And I don’t I think said they are illegitimate “if they aren’t trying to sell things”, rather I was trying to say that any large media network is going to need a lot of resources provided by external sources. In the case of Lemmy, that would be all the many instances operated by third parties, who are paying significant hosting fees themselves (and many therefore are asking for donations).

So, if they claim otherwise, that they “don’t take help from anyone”, then unless they are so small that they just pay for everything right out of their own pocket, then I think they are trying to scam people.

I do not want to discount the possibility of charitable media outlets, but I do think that they are far easier to maintain group cohesion when they are small then when they are large. Once they grow beyond some size (what size specifically I don’t know), I think they are all but certain to fracture, partially, into “groups of groups” with more and more major disagreements between larger and larger subgroups. I am not going to say that it is “impossible” for a charity to run a major news outlet, but by that point I think that they will need to be accepting quite a few large donations from outside sources, which brings us back to questioning their independence.

I copy-pasted a bunch of short, redundant “replies” because I was trying to let people who I had disagreed with know that I had edited/changed some of my main argument. I knew that wasn’t an ideal way, but I wasn’t sure if and how I should “mention” their usernames instead. But I decided to just delete all the redundant messages because I know that can be very annoying for people trying to scroll through all the comments. I guess they’ll either see my changes and tell me what they think or everyone will just move on.

I have reconsidered some of what I said before, and edited the post text to reflect that. I would like to know what you think.

I have reconsidered some of what I said before, and edited the post text to reflect that. I would like to know what you think.

I have reconsidered some of what I said before, and edited the post text to reflect that. I would like to know what you think.

I have reconsidered some of what I said before, and edited the post text to reflect that. I would like to know what you think.

I have reconsidered some of what I said before, and edited the post text to reflect that. I would like to know what you think.

You make a lot of points here, and I agree with some of them but not all, so I’m going to break it down and give my opinion (when I have one), skipping over anything that I don’t think is that essential. It will make for a long read, so most people will probably want to skip this response.

The idea that paid is better than free is just a joke of a position and I think you can quite easily deconstruct it yourself.

I do not think that “paid is [necessarily] better than free”, paid “journalism” can be bad too — atrocious, even. But I do think that all news (aside from one-off coincidences of “being in the right place at the right time”) ultimately have costs associated with them, and if they are going to be offered as free goods, that is going to attract both very charitable organizations and those who have motives that are less than charitable. The latter can include both “far left” and “far right” sources just as much as it can “enlightened centrists”, and I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.

Pick some free news source that’s broadly inoffensive […] are we really going to say that it’s worse than whatever Exclusive Content can be raked up from paying subscriptions to Crowder or Molyneux or Alex Jones or some other reactionary cultist?

No. In fact, the free news source is likely far better, simply because most news sources are better than that, whether paid or not. I don’t really know anything about Molyneux, and I don’t listen to Crowder or Alex Jones either, but from what I’ve heard about them, they are some of the worst sources one could rely on. And again, I am not trying to say that paid = better.

Are we really saying that the paid version of Breitbart is a much better source than some lib shithead’s Twitter feed?

Breitbart is another source I strongly dislike. It’s hard to compare them to a hypothetical “lib shithead”, especially on Twitter, since I have never engaged much with Twitter — and do not want to, especially now, with Musk in charge — but I will grant that some liberal (in the sense of someone who thinks government should “stay out of people’s business”, usually “left wing” on some social issues and “right wing” on a lot of economic issues; not the sense of someone who is generally “left of [the American] center”) could be much better than Breitbart.

There are even some “liberals” in this sense that I often find myself agreeing with, though certainly not always — there are a lot of ways in which our lives can be and have been made shittier by doing away with regulations — and so I still try to take what they say with a heavy dose of salt.

Do you even know what yellow journalism is or that tabloids sell by subscription?

I will not claim to be even close to the most knowledgeable person in the world on yellow journalism, but I am aware that there is a long history of newspapers that were sold for money and used their position to manipulate public opinion, often on things they had a heavy financial interest in. Again, “paid” does not imply “good”, though “not paid” does raise the question to me of “how and why are they doing their work?”

Most of my experience with tabloids comes from the days when they were usually sold as cheap physical magazines in supermarkets, and full of both wild speculation and insane conspiracy theories, though IIRC, even then they were trying like hell to get people to subscribe as you say.

Get away for a second from words like “quality” that are epistemically messy and consider the market incentives: What any subscription service wants is for people to subscribe and then stay subscribed.

