this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your second paragraph is severely understated. It completely invalidates your first paragraph.
In the USA there are 4 corporations that own pretty much all TV news, whether it's local or not. Add another 2 corporations to cover almost everything else on TV.
Online news is a little more diverse, but it's heading in the same direction.
And the government won't break up those corporations because they're too big for that to be possible. It's too late. Whether the corporations use regulatory capture or just a massive team of lawyers to make antitrust lawsuits prohibitively expensive, they simply can't be broken up.
It doesn't invalidate it. It's accurate that for a time, privately owned, for-profit newspapers would (and did in the past) result in a multitude of viewpoints since the editorial stances will are inherently more diverse between 20 newspapers instead of 2.
Whether or not the current vertical and horizontally integrated media companies will be broken up is irrelevant to the fact that it would result in a more diverse and freer press.
A tax funded solution would most likely take the form of a single entity. If 4 entities dominating the press is wrong, then 1 is even worse.
Not much different from private...
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?
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, not enough anger.
The US government broadcaster is the Voice of America. For a long time it was unavailable to Americans (propaganda laws), but is now. Some Europeans may be familiar with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that is also US-funded by the same agency as the Voice of America.
We also have NPR and public broadcasting (PBS), both have news. They receive government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is supposed to be objective although there have been issues in recent history. They also have corporate donors, which could affect objectivity.