Quality journalism will become a commodity for the wealthy.
Reputable news platforms are moving behind paywalls, while propaganda/quasi-propaganda networks remain free.
This is bad for society, for politics, and in the long term for our way of life.
It is not reasonable to expect the average person to validate the news they see on low quality news platforms by cross checking with other sources, even if quality sources were free, which they are increasingly not.
I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
As the Trump years have shown, misinformation and the distortion of facts can have real life, hard consequences. Trump owes his 2016 victory to 80,000 votes in three states. How likely is it that his democratic opponent would have won had the social media storm of combined conservative-Russian propaganda been a degree or two lower? Extremely likely.
Four years later, half a million Americans have died because of Covid-19. This would not be the case if the 2016 election had turned out differently.
To circle back to the original topic. The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
The BBC is no better or more "neutral" than commercial news outlets. If you're looking for an outlet than can "validate" the news, and you're suggesting that it should be fully funded and operated by the government, that becomes scary quickly. It will just be an administration tool, and as an administration tool it will ultimately be run by the family and friends of the people who finance the election of administrations.
The overgrown mutant NPR that centrists imagine government's media department would, under your nightmare Trump administration, become the Trump Network, operated by a bunch of smirking Faucis so much better than the system that feeds them and they help run. NPR gets all of its money from giant investment funds, extractive industries, agribusiness, military contractors, and foundations named after families of multigenerational wealth acquired by doing terrible things. It was editorially destroyed during the first Bush administration out of simple Republican vengeance, even though they weren't even getting a majority of their financing from the government.
A lot of times when I hear this take, NPR and the BBC are the models. I don't think they're good ones.
> I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
HN's audience will hate the idea, but such things already exist in most developed nations, like the BBC in the UK or the ABC in Australia. They're generally the best news sources with little opinion dressed up as news and much less clickbait and are freely accessible to all in a variety of forms.
It's like socialized medicine, it just works better.
ABC in Australia is the opposite of objectivity, considering they take over a month to issue retractions on false reporting. I've reported dozens of issues with false reporting in a broad range of news outlets, and ABC is nearly the worst.
ABC corrects mistakes in a month on a good day (worst case 2.5 months).
Contrasted with the private sector, Fairfax and News Corp both issued retractions to my complaints in a timely fashion, at 3 days for Fairfax and 15 minutes(!) for News Corp.
ABC simply doesn't care about journalism, why else would they have such lazy policies that ensure incorrect information is distributed as widely as possible?
Don't know about him but I used to do it at a time when I felt obsessed with making information correct. It was a bit compulsive.
But on the bright side, that's how I knew Bloomberg News was bullshit and that despite HN's frothy comments about how they always knew SMCI was backdooring chips I just grabbed some long options on the cheap and partied it up.
This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars. This puts an explicit limit on what they can say and criticize, and what their bias will be: the ones holding the purse strings. Even if a majority of tax payers discard it at that point, the institution would have no incentive to change its messaging.
This is very easily seen already in the existing public news and media organizations that have been formed.
> This is no solution, and the reason is obvious: such an outlet is beholden not to the tax payers whose dollars are being used, but to the government who allocates those dollars
It's not an employer vs employee situation.
In societies with rule of law you can endow public entities/broadcasters with rights that protect them from such influence.
This, with a well-defined duty to inform and culture of journalistic integrity should go a long way.
Having rights is orthogonal to receiving funding. Whether it should be the case or not, it is within government power to withhold funding from a public entity if it, say, puts forth journalistic effort to uncover a majority party scandal. And that is unlikely to change in any other nation's context.
As for journalistic integrity: take America as an example again, where integrity has been overridden across the board in favor of party line messaging. Very little journalistic work is now done, public or private. And indeed, again, the public entity would have even less incentive to poke the bees' nest that makes its honey.
The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.
Even paper newspapers had to be paid for though. And who’s going to pay for those quality journalists writing the quality journalism?
Paywalling of corporate media leads to less deaths, considering Reuters regularly beats the war drums along with CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post.
Remember when they lied about WMDs in Iraq? What about when they lied about Russia hacking critical US energy infrastructure? What about when they lied about Russia placing a "hit bounty" on the heads of US soldiers?
