It’s not flawless but public funding for journalism is about the only answer here, I think. In the UK the BBC offers newscasts for different regions of the country… while they don’t exactly do a ton of hard hitting journalism they could if the money was spent more wisely.
Public funding is not the solution. Too many conflicts of interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds them?
Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
You may say that things won't go that way but since there is no way to check then we need to rely on trust and the trust in the mainstream media for good or bad reasons has plummeted in last decade.
And don't take this comment as an endorsement of paid news media, they have the same exact problems.
Currently the most succesful method of assaulting the "marketplace of ideas" is by overwhelming channels with content. Most of our guard rails and fears were around government over reach, not through the attrition of attention and via the production of overhwelming amounts of content.
As a result, more competition (more speech) has been defanged as a solution.
Producing Local news is never going to be more interesting and attention grabbing, and thus revenue generating, than pure dopamine stimulation.
To keep local news alive, it needs money.
A public news option may seem sub ideal, but the option is on the table because the other avenues have been destroyed. Hell - even news itself is losing. The NYT is now dependent on video game revenue to keep itself afloat.
The common ground of the eralier information ecosystem was a result of chance. New factors are at play, and if we want it to survive, then we need to address the revenue issue, some how.
> Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. It is possible to do, though given the current state of US politics it doesn’t seem remotely likely.
> This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration.
That is a very nice solution but it doesnt work in practice. If the budgets are decided by the government then there is always the possibility that neutrality on some subjects may be missing or that some amount of pressure will be applied in order to get some stories buried or on the contrary exacerbated.
Since there is no way to know which is which then how can you trust it? Personally I don't.
It's as if many of you have never really understood the concept behind separation of powers. There is a very clear reason why the branches of government are constructed in partial opposition to each other, and the validity of that reason is readily demonstrated every day. Who cares if one branch of the government doesn't want to fund a particular story or slant: another branch should be happy to write that check to provide a counterbalance.
Came here to say this. Journalism is increasingly seen as part of the commons (public good), like utilities. Under free market forces, it turns into propaganda for capitalists (moneyed interests - not workers), the same way that private utilities charge extortionary prices because people have little alternative.
So the litmus test I use is that if a politician works to undermine public funding of journalism, then they're the product of lobbyists, or at least beholden to moneyed interests in some way, and not a public servant.
And, yet, that reporting is better than what 99% of the public have in their brains on a subject.
Want an interesting discussion? Talk about "AI" to your non-technical family members. You'll take the NPR Gell-Mann effect any day over what they've gotten from other sources.
Isn't the whole idea of freedom of the press to act as a check to governmental power? With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news.
Personally, I support a ban on public (taxpayer) funding of journalism. Keep it independent.
> With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news
I think the BBC are a good counter to that argument. No, they’re not flawless but over the decades they’ve delivered plenty of journalism that’s held government to account.
The current government of the USA could not create a similar vehicle. Washington State would hand it off to some donor (like previously Inslee appointed a donor to ESD which then lost a billion dollars to scammers when covid hit) and the federal government, uh, goes without saying?
The BBC just like any other news organization is not neutral. It sometimes leans left and it sometimes lean right. The problem is that this "leaning" is never disclosed.
If a newspaper is comfortably right-wing/left-wing and so on, I don't care about their biases because at least you know that if you read it, you are going to get a "version" of a story that fits the overall narrative of the outlet.
When it comes down to publicly funded news outlet though, their neutrality is disputable and on top of that you end up paying through your taxes for "news" that have either been downplayed or exaggerated depending on who is reporting on it.
So as a tax payer, what is there to gain from being manipulated (at best) or lied to (at worst) by an organization who is supposed to be neutral but who isn't?
I wish it wasn't the case but there has been too many stories in the past in the mainstream media that turned out to be either misrepresented or made up and there was rarely any retraction/apologies on the subject.
And just in case you think that only right wingers have problem with the BBC (for example), the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.
But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.
† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.
> the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right
> of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
It's impossible for any media outlet to be considered truly neutral. Reporting that doesn't align with your own (biased) partisan viewpoint is, to you, biased.
It's often said that when both sides accuse a media outlet of being biased towards the other side, they're probably being pretty objective. It shows they're reporting accurately rather than pandering to one side over the other.
By contrast, nobody is accusing the Daily Mail of left-wing bias, nor The Guardian of being right-wing.
Just government power? Corporate media is no less afflicted by this problem. Small-time journalism is just as capable of being tendentious. Advertising also shapes coverage, as subscriptions and reader purchases never cover operating expenses.
In any case, this is not a problem to be solved. I do think the media should stop concealing or misrepresenting their political leanings. They will always be there. Everyone has a POV. You might as well openly advertise what that POV is. Then it is up to readers and viewers to draw from multiple POVs (which they might not do, but that's just life).
This position is suitable, for the 1990s. Even then, the BBC showed that public journalism != propaganda.
In fact, the evidence is that if you build institutions, you can actually have very effective public options.
However, in the current era, news is simply being outcompeted for revenue. Even the NYT is dependent on games for relevance.
And the attack vectors to mould and muzzle public understanding have changed. Instead of a steady drip of controlled information, it is private production of overwhelming amounts of content.
Most good people are fighting yesterdays war, with yesterdays weapons, tactics and ideas when it comes to speech.
The real reporting now comes from individual creators often with a gopro or cellphone camera and a youtube/tiktok channel.
It's cheap to make, doesn't require state/institutional funding. It's also quite hard to buyout all the creators and thus at least slightly resilient against the usual attack vectors.