Fair. It can indeed be messy to define just what we mean by “knowing the quality of something”, but whatever traits we select for will end up being the traits that are most represented in the population, it’s the same reason politicians care more about getting in office/power and staying there than they do about anything else. Whether that’s done through votes, bribes, or complimenting other powerful political leaders.

This is what they invest their money in and anything else is either wholly secondary or based on a different revenue stream (like ad revenue, sponsorship, or grants).

While it’s undeniably true that subscription-based services spend a lot of resources on keeping people subscribed, they will have a very hard time accomplishing that goal without providing what their customers want in exchange for that. That doesn’t guarantee even slightly that what their customers want will be accurate information, as you demonstrated amply with your Alex Jones, Crowder, and Breitbart examples.

But if they are going to be around regardless of what anyone else wants, then they are both much freer to provide accurate information and much freer to completely ignore what would, in a more personal setting, be regarded as important social cues that they are being unhelpful. You can’t “vote with your feet” if they tie you down and chop off your legs!

Alex Jones displays an excellent example of one of the most salient investments for these businesses: Fostering dependency. Through his conspiracism, he promotes the idea that listening to his program and only his program allows the viewer to be largely free of whatever “satanic vampire brainwashing” he warns them about.

Like I said, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, but that sounds like the kind of things I’ve heard he says. And yes, trying to make people feel like they can only get the truth from the very person or group currently telling them about all the evils of the world is a pretty shitty (and unfortunately common) manipulation tactic.

However, this is only one approach, and there are many other ways to get your audience to believe that yours is either the only service or one of a narrow range of services worth having, and all the self-flattering that goes on in liberal journalism should tip you off that the neoliberal press behaves almost like a guild, hostile to independent journalists and relatively friendly to those who have the same agenda or the same corporate masters. One can look at any of those bullshit “bias” charts and see how they equate centrism with being “free of bias,” which is simply absurd on its face.

Sure, but a lot of manipulative people of all walks of life use those tactics, frankly because they often work. Another common tactic is to say “you need to be open minded” and “listen to all viewpoints”, but then when confronted with a viewpoint that differs significantly from theirs, they start lobbing insults and shaming people for disagreeing. Unfortunately, I often see that behavior from people who describe themselves as “leftists”, but who a lot of other self-described “leftists” would probably insult and dismiss themselves as “tankies”.

There’s more to your argument that I haven’t yet addressed, but I am getting tired and I’ve already written a big wall of text and commented on almost every comment I saw, so I’m gonna stop for now. I know it’s not all about what I think, after all.

Instigate already gave what they called exceptions, but I mostly think are actually some examples of 1):

state-funded, independent broadcasters such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, the Australian ABC, NPR etc.

I haven’t listened to the Australian ABC, but I have spent some time listening to all those others, and I think they have all been pretty good, at least at some times in the past.

And even though we are primarily talking about formal news organizations, not free software specific stuff, since we are using free software I would like to at least mention that the FSF and other free software publishers and advocates (like the EFF, and even some the FSF has significant disagreements with, like Debian) can be good sources on a lot of things too, and for the most part are charities.

As examples of 2), keeping in mind that I did not say they are all inherently bad, just that a lot of people don’t think they are very useful or don’t use them much, and they do not primarily exist for charitable reasons, I would cite some state-funded nonindependent broadcasters like VoA/RFE/RL, Xinhua, RT/Sputnik, etc.

Edit: But apparently I did say if they also publish timely news, then they are “likely … not a very credible news source”. Crap. I’m gonna change that “likely” to “may not be”.

In that case, I would say the advertisers are most directly paying the cost, and the readers are indirectly paying for it by sometimes buying the products that are advertised. I don’t like ads, and I especially hate when people try to force others to view ads whether they want to or not, but they are still one source of revenue for goods which are nominally “free”.

And, as I mentioned at the end of my post, as much as I dislike them, these attempts to force ad viewing can also function as a form of “price”, to put a limit on the number of people who bother with those sources, which can make it easier for them to keep up with the demands of those who tolerate that behavior. (Again, I don’t like this, but I can’t change it just by disliking it.)

Your first example is a very fair point, I wasn’t thinking about people who basically stumble into something important and decide to publish it. But unless something very odd is happening, that will not happen over and over again to the same person. More likely, it may happen to them once and then they’ll decide they want to become a regular citizen journalist, as you say, and then they will need to do a lot of work (with associated costs) even if they aren’t getting paid for it. Which would be another example of my first suggestion.

