Slashdot Mirror
State Media Rushing Into Coverage Void Left By Dying Newspapers
derekmead writes "As newspaper budgets shrink, state-sponsored media outlets like RT, China Daily, and Al Jazeera have grown, hired more writers and offered more (free) coverage. Mark Mackinnon, writing for The Globe and Mail, explains the issue well: 'Throughout the recent crisis in Syria, and before that in Libya and Egypt, Xinhua and RT News have thrown unprecedented money and resources at reporting from the scene, even as Western media scale back on their own efforts. It's not too far-fetched to imagine a near future where it's Xinhua or RT, rather than the Associated Press or BBC, that have the only correspondents on the scene of an international crisis, meaning the world will only get Beijing or Moscow's version of what's happening.' But quality coverage still requires money, which means finding funding from somewhere. You see the effects of this every day: If your revenue is based mostly off of pay-per-click banner ads, a lowest-common denominator post, like a cheap roundup of cat pictures, is quite possibly going to pull in way more views for less money than a nuanced, deeply reported, and expensive dispatch from Syria. And, yeah, ads can be a bummer, especially when they're executed poorly, and paywalls aren't great. But when the alternatives are either fluffy, thin reporting; or worse, blatantly biased coverage sponsored by governments, we have to find a palatable way to fund good reporting."
I want to hear about the state of the collective farms with the objectivity only the state can provide..
I am sorry, but I don't need instantaneous, round the globe coverage with whatever the hell happens in some God-forsaken corner of the world. it's a perk I'm passively receiving and if I get such news, then that's fine. If not, I'm not gonna curl in a corner, frightened of the unknown.
There were times when people found that their king died weeks after the dude passed away, and their life was not impacted. Granted, we can do better nowadays but still, I couldn't care less about some fanatic blowing himself up in some Syria busy market. Local news - that's what I'm interested in, followed by news from my country. Everything else (save from something HUGE like the Japan Earthquake) is optional.
Yes I know, the Syria whatever-the-fuck-happens-there could theoretically very slightly affect me through the butterfly effect but really... not worth my immediate interest. Give me the high level overview: Syria dudes are still beating each other; China launched some satellite; USA still has crushing debt and Greece goes down the drain. Have a nice day!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
From TFA: "This isn’t about who rakes in the advertising dollars – there’s precious few of those these days for anyone – it’s about the global conversation, and who gets to frame it."
I think that statement gets it spot on. In those few words, you can read a lot between the lines: elements of capitalism, paranoia and perspective.
It's kind of a wordplay on the oft-cited "history is written by the victor" phrase. Only this time round, TFA makes it like history is written by he who has the most money.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
I recently found this to be good source of main world information, especially if you read it 2-3 days delayed. Clean short description of what is happening in the world. Without ads.
Unlike the impartial and totally honest reporting of the private media?
I think the point of this TFS sentence was western media vs middle east/far east one's, as a second spin additionally to private vs state-sponsored broadcasters.
Look, obtaining good information isn't always easy (and sometimes can get you killed as the rising numbers of killed journalists will attest to). It is also VERY valuable, if the person playing the devils advocate wants to live WITH the deprived information access of the middle ages, he should be prepared to live IN the middle ages. Haven't you heard of the trite expression "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance?. Well information is like a real-time version of education and is probably even more valuable. (Ok, the devils advocate has a point about not necessarily needing instantaneous access but I still contend good information and Analysis is very worthwhile).
Unfortunately the world is now being divided into the rich, educated and well informed and the poor, uneducated and ignorant. Sadly, in many countries (like the U.S.) it is a self-reinforcing cycle where the uneducated ignorant don't realize that they're uneducated and ignorant. So they vote for policies that put them even further behind not understanding that the "liberal elites" are abandoning them to their fates and putting their kids in private schools etc. I'm looking at you, you home schooled creationist anti-global warming religious fanatics (not just Fundamentalist Christian but Ultra-Orthodox Jews and don't even get me started on madras attending Muslims).
Just as I'm a proud taxpayer because I feel it buys civilization (as opposed to Somalia), I immediately signed on to the NYTimes pay service without even bothering with the one month free trial. It buys very good journalism (as opposed to Fox).
Because it isn't. The BBC is funded via the TV license, not taxation. It is not government controlled, it is an independent entity.
I really wouldn't trust AP as an unbiased news source just because they are privatized. At this point, in the US, privatized basically means "an excuse to hand out government contracts." That's mainly just a bitch against the right-wing, though, my main point was this article in which the AP version differed from other version, in favor of US interests.
