Comment by aeternum
2 days ago
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.
You don't seem to offer a better solution only a reason why you don't like this one.
Of course the BBC is unavoidably propaganda - even just unconsciously - that's why this Hafler Trio track from 1984 exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIobKBy8XOs
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.
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.