Clearly people won’t pay for news because it’s flawed, the product stinks, and the information is biased. So here’s a great idea, let’s steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay for it! Then it will be good somehow.
It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.
The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government.
The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.
Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal, for instance, before it became a national story.
Here's one afterward:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863
> Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report.
"not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.
In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.
To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.
"Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality.
Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now.
I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system.
"News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me.
I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.
Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way.
I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to.
- is it important that voting citizens are informed about various issues?
- is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting this need?
I don't think we can assume it would.
News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust established in it's name.
Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post, instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and more for-profit articles.
The following would address specifically how (or if) journalistic business / financing models need reform.
As for journalistic business / financing models: public financing will never be anything but a tool of the power structure (whether or not they happen to be in formal power at the moment).
Private financing sometimes works, but doesn't at the moment.
You're welcome to share or not.
What isn't a tool of the power structure? What of advertising (see the I.F. Stone interview I've posted elsewhere in this thread), or of philanthropy (take your pick of benefactors)?
- ABC (Australia)
- BBC (UK)
- CBC (Canada)
- CPB, NPR, and PBS (US, though with very limited public funding)
- Canal Once, Canal 22, Canal Catorce (Mexico)
- DR (Denmark)
- Deutshlandfunk, DeutscheWelle and regional broadcasters (NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, HR, SR, RB), the last for somewhat interesting denazification reasons.
- EBC (Brazil)
- ERT (Greece)
- NRK (Norway)
- Polskie Radio (Poland)
- RNZ/TVNZ (New Zealand)
- Sveriges Radio/Television (Sweden)
- TVN (Chile)
- VOA, AFN (US, not broadcast domestically)
Are there specific parts of my diagnosis or etiology you specifically disagree with? Which?