For the rest, I realize that there are plenty of examples where people provide accurate and timely information without charge (a lot of Lemmy is, and hopefully will continue to be, an example of that!). But those people are, for the most part, doing volunteer work, which is very valuable and healthy, but nevertheless is still work (that has costs).

I was not claiming that free goods, or free news in particular, “can’t” be worthwhile. Just that it implies that someone is supplying so much that goes above and beyond what a lot of people are trying to get that there is no need to charge for it. That can be an example of something very charitable and wonderful, or it can be an example of someone trying to push something that most people (rightly or wrongly) think is not very useful.

Yes, I think I agree, and I think there is more to be said here but I am tired. So I’ll sleep on it and maybe add something more later if I can think of anything useful. 🙂

Oh, don’t get me wrong, state-funded broadcasters can be excellent (or horrible, it really depends on the details). But when they are good, I would count them under the first case: they are being backed by the state itself (being charitable), and a lot of people like you use and love them.

Public funding is a double-edged sword: it lets news reporters not worry about profiting, but focus on their actual job instead; and it also lets “news” agencies that stopped caring about reporting truth a long time ago not worry about needing to actually be useful to the public at large, instead only needing to keep the government decision-makers happy.

Do I have the proposal for you! RFC2549

Edit: please note that I made at least one mistake here (as well as some kind of boneheaded comments later). FPTP, even in the US, does not require a 50% majority, just more votes than anyone else (a “plurality”). It can still benefit parties to get to 50%, since it makes their winning more likely, and so in the absence of any drawbacks, most successful parties will still aim for it, but it isn’t strictly necessary, as has been sometimes demonstrated in the UK. Thanks to squaresinger for linking a YouTube video that mentions this below. /Edit

I just want to share my thoughts on this. It started as a response to one comment, but I realized that there’s a lot more that can (and I think should) be said, so here goes.

First, for those who don’t know, FPTP stands for First Past The Post, meaning a system where everyone votes for a single candidate and whoever gets more than 50% (i.e. “past the post”) wins the entire election (the losers get nothing). For many Americans, this might be so familiar that one would wonder how it could be any different (in a small-d democratic system), but there are in fact many alternatives: ranked voting, proportional representation, Condorcet method, etc.

They all have strengths and weaknesses, but for FPTP, and other similar systems, there’s a result in political science called Duverger’s law that says FPTP-like rules tend to cause a two-party system, essentially because because even if you don’t team up with a larger party you may disagree with on many issues, to get a majority, others will, and then they’ll win and you’ll get nothing. And since getting significantly more than 50% consumes party resources that might better be used elsewhere, but gives no reward, 50% (plus a small “safety margin”) is what all the successful parties will eventually aim for, and thus you get two roughly equally-successful parties. Tiny swings in voting then lead to massive differences in outcomes, which threatens the stability and security of everyone (even America’s “enemies”).

So saying “just vote for third parties” (like I see some calling for here) is tone-deaf at best, or part of a cynical ploy to fracture the opponent’s party at worst. Even if a “third party” does win, the best that can be hoped for under FPTP is they just end up replacing one of the two parties, becoming one of the two parties in the “new” two-party system. And the two existing parties have likely spent far more time and effort researching ways to stop even that from happening than any of us ever will.

If we, as Americans, or others with a stake in what America decides to do, want to change this (and I personally do), then we need far more fundamental changes to how the system works. Just choosing a candidate we like (whether they have any chance of winning or not) won’t cut it. I don’t know what’s the best voting system to use, but I know I’d like to scrap the Electoral College, for a couple reasons:

1. Even though one might argue that Congress and the Supreme Court are more essential to reform, it’s hard to deny that the President has a very large leadership role today.

2. One might argue that relying on a convoluted/Byzantine method for choosing the President makes it harder to manipulate, and that’s probably true, but the two parties have shown that it being difficult is not a deterrent to them doing so: in fact, they likely both benefit from it by keeping smaller parties that can’t afford to do it out.

It reminds me of the fallacy in computer security of “security through obscurity”: if it’s possible to break into the system, and large numbers of people can benefit substantially from it, then someone eventually will, no matter how hard we make it to exploit. We need to change the system, not only so that it is prohibitively difficult for anyone to exploit the system, but also to get rid of a lot of the corruption that makes most people want to exploit it in the first place.

All of this is much easier said than done, I know, but we need to explain clearly to the public why “quick fixes” won’t work, before we can convince them of the need for more fundamental changes. We still need to work on figuring out the details of the best changes, but unless we can show people the reality of the deep structural problems that acually exist, why they exist, and how we know we’re right about what we’re saying, we’ll never convince most people to change anything.