You can convince them at will that any rival is a tyrannical regime under a capricious, childish, genocidal maniac, and that any evidence to the contrary should be dismissed with self-satisfied smugness as coerced or compensated state propaganda.
I find it hard to be confident that the US Security Apparatus couldn't figure out what I access via VPN if they chose to.
I'm not sure whether the US or the CCP would be more able to block all VPNs, but I have the feeling the answer is the latter (for legal, rather than technical reasons).
Crude operations to shut down certain parts of the web, yes. Ability to monitor individuals, yes.
But the only entity on earth that can do surveillance at scale is China. They've invented that in the modern sense.
And the media is a strange place. Something like Joe Rogan's podcast is realistically more mainstream and probably more trusted than most news programs. There will be many examples like that.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-med...
How can you "trust" a podcast that just interviews everyone and takes them at face value? Do people seriously go "yeah I heard it on joe rogan so I think it's probably true"?
Obviously any thinking individual will know Joe Rogan is worse at some of these aspects than mainstream media but they also recognize that mainstream media will willfully consistently violate other domains where Joe Rogan won't.
I trust Joe Rogan will tell me some stupid stuff about conspiracies and extra dimensionality trips, but I also trust that he won't tell me this stuff just to sell me on sponsors or his party's agenda, unlike the mainstream news.
The media companies don't have any special domain experience, they've got no clear idea if what they are reporting on is true or not.
And it doesn't really answer a lot of the hard questions. Who is going to actually write the articles, what's their political angle, and what are their career objectives? And how do you handle delicate topics with evolving information in a neutral way?
Create one "donations to non-profit news" bucket, that people could freely contribute to (with tax advantages, like the election fund).
Then apportion that money out to all non-profit news organizations, according to some (readership) + (journalistic awards by their peers) weighting.
It removes the direct connection between donor and output, which is what we seem to want in news.
Also, PBS has a variety of content and I don't think I know anyone who watches their news. Scarcely any of their content, but they have a few good things. I don't think they are taken very seriously as a news organization -- much less than NPR, for instance.
Yes, they get government funding and have a public mission. But they also aren't entirely funded by tax dollars.
I do think they have a weird bias that they are very oblivious to, but I don't think it's exactly a pro-government bias. It seems more like a don't-be-controversial bias where the goalpost for that keeps shifting.
Subscriber owned, i.e. subscribing involves buying a voting share in the enterprise. Endowed. Donor-driven is just one among many non-profit models.
A not for profit newspaper could easily have a backer with other motivations, where they might be willing to sacrifice accuracy to push a particular agenda.
I am not sure that the problem is the news. I do not think people really care if they get accurate news.
Evidently not. When was the last time a mainstream news organization got heat from its own viewer base because of inaccurate reporting? I mean, it's fun to dunk on fox news because you think they're obviously spewing lies or whatever, but that doesn't really matter unless their viewership actually cares. Meanwhile outrage drives clicks, so journalists are strongly incentivized to stretch the truth.
Even assuming all leads were pursued equally, and all stories were published, entertainment is still highly partisan.
Which, presumably, is why we saw partisanship jump when the entertainment component increased in revenue importance (90s talk radio, then 2000s competitive 24/7 news).
Fox News was objectively brilliant in that they saw this coming, which is why they went ahead and devoted a huge chunk of their airtime to entertainment-weighted programming.
In any case, the eyeballs are the product. The advertisers are increasingly the true customers of media outlets. They don't even theoretically care about accuracy.
The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it? Well, that's a news organisation. It's not that you necessarily trust any one individual publisher, it's that a range of views are freely represented in the press generally.
The Chinese constitution used to guarantee free speech, but the massive disconnect between what the constitution said and what was actually allowed was so gargantuan it became a bit of an embarrassment in the post-Tiananmen era. Since then the constitution has been revised extensively to be less blatantly contrary to reality.
Totally incidental aside, but one of the inciting incidents for constitutional revision was a court case brought by a person fired from their job for being short, where the actual job had no real requirement for them being any particular height. They won the case based on the constitution's barring discrimination, but the fact that a court had granted a right to someone based on the constitution was so novel and unheard of that it caused massive conniptions in the CCP.
No, that's a publisher. "News" describes the product, not the method of operation. Has the war on words been so successful that Americans univerally consider e.g. Cosmo "news" now?
Google writes PR pieces. I don't see why you should trust news articles more than PR pieces, except as links to other sources that you can check yourself like scientific articles or government agencies with data.
> The issue is freedom of expression. If individuals are allowed to speak, write and disseminate information and opinion freely and own businesses, why can't they charge for it?
You can make legally protected news organizations, and that anyone who doesn't follow those rules isn't allowed to call themselves a news site with journalists. Instead they'd be forced to call themselves opinion writers or bloggers. That way you still have the freedom of expression but lets the public clearly see who follows the basic rules of independent reporting.
In terms of journalistic ethics, non-profit is somewhat better but by design isn't necessarily free of the same crockery that occurs in for-profit news. Non-profits are more likely to get people who take journalistic ethic seriously, but non-profit orgs are also seen as career leap-pads to the big name for-profit outlets, thus you end up with a lot of the same people and similar practices that end up at places like WaPo.
I don't know what the answer is to news, but I'm pessimistic that present models of non-profit news are the solution some believe them to be.
> I wonder why [...] articles written by for-profit organizations are as trusted as they are.
That's like asking "why do people believe propaganda?" The entire business model is built on creating the perception that they are authoritative when they may be nothing but lackeys playing dress-up. Sadly, the average person receives a generally poor education and is never taught about human psychology and how programmable the human brain is, and many of the messages they've received about the world came from parents whose views were shaped by a world that didn't have the internet in its current form. You could place the truth in front of them and it's a mixed bag as to whether they take that information and form an original opinion. But if you dress that information in a suit and tie, perhaps with the right letter and color next to their name, they become conditioned to accept that information from a place of subordinance.
EDIT: I want to clarify that I don't actually like shitting on public media. There was a lot that I learned during my time in it, there are some fantastic journalists in that arena, and overall I want to be believe in the concept. I've been highly critical of just about every single organization I've ever been affiliated with, so my intent isn't to single them out.
I pay monthly donations to Democracy Now, PBS, and Matt Taibbi. For my tastes, I very much prefer these sources rather than MSNBC or Fox News, which I dislike (one reason is that they never seem to walk back major stories that we eventually find out that they initially got wrong - that seems either unprofessional or corrupt, or maybe both).
A true facts only news outlet is likely best, but provides little entertainment value.
Seems centrist according to AllSides, but in my experience is has been Center-Left to Left.
Shouldn’t news be parcelled like AT&T and centralization systematically unweeded, for it is far more dangerous than centralization in energy or internet providers. Then, when there are thousands of small information providers, we can see bottom-up what actually interests people, rather than beating up an idea from the top-down until people think it’s interesting.
Private or public if the media is controlled by a small club of wealthy and/or connected players you have an unhealthy and not very free press.
The government can't invest in all media organizations equally. This will just be a new source of polarization in itself.
Any suggestions?
Why force it legally, when they could just have the private news sector de facto mirror what the establishment says (complete with a faux-choice between two parties), like in the US?
But yes aside from that you are totally free to start your own media.