For those not paying attention, Reuters was also engaged in propaganda around the time of the Turkey coup, which was assuredly backed by US intelligence. Reuters falsely reported that Erdogan had fled during the coup and tried to seek asylum in Europe -- which was US intelligence propaganda and false.
The only sustainable solution is to abolish copyrights. Stupidest fucking laws on the planet. It's intellectual slavery—restricting people from peacefully sharing and building on information between each other. Propped up by billions of lies pitched daily by industry. It's the big dirty secret propping up big tech, the media, et cetera.
While Bill Gates had access to the world's best information growing up attending elite institutions, a significant number of Americans weren't even able to vote or attend their local libraries, or outside the country you had places like South Africa with apartheid preventing access to education. The charity work of these assholes is a fucking farce, as long as they are pushing #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. You want to improve the world BG—stop preventing people from educating themselves! (I pick on BG just b/c he's the most famous, but really goes for all these tech assholes who don't realize the #IdeaPrivilege they had, which they deny to others via their support of copyrights and patents, and whose outlier wealth is dependent on these laws which put chains on people and ideas).
How does this help with journalism? Facts are not subject to copyright and articles about what other articles say or that are rewritten to share the same info are common.
I'm sorry, I veered horribly off topic in that comment. Hard
to edit on a phone.
The only sustainable solution to fix journalism is to
abolish copyright. That's it. That's the only thing we can
do to fix journalism.
For some context, journalism has not signicantly improved in
roughly 150 years, perhaps longer. Perhaps it some slight
areas it has gotten better, in others it has regressed. You
can test this for yourself. There's a book available right
now used on Amazon for $3.51, called "New York Times: The
Complete Front Pages 1851-2009" ^0. Get that book, read some
of the front pages from ~170 years ago, and compare to
today's paper. It's a toss up which is better.
So I will conclude in part from that the field of journalism
has plateaud for at least the past 100 years. This is
surprising, as technology has improved dramatically. You'd
expect the quality of the news should have gone up.
What else has happened in the past century? Well we
know governments dramatically extended copyright laws. So
now our prior should be that increasing copyright has not
improved journalism at all, and probably has had a
significant negative effect, enough to offset the
improvement we'd expect from better technology.
Why would moving away from copyright lead to better
journalism?
Let's talk about 3 parameters that will change.
First, collaboration will go up. Lots of people who are now
prevented from seamlessly collaborating to improve the news
would now be free to do so. Articles will be developed on
git. Instead of constantly sucking everyone's attention to
show frivolous novelty covered in ads, more important long
term stories will be iterated upon.
Second, trust will go up. If one paper starts lying and
someone knows the truth, they can fork that article/paper
and offer the better version. Over time sources that
prioritize truth will win gravity from tabloids. Every
article will be backed by git (or similar) and the chance
history and authors will be visible at every step of the
way.
Finally, distribution will be improved in myriad ways.
Starting a publisher will be easy for everyone, and you'll
see a resurgence in regional and topic specific publishers.
You'll have lots of innovation around customizing content
for specific kinds of devices and readers.
So collaboration will increase and the cost of doing great
journalism will fall dramatically, trust and auditability
will increase, and distribution will increase.
It will be a dramatic win for journalism, and journalism in
10 years (or 100, if it takes society longer to wake up to
the obvious), will be a big delta different compared to the
delta in the previous century.
Reputable news platforms are moving behind paywalls, while propaganda/quasi-propaganda networks remain free.
This is bad for society, for politics, and in the long term for our way of life.
It is not reasonable to expect the average person to validate the news they see on low quality news platforms by cross checking with other sources, even if quality sources were free, which they are increasingly not.
I see only one sustainable solution. A public news organization, paid out of the federal government budget, with your and my taxes. Like PBS, but with 50x the budget.
As the Trump years have shown, misinformation and the distortion of facts can have real life, hard consequences. Trump owes his 2016 victory to 80,000 votes in three states. How likely is it that his democratic opponent would have won had the social media storm of combined conservative-Russian propaganda been a degree or two lower? Extremely likely.
Four years later, half a million Americans have died because of Covid-19. This would not be the case if the 2016 election had turned out differently.
To circle back to the original topic. The paywalling of quality journalism is detrimental to society, and the consequences of this trend can and have already led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.