Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.
Comment on So much for that dream.
stealthnerd@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The fall of newspapers led us down the path of click bait, low quality, ad driven “news”. Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free. Those that did survive mostly exist in a much smaller form with low funding and reduced quality.
Personally, I’m excited to see it becoming more common for people to subscribe to news services again. I just wish there was more diversity and competition available like there was in the past but I’m hopeful we’ll get there as more people seem to be opening back up to paying for high quality publications.
High quality journalism can’t exist without paid subscribers but there are still ways to access it for those who can’t afford it, visiting a local library for example.
flossdaily@lemmy.world 1 year ago
9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Should have long term funding structures in place (longer than election cycles) so that you dont have different political parties influencing things once elected into power
flossdaily@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we’ve learned since then about media malfeasance.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Very few newspapers survived the transition to digital because suddenly nobody wanted to pay for access to something they could get online for free.
This has nothing to do with click bait low quality ad driven news.
The cut off of access to information is a fundamental problem of using capitalism to allocate resources in an information economy. Information does not behave the same as matter and energy, it is a fundamentally different physical property of the universe, and unlike matter and energy, it is not conserved and limited in the same way.
With matter and energy, to replicate it, you need the same amount of resources as the original, if you possess the original, I cannot possess it, and to make a copy I need all the metal /energy that you did to make the first one. But with information, once it exists in a digital format, we can effectively replicate it infinitely and immediately to everyone around the globe, for next to nothing. At a fundamental level, information does not have the same property of scarcity as literally all physical goods.
And that’s a problem now that we’re trying to use capitalism to fund an information economy. Capitalism is entirely based on the idea of scarce things being valuable; despite everyone needing oxygen / air to live, it is not valuable in most places because it is not scarce.
So what has happened? Did we act intelligently and back up and examine whether capitalism is the right system of resource allocation for the information economy? No. We had fistedly spend billions and billions of dollars and wasted millions of people’s lives building the copyright system, and the patent system, and paywalls and DRM all in the pursuit of creating artificial scarcity where there was never a need for it.
Spicylem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I do agree that more competition with enough subscribers is better. I wish more regional “papers” had been able to convert. I live in a large city with a terrible paper and would gladly pay for better local news and Journalism.
The trouble is it’s hard to subscribe to every paper. I like that you at least get a handful of free times articles.
Medium attempts to provide quality work paid directly to the writers and journalists but it’s hard for them to do big projects.
Several universities and business schools provide op-ed type pieces.
ineedaunion@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Agree, yet disagree. That article on Suits that shows what the writers got paid vs the views vs the amount of money executives get, shows that all we need to do is get the money into the hand of the deserving people instead of the billionaire stockholders.
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I know “state-funded media” is an ominous word to Americans, but most European countries have their own government broadcaster and news organization, entirely funded through taxes.
Those generally offer high-quality non-biased journalism (of course it’s always based on how authoritarian the government is). The British BBC, the Swedish SVT, the German DW etc. are all publicly owned broadcasting companies.
IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 1 year ago
BBC is publicly funded but they collect the money themselves trough the TV license, they are not funded by the government trough taxes and they make a shit ton of money from commercial operations, like selling shows and formats to foreign networks. That’s probably the best way to keep an independent state network with minimal government meddling. Though we’ve seen that individuals with power at the network can bias the news reporting. Like BBC definitely favors the political right.
flossdaily@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.
nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
You’ve just given whatever regulatory body significant power and influence. It will have its own biases if it doesn’t simply become outright politicized, and now they dictate facts or else. Inaccuracy or “fake news” are used by authoritarian regimes all the time to justify silencing of critics.
flossdaily@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don’t ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.
You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.
You also have congressional oversight adding another check.
If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.
Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The other nice thing for “state funded media” is they often have translations for international audiences
For example CBC / Radio-Canada also have an international page, Radio-Canada International offered in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic etc.
nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
The BBC World Service is the largest and broadcasts in something like 40 languages around the world. I think the normal BBC news still uses some of the sound effects traditionally associated with their shortwave broadcasts.
STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Journalism student here. Tbh in my experience I have come to the conclusion that news stations should never be state owned. I think state funding for news is good but I think the best solution is a non profit ngo group running the news. When the government owns the news they can change the news and manipulate what facts get shown as is the case with the BBC.
NathanielThomas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
When private entities own the news you get much worse.
Trekman10@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It scales. Privately owned community newspapers might have a bias, but if there’s one in every town with 1,000 people, then exponentially that increases the amount of different agendas of each of those private entities, and they can sort of cover each other’s weaknesses. It’s the concentration and consolidation that’s the issue.
Of course, private industry inherently wants to merge and consolidate, as is the nature of capitalist competition. So either you continually break up mergers or develop a public community newspapers that are independent of any government - its debatable how independent the BBC or CBC are.
NathanielThomas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or the CBC across the border. Also, PBS in their own country. Or TV Ontario. All public and successful broadcasters.
bakachu@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I honestly don’t think this is a bad idea for the US…for now at least. Right now your typical options for official statements from government leaders are either through (1) politically polarized media like CNN or Fox, (2) paid subscription to better journalism, or (3) social media monopolies like Twitter (X) and Instagram. Can we really not fund something entirely independent of a mega-corporation to get official info out?
nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Voice of America through the United States Agency for Global Media.
People think they’re boring.
nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
The US government broadcaster is the Voice of . For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting, both have news.