this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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well then i think the disconnect here is pretty simple: i absolutely don't, and i think the past few years have borne this out repeatedly. i think it's trivial to mislead people into voting against their best interests and that the public voting in a way that harms them has been a repeatedly-occurring, inarguable problem in most existing democratic states throughout their history. so i have no issue with this.
Misinformation does not discredit democracy, it discredits the state apparatus that either allows- or conducts- the misinformation. Educational failure is also a huge part of our current problem with misinformation, and it's the active, malicious deconstruction of our education system by political and corporate interests that is to blame for that, making voters less informed about history and science, less capable of applying rigorous critical thinking skills to information they encounter, etc, that is exacerbating our current problem of easily misled voters.
So then I would again ask, who do you think should determine what kind of journalism is 'needed'?
we don't agree on this for a variety of reasons, so i just reject the premise here and what follows from it.
i'm pretty content to trust journalism as a collective institution to produce the sort of necessary journalism for a healthy civic society—it's been doing just that for a long time even in the absence of the readership to financially support it. (things like ProPublica would not exist if journalism was incapable of doing this from within)
...okay? I'm happy to discuss this within the parameters of a different political paradigm if you prefer, I just normally discuss things within the paradigms they currently operate under.
ProPublica exists precisely because of the public directly deciding which media organizations should receive funding; they're a donor-funded non-profit. They would not exist if the public did not agree- and vote with their wallets, as it were- to fund them. Journalism as a collective institution does not sustain itself.
So just to be clear, are you advocating for news media to not be publicly-funded, or are you advocating that all news be publicly-funded?
Because if it's anything else, someone is making the call as to who receives funding and who doesn't, and journalism as a collective institution is not actually a decision-making body.
ProPublica exists in large part off of grant money, large philanthropic donors who believe in its journalism and very generous backing from the Sandler Foundation (which i believe gives it on the order of $10m a year). it does not really exist because of the kindness of individual small donors that you're using as shorthand for the "public", and if (as you suggested up thread) the public at-large was asked to fund ProPublica at the scale it currently operates, it would almost assuredly be non-viable.
i think it's perfectly fine for all news to be publicly funded, yeah
So anyone could create a news organization, and publish anything they want, and receive public money for it? That seems like it would massively increase the amount of misinformation being thrown at voters, making them even less informed?
Personally, I don't like governments, so in my ideal world there would not be "public" funding in the way we define that now, it would be up to communities how to allocate their resources (and how to make those decisions), and which industries are important. But obviously I understand that situation is purely aspirational. In our current system, I prefer direct democracy over leaving decisions to a political class that is bought and paid for.
this seems like an unfounded logical leap from the premise of government involvement, when the far more likely answer is this would become less likely due to the ability to directly regulate news media. you could probably make the public funding contingent on meeting certain editorial or transparency criteria to curb what you're describing, for example--this is, to a degree, the model of the Dutch public broadcasting system.
I don't think it's government involvement that causes that, I think it's the absence of some kind of mechanism to discriminate between news entities. The only question then, when avoiding that, is whether it's ultimately the government doing the choosing, or the public.