Federally Subsidized News
Bill Maher's podcast was talking about the news. The question they got was "Did Americans dumb down the news or did the news dumb down Americans." It's a semi-clever question soft balled at the liberal talk show host and his diverse panel, and their general response was pretty similar to what I already thought. The foundation of the problems with mainstream news is that mainstream news is trying to be profitable. Headline news is, in my opinion, basically just the ultimate hidden camera reality show; except that they don't bother to hide the cameras. I also have issues with 24 hour news channels because they makes the passive assertion that there's 24 hours of news in a day, but the problems with those channels are rooted in the previously mentioned financial problem.
So lets run from this assumption. The problem with news is that it's being made in to a market venture. The way it's doing this is by making itself into entertainment, which is the more direct problem. NPR can be brought up as a great counter-example to this, because NPR is generally unbiased straight news, which is why NPR is boring. If the problem is that news is trying to be entertaining, and the root of that problem is that news is trying to be profitable, it stands to reason that a good solution would be news that was subsidized by some major organization. The pledge drive is how most non-mainstream news sources do it, but Government backing is what jumped to my mind.
It's an interesting idea at first. People are reporting the news in a non-competitive way, journalism is pulled out of the twin mires of politics and money, and the people are better informed. That, however; is "perfect world thinking." It's the shiny pretty thing one conceives of before they remember the cruelties of harsh reality. First of all getting rid of human competitive nature is something that will never happen. I'm prepared to make a blunt assertion of that. Preach innate kindness all you want, hippy. It's also a flawed idea to think that you can pull any aspect of society out of the twin mires of politics and money. Society, in general, is so far submerged in this foul pool that we can not conceive of an existence without it. I don't put myself above that either, other then spiritual transcendence I see no escape.
This may help some of you understand my pursuit of spiritual transcendence.
The biggest issue though, the one glaring obvious problem that should've stopped me from ever thinking of this in the first place, is that this system would hand control of the news directly to the government. It wouldn't be theoretical Powers™ manipulating both the media and the government with an invisible fist, nor would it be the much more likely scenario of the invisible hand of the market creating heavily politicized cheap thrills news for its equally politicised short attention spanned viewers. No such clandestine acts need take place. It would be opening the doors to propaganda on a scale that has never existed outside of a dictatorship.
Really, in the end, this is just another interesting idea that would be a boon to humanity if humanity wasn't involved in its orchestration.
So lets run from this assumption. The problem with news is that it's being made in to a market venture. The way it's doing this is by making itself into entertainment, which is the more direct problem. NPR can be brought up as a great counter-example to this, because NPR is generally unbiased straight news, which is why NPR is boring. If the problem is that news is trying to be entertaining, and the root of that problem is that news is trying to be profitable, it stands to reason that a good solution would be news that was subsidized by some major organization. The pledge drive is how most non-mainstream news sources do it, but Government backing is what jumped to my mind.
It's an interesting idea at first. People are reporting the news in a non-competitive way, journalism is pulled out of the twin mires of politics and money, and the people are better informed. That, however; is "perfect world thinking." It's the shiny pretty thing one conceives of before they remember the cruelties of harsh reality. First of all getting rid of human competitive nature is something that will never happen. I'm prepared to make a blunt assertion of that. Preach innate kindness all you want, hippy. It's also a flawed idea to think that you can pull any aspect of society out of the twin mires of politics and money. Society, in general, is so far submerged in this foul pool that we can not conceive of an existence without it. I don't put myself above that either, other then spiritual transcendence I see no escape.
This may help some of you understand my pursuit of spiritual transcendence.
The biggest issue though, the one glaring obvious problem that should've stopped me from ever thinking of this in the first place, is that this system would hand control of the news directly to the government. It wouldn't be theoretical Powers™ manipulating both the media and the government with an invisible fist, nor would it be the much more likely scenario of the invisible hand of the market creating heavily politicized cheap thrills news for its equally politicised short attention spanned viewers. No such clandestine acts need take place. It would be opening the doors to propaganda on a scale that has never existed outside of a dictatorship.
Really, in the end, this is just another interesting idea that would be a boon to humanity if humanity wasn't involved in its orchestration.
posted by Max at 7:50 AM
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