> should be available to all participants of that society.
Who pays?
Who pays?
I see the gp post about pirating news as a very good point, while having no veleity to pay the New York Times, and being ok with not reading it in general.
But I also pay for my national (public) news outlet, and their articles are available to anyone anywhere in the world. I don't know how it should work, but I wish we could get to a system where the burden to keep news outlet alive is split thinly enough to have open but viable publications around the world.
Basically the same way weather stations collaborate all other the world and we pay for our local stations while getting acccess to all the forecast everywhere.
For example in Hungary there is an official news agency ran by the government, with (cumbersome) free access for everybody. Of course this does provide somewhat biased presentation of some facts, but on many topics it provides unbiased access to news for any citizen.
This is actually pretty common in Europe, often funded by mandatory fees (for some reason not branded as taxes) certain appliance owners need to pay (UK TV license, German Rundfunkbeitrag). For this fee people get access to news and cultural programmes for free via different media (radio, TV, internet).
The level of control governments exert on public broadcasting networks is widely different. Since Meloni, the RAI in Italy is facing similar issues, but Hungary is still the canonic example of government misinformation and propaganda.
People have free access to public roads all around the world, and the quality wildly differs in that as well. Also the quality of for-profit news services does differ wildly, you might have an opinion about that of fox news, for example, but that is also off topic in this discussion.
On the contrary, the quality of the news is very important to the discussion. There is no point in making trash freely available to the public, after all.
think about this: I will get mostly objective and useful reports of the flood approaching my home near the river regardless the narrative/interpretation they might have on some other topics, or the biased reporting on the merits of the government in handling the situation at the dams.
For me I'm not here to debate on the political policies of some governments, just gave a few examples of ways to fund public access to news. This discussion is over from my part.
Public donors ALA Patreon
People doing it in their free time because they care a lot about the subject (nowadays with things like Twitter its quite possible for an independent obsessive to write a good piece on, for instance, the Ukraine War by mostly referring to open sources and public announcements by governments and corporations)
Government sponsorship ala BBC
Instead of paying news outlets to provide ourselves with filtered feeds of content that match our own biases, we could instead pay news outlets to produce competing streams of explicit propaganda to be freely disseminated. The overall bias and quality of the news would be largely unchanged, even if the biases were more obvious; in fact, it may even improve.