In the West privately funded media has increased polarisation over the last 50 years, so having stronger public investments in media could be helpful to stop this pervasive divisiveness. 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. These are both extremes that are undesirable IMO.
A bit naive to assume there isn't quite a bit of centralized control of media in the West. Not only are the media largely owned by a scant few large conglomerates - the government itself also gets routinely involved in controlling the narrative.
The seemingly obvious middle ground is that there cannot be too much concentration of news station ownership.
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.
These are all corporate sources that openly brag about censoring content. My favorite is when they censored an academic conference on censorship. Straight out of a Monty Python skit.
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.
It's not really opposites, though. Private media is highly centralized, and the people involved are also highly involved in politics (Rupert Murdoch, for instance). In China, high up party members are generally very wealthy, and wealthy people generally are highly involved in the party, so it's the same politically-well-connected elite that would be involved in media in the west in any case - it's just backed up by formal censorship, explicit government rule, etc.
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.
What do you think of France where the media is highly political, but politics no bi-polarized (13 parties in big elections, 5 large movement/ideologies)?
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"?
Sounds nice. One of the things I've been dwelling on recently is the degree to which economic geography creates the conditions for an effective press. Germany and France are both really regional, in the sense that you have loads of competing regional elites, each with their own take on things. In the UK, it's very centralized, so there's a much greater penalty to your career if you ruffle feathers, and the views expressed in the media are necessarily fairly narrow (for instance, Jeremy Corbyn, despite getting about 40% of the popular vote in 2017, had basically no positive media coverage throughout his tenure).
Sounds like a mature approach where many voices are heard and allowed to be shared and understood. France puts faith in citizens while other countries try to control those choices and voices.
I think news in west is starting to see some direction for news in the future, the weight of main stream media is going downwards. It has created some problem to force them moving towards the extreme of political spectrum to be honest. News is not about reporting the facts only, it has influence and education value, it is like literature, I don't think everyone should be a teacher, and I don't think everyone should be a journalist. Especially many independent journalists would actually need to make a living with their reports, they are more likely to bend facts to please their sponsors.
In the west, governments collude with the media entities. This collusion is not discussed in the mainstream or in the academia that much, as the latter is part of that collusive cooperative. In China, CCP controls the media. The difference between China and the West is one level of indirection.
Right. That something is private is by itself meaningless. This is a major problem in the West that many don't seem to understand, that the lines between the private and public sector are worthless and blurred if the private sector is powerful enough to function as a de facto arm of the government. Raw power is what counts. In terms of the media, CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox, etc, are all de facto regime media outlets (Google and Facebook fall broadly into the same camp because they control the flow of information). The same oligarchic milieu that influences or runs the government influences or runs the media. They all go to the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same parties, etc, etc. You don't need a Legion of Doom to orchestrate anything or any planning. Common interests and a similar lust for power causes a coincidental synthesis of mutually constructive arrangements that the same group finds beneficial. It happens naturally, as it were.
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.
I’m not sure many in the west would see divisiveness as a negative, in so much that it seems necessary to reach an stable equilibrium. Yes, one side will find the other side’s position infuriating, but China is the result of what happens when one side completely wins over the other. Because there is no equilibrium to be had, they can only emphasize unity.
If you want to balance a system dynamically, you want negative, not positive feedback loops. The latter will just grow until they shake the system apart.
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.
We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear.
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.
> We basically have an efficient system where two sides constantly adjust their positions so that elections are won basically on a knife edge. The system demands competition, and if that competition doesn’t come from outside (eg there is a war), it won’t simply disappear.
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.
It’s a question of degrees of divisiveness. If the population is divided enough to kill each other there probably needs to be some sort of regulations to temper the extremes.
Not defending China's idea at all, but with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible. They have the right to do it sure, and they should, but if a good portion of a populace lives in a fiction, that isn't great. And to be clear while leftist stuff can be extreme, sure, the current major problem is right wing extremist lies are clearly more detrimental just because of their popularity. It is not really a both sides issue.
> with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible.
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.
>> with private media in this country having a financial motivation to knowingly lie is pretty reprehensible.
> 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.
> These are both extremes that are undesirable IMO.
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.
I don't think those things can be attributed to the media system.
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
Publicly funded media will present the views of those in power. That does not mean it will be any less self-serving than private media. Government newspapers have a sorry history.
Those hucksters are the price we pay for freedom of expression. In normal times, it's just a clownshow. Obviously it's more of a problem when there's a constitutional crisis, a war, or pandemic.
I wish PBS was better funded and supported, maybe look to BBC as an example to emulate. Though BBC also has non-new programming (drag race!).
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.
The Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to broadcast TV and radio because spectrum was a limited resource. It never applied to cable, satellite, or online services. Those were never really deregulated because they were hardly regulated in the first place.
Makes sense. Broadcast is a shell of what it was in viewership. Interestingly it seems Republicans might be the ones pushing government intervention on those new platforms (FB) since they feel censored.
I think a polarized society, means there is a big problem in that society that needs fixing. Like when a project is forked because people think it should have other goals/values. I don't think we can split society, so that problem needs to be found and addressed, so people can trust each other and the government again.
Meaning having all the correct facts, and information, will not fix polarization, only societal evolution
