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Comment by cathyreisenwitz | Hacker News Reader

Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.

Very true

Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.

To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.

The incentives are perverse. It's not just about selling razors, but about getting attention. From Enlightenment 2.0: "You can blame the media, but obviously the media is just a part of a much broader trend. The problem is that, in the competition for attention, being rude (or vulgar) is a way of getting noticed. In order for it to work, however, you need to be ruder than everyone else. Everyone else, of course, is not about to stand idly by and let you steal all the attention. They will respond in kind. The result is a classic race to the bottom, where the level of rudeness gets steadily ratcheted up over time."

Algorithms in particular are problematic. And drive most new traffic to news websites.

Noah Smith:

"There is a growing body of careful research establishing causal links between social media and political polarization and extremism. But simply looking at the trend lines is enough to realize how much American society broke in the 2010s when everyone got a smartphone, Twitter, and Facebook. The 2010s are when perceptions of race relations in America fell off a cliff; when people began to perceive much more discrimination against themselves, despite declining discrimination in offline society; when progressives in particular became depressed en masse and started to experience mental health issues on an astonishing scale; and when young Americans started losing trust in their institutions at a rapid rate."

American society broke
fell off a cliff
discrimination against themselves
depressed en masse
mental health issues on an astonishing scale

institutions at a rapid rate

All in one paragraph. I don't even know this author, but the breathless panic induction makes sure, I'll avoid him in the future.

Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)

> Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

The Tribune will still have advertising.

"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.

I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City

The Salt Lake Tribune has always promoted the view of the opposition for Salt Lake City (and Utah). It might not be who you think.

Donors don’t have control over the editorial board like owners do. Donors can always pull their funding, but not before the editors get a meaty stab at a controversial topic. And funding being pulled is a story in itself.

Donors and owners are different.

The Salt Lake Tribune seems pretty centrist to me, but in Utah it is considered left-leaning.

The Salt Lake Tribune was explicitly founded in the 1870s as an anti Latter-day Saint newspaper. I'm guessing that the people you think are donors, are not actually donors.

...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push

I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.

The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...

Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)

Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence

My pops used to work for Lockheed, and every couple of years he would get a big bonus, then tapped on the shoulder that it was 'his year to donate' to PACs. They'd let him keep enough to cover taxes plus a little extra, but it was understood why he suddenly got a large bonus. This was back in the 80s, so maybe things have changed since, but I'm sure whatever regulations have been put in place are easily avoidable. The people who wrote the laws are the same ones taking the bribes.

If you're suggesting "The good guys just need to out-donate the bad guys", the unfortunate reality is the bad guys are donating because it makes them money, so they can afford to. Nobody bankrolls good deeds that lose money.

Ye sure. The point I am trying to make is that you could run off smaller donators and have an ideological paper whoch does not accept dirty money. Most political magazines I read are run like that where subscriptions essentially are donations.

It might also be the case that one single "donor" puts in like 60% of the budget.

But that is also no different from one single client being 60% of your revenue.

In both cases, they'll be calling some shots.

Better that than a press that won't say anything that will upset entire industries because they're afraid that ads will get withdrawn. It's been postulated that the only reason for pharmaceutical ads is to suppress critical reporting on the industry; the amount of spending on them is preposterous, while the amount of sales that TV and news ads pushes is likely tiny. Which is probably why all the "reporting" we get now is rewritten press releases about what a miracle the new drug is - the endless breathless stories push more sales than the actual ads.

Even if your 60% guy owns a pharmaceutical company, he might even be happier to push reporting on the problems with other pharmaceutical companies.

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