Let’s not play word games. It’s not “populist authoritarianism” to say that, in a democratic society, taxpayers shouldn’t have to bankroll journalists who don’t share their world views.
Shutting down journalists just because they're not ideologically aligned seems a bit antidemocratic to me - it's important for the fourth estate to be an independent watchdog over other institutions.
What you're suggesting is something close to Orbanism or Putinism, where the media apparatus is completely captured by the ruling party. That is not an appealing proposition to me.
A democracy generally will have a plurality of views. But when it comes to voting on what will receive public funding, that's based on having a majority.
> it's important for the fourth estate to be an independent watchdog over other institutions.
That's not democratic. That's giving a single profession the power to check a government elected by the majority.
Why? That's the reasoning Orban used to purge the media and strengthen his corrupt regime. Private journalism already is beholden to private employers, e. g. Oligarchs like Bezos buying the post. There needs to be an independent counterweight, not what you're asking for - which would be state propaganda.
> That's giving a single profession the power to check a government elected by the majority.
Yes, that is the purpose of the fourth estate in a democracy, just like the third branch of government, which is also supposed to be impartial in their judgements and not be swayed by electoral concerns.
> Why?
Because the public getting to decide how to spend their own tax dollars is the bare minimum standard for calling something a democracy. Dictating that the public must spend tax dollars on things they do not support is completely unlike constitutional protections on minorities.
> Yes, that is the purpose of the fourth estate in a democracy
What country has a "fourth estate" in its constitution? And who decided that journalists are it?
This is a strong assertion that serves more as a declaration of ideology than an argument.
> What country has a "fourth estate" in its constitution? And who decided that journalists are it?
I'm not really interested in the particular, as mentioned above. The point is how systems behave in the real world, with real world actors, with real world feedback loops and incentive structures, not counter-productive excursions into legalisms.
The failure modes I describe are real and actually happened. I'm not terribly interested in litigating the ideological framework that produced them - ye shall know them by their fruits and all that.
I'd invite you to read my longer comment above if you'd like to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563762
This is why Obama, Biden, and other politicians who support democracy had no problem funding a free and fair press while populist authoritarians have sought to dismantle it.
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims. IMO majoritarianism is the failure mode of democracy - mob rule. We saw this happen in Hungary, where Orban used his majority to cement sixteen years of one-party dictatorship and only by a miracle got deposed this year.
Pluralism is how democratic institutions can actually be upheld and protections like free speech can be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
They are synonyms. That’s why the Founders called America a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy.” “Democracy” is like a color: blue, green, or red. You never find it by itself in the real world. It’s always got something else mixed in: constitutionalism, liberalism, even constitutional monarchy.
And there is a good reason to be precise about using orthogonal terms in orthogonal ways. As Georgetown’s Shadi Hamid explains, conflating “democracy” with “liberalism” and Anglo/European cultural and political norms makes it very hard to understand how democracy actually operates globally: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
More to the point here, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S. We have a constitutional republic with myriad checks on majoritarian rule: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, etc. Thus it’s important to be precise about when you’re saying a particular decision should be turned over to the majority and when you think majoritarian impulses must be checked by anti-majoritarian institutions.
Here, I’m trying to be precise: I think the majority should get its way when deciding who to affirmatively support with taxpayer dollars. I think public spending priorities are at the core of where the people are preeminent. That’s why the House of Representatives in the U.S. and the House of Commons in the U.K. have the Power of the Purse. But the majority should be checked by courts when it comes to shutting down independent speech from private individuals.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.