Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded
Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded
U.S. journalism needs to be treated as a “public good” like roads, schools and bridges
Scientific American
I’d at least like to see more non-profits and coops in the news business. Of course I’d like to see more of that in pretty much every business.
I notice a fair number of people suggesting that it might give incentive to corrupt the public media outlet, or that it may be biased toward the government funding it... and yeah... that's probably true to one degree or another. But, that said, I think we all should take a moment and think honestly about bias in media. All media is biased, especially the ones that claim they're unbiased. Just because it's privately funded doesn't make it any less succeptible to corruption or bias. Indeed one of the biggest complains about our news is that the majority of media companies are owned and operated by, what is it, six(?) companies, and we know they all mislead people regularly on issues that affect them. Instead of focusing on removing bias from media, we should all be more diligent about being skeptical of the author's presentation of the media we consume regardless of funding source, and particularly when it is selling is info that we agree with and that angers us.
Yes, it's important to believe nothing and criticize everything. But in this day in age, I'd rather trust the publicly funded stuff than the privately funded media, due to the amount of scrutiny
But then they would have to report on the systems funding them. That's a bit too easy for corruption to take place in my opinion.
Japan has a fee on any device capable of receiving a television signal (cost varies based on capabilities) used to fund the NHK and one reason was to keep the government influence out. Today, it still often has huge bias and avoids certain reporting and tows government lines. Sometimes translations over English or other languages completely changes what the people are really saying. NHK does produce some good programming, but they also are definitely up the ruling party's ass.
That's why you have multiple outlets within a public system, governed by a public institution chosen by those outlets instead of any government. Subsidize those outlets by subscribers regardless of political affiliation.
There are examples of this system or systems like it working, more or less, in various liberal democracies across the globe. And with across the globe I mean mainly within Europe.
My country has a public broadcaster called NRK, which is funded by taxes paid by the people. By law they are funded by the public, but they have full editorial freedom (NRK-plaque) and they got a special board made up by members of the public to handle complaints and ethical issues. They are governed by Medietilsynet (eng.: The Norwegian Media Authority), and have a special responsibility to support democracy and public knowledge.
NRK digs up dirt on and criticises members of Parliament (Storting), Parliament itself and the different ministries.
It can be, and it's a valid point. But some countries do publicly fund their government broadcaster and have safeguards in place to maintain journalistic integrity. It can be done properly.
Australia is one: https://about.abc.net.au/who-we-are/the-abc-board/. The ABC regularly has fact checking articles for politicians on all sides and has exposed many a government scandal over the years.
Good good. We're relearning things we figured out pretty definitively back in the 60s
This isn't what I thought living in the future was going to be like.
Elaborate, friend
Public service journalism is really good in the US and yes, it deserves public funding. It needs to be funded publicly. As a matter of fact, NPR and PBS are, in my opinion, the best news sources in the world. I've lived with public journalism in other countries. It's publicly funded, but its reporting often gets filtered by whatever party is in power. It's a shame more people don't realize what a national treasure the US has and does not appreciate it because, you know, taxes.
But public funding isn't the problem. The problem is that private funding is also allowed. And so the people with the most money control what is told to the other 99%.
And no, disallowing private funds for journalism that is also getting public funds isn't a solution either, because then they still have their 100% private "journalism". And banning those in general would be met with a lot of crying about press freedom.
Ehhh... I'm not so sure. If it's publicly funded, what incentive is there to investigate government corruption?
Would Watergate still have happened if Nixon had the ability to cut the WaPo purse strings?
if that funding were guaranteed and beyond the influence of those government officials, then they wouldn’t have any fear of revenge-based budget cuts.
this could be accomplished by putting control of the funding into the hands of multiple levels of committee oversight so that no one person or even a single committee could threaten it.
That's the problem, when it comes to government funding, nothing is guaranteed. :)
Witness:
No? Publicly funded journalism is called propaganda.
No - if you make the funding independent from taxes then it doesn't have to be in favour of the government.
The German publicly funded journalism is a mandatory payment by everyone unrelated to their taxes (which makes it a favourite target for right wing people claiming it's unfair because it's too liberal for their taste when it's literally the definition of fact and science based centrist reporting)
The are often critical with the government and not propaganda at all.
In Europe, we have public services news organizations, that are still independent. While not perfect, they're more independent from their state than most newspapers are from their shareholders. You can read more about Arte, the European public service channel dedicated to culture
In Canada I fully want to keep CBC (Canadian broadcasting corporation). Guess which party wants to get rid of it.
im assuming whatever conservative parties are there
But then fuckwads like Musk will declare it "state run media" and sow distrust. Not that they trust any media not serving up confirmation bias...but anyway. It's a laudable ideal that right wing monkeys will fuck up.
For some reason state run media = bad, but media run by oligarchs who have proven themselves to be complete dickheads on multiple occasions = totally fine.