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grantc | 2 years ago

Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.

To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.

It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.

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goodbyesf|2 years ago

> Definitely a demand issue.

This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.

> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.

This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.

> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day

The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?

> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage

The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.

dns_snek|2 years ago

> This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.

As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?

Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.

zerbinxx|2 years ago

I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by.

To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.

I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.