Comment by manquer
1 year ago
Media biases and ethics in journalism are masters degrees sized topics of their own.
Very briefly you are not wrong, yellow journalism has a long history is not new. In America from the times of federalist papers through slavery and jim crow and antisemitism of the 30s, to civil rights and into modern times it has been a powerful tool to shape public opinion.
There is nuance to this however, the era of professional journalism has been brief, only 100 or so years. In that time, media had the most impact in shinning the light on the truth, notably with reporting on Watergate, Pentagon papers or Hershey on Hiroshima and so on, that era is coming to an end.
As the cost of publishing drops orders of magnitude in every generation of technology as it happened with cheap and fast printing press, radio, broadcast and then cable TV and finally the internet and mobile, the problem becomes more massive and much harder to regulate, and also drops in the quality of public discourse and nature of truth.
Basically it boils down to we had a good(relatively) 100 year run with media and corresponding improvement in civil liberties and good governance, we can no longer depend on educated public taking decisions sooner or later in the right direction like we have last century or so.
Conceptually regulation is "not very complicated".
1. Bring back those laws requiring fairness of media representation.
2. Force standardized disclosure of sponsored content of any type (total, segments, placement). Many countries already do this. Standardized = big, high contrast "Ad" sign in the corner with mandatory size proportional to content size.
3. Mandate providing sources.
4. Treat all influencers with an audience above NNN followers (10000?) as mass media.
5. Require that widely shared content is fact checked and that fact checking is automatically included while sharing and provide recourse for fact checking up to the legal system.
6. For sensitive topics (politics, primarily) require AML and KYC disclosures of funding, primarily to find foreign funding sources and propaganda.
However, you know, vested interests, the bane of humanity.
> Bring back those laws requiring fairness of media representation.
There is no way for this not being censorship and not being used to suppress less powerful opposition. Which is exactly how it was used in the past. Plus, just look what both sidesm currently does - it motivates journalists to write as if both sides were equal in situation where they clearly are not.
> Require that widely shared content is fact checked and that fact checking is automatically included while sharing and provide recourse for fact checking up to the legal system.
Fact checking is irrelevant to public opinion. And again, it is not that difficult to bias it.
Confidential sources are necessary for lots of whistleblower based reporting.
Fairness of media representation seems hard to define and prone to abuse.
But mandating the the financial conflicts be disclosed and ads labeled seems reasonable.
As much as I agree, you might run into a challenge with case law in the US. IANAL, but I reckon Near v. Minnesota (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_v._Minnesota) is relevant here.
Problem is: some people will demand their free speech rights are being violated. The legal system is a weak guarantee: just check how the legal system works in a dictatorship. Or if a political faction decide to throw a lot of money into fake news and opinion laundering.
It is baffling to me how "free speech" has come to mean "freedom to use mass broadcasting systems".
Of course anyone should be free to publicly say anything, however untrue it might be.
Should they be free to broadcast their nonsense to million of people?
I don't know, but I do feel these are two different things.
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