Umm, yeah, it is.
It's really very funny to watch the huge amounts of spin they put on everything. I was watching the RT coverage of OWS last year, in which they hyped it up as the beginning of the new American Spring, which would sweep the country and take down the institutions of oppressive American government inside a few weeks.
US biased news at the time was doing its best to ignore it or hype up any hints of violence they could find, while playing down any message that protestors might have.
The BBC were reporting that some amount of people were protesting about financial stuff and that the movement seemed very decentralised and pretty peaceful.
Guess which source I trust a little more than the others?
Sky News have been reporting on this non-stop for weeks, constantly taking any free minute to drive home that the BBC is being subject to this inquiry. I'm so glad that non-government media is so impartial!
Sadly reason isn't exactly an emblem of unbiased reporting either.
flagrantly biased coverage by corporate interests.
No, BBC isn't state sponosred media, it's tax payers sponsored media (rather directly). While goverment has some oversight of BBC, comparing that RT or Xinhua is laughable at best. Both ar propaganda mouths of their respective goverments, and don't hide in shame about that.
Sorry, but I will take BBC over any of these any day. Call me Western capitalist whore if you like.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Most "news" is total crap.
In these days of ours, if something is actually newsworthy, then it ends up being documented and discussed in Internet fora, often in excruciating detail under all kinds of useful insights (diversity of bias is a great thing).
Newspapers and conventional media are dying because NOBODY NEEDS THEM ANYMORE; this is the nature of the Free Market—society evolves through variation and selection, but of course, people are trying to inhibit this most fundamental process by turning to the steel boot of would-be central planners, in order to pretend otherwise at everyone else's expense; when in doubt, bring out the violent coercion.
Now, don't be confused. There is no doubt still value in expert analysis—value worth paying for (in the traditional sense). However, most of what we call "news" is not in that category. The death of newspapers is a good thing; oh, certainly, there will be some unpleasantness during the evolutionary transition (especially when central planners prolong the agony), but the result will be a society having adapted a more efficient form.
The TV license is a tax and the broadcast finances and license fee rises are negotiated with the UK Government every ten years. Think the Government and the British state don't have a large measure of control? Think again
The notion that the TV license isn't a tax and the BBC isn't state-controlled is a delusion.
I prefer to think of this way, The RT is no more biased than the BBC is..
But the summary says different sources of money of different media are the cause of this situation. And in that regard BBC is comparable to RT: both are publicly funded, they don't rely on advertising.
or any other news channel
RT's coverage of Syria shooting down Turkish plane is enlightening on that point:
Turkey's downed jet: NATO action in disguise?
It's quite a thorough analysis, and a totally different spin than anything I had heard on BBC, RTE (Ireland) or US news sources. I guess all news sources are biased, and you need to take more than one point of view if you want to be able to form your own balanced opinion.
While people in the west were crediting facebook and twitter for organizing the arab spring, the leaders in the middle east understood that it was al jazeera that actually was responsible for forming perceptions, in some ways it exerts more influence in the middle east than any other regime in the world. I suggest that interested individuals read "propaganda" by Edward Burnayes, whom was the nephew of Sigmud Freud but far more influential, by being responsible for corporate perception management in the USA. Of course the internet has thrown the media a curve ball, but they still hold asymmetrical power and influence, which is why governments want to filter out the internet.
I recently found this to be good source of main world information, especially if you read it 2-3 days delayed. Clean short description of what is happening in the world. Without ads.
This is an example of what post journalism should look like, more like citation based research conducted by qualified agents using the scientific method, analyzed and automated using Natural language processing and statistics including "reporters" as datasets. Once people can have a reasonable objective certainty of what is true and false, it will get alot easier to separate the wheat from the chaff in politics. However none of this will ever occur if we don't fight for the net neutrality and freedom of information, information asymmetry will be used to manipulate people and consensus for ulterior motives.
We live in a globalized world. I live and work in Egypt, colleagues work in Washington, I have family in Canada, friends in a dozen other countries. The world is a small place. I'm not even American, but I'm amazed at the ignorance of most Americans toward their own status in the world. The USA is deeply involved in most conflicts around the world, though I would argue in a positive way. Furthering the cause of freedom and democracy for the downtrodden and oppressed. The moment most Americans stop caring about this fact though, then all hope is lost. So, perhaps instead of deriding the reality that exists outside of your comfy bubble, perhaps you could educate yourself and become wiser.
The BBC USED to be government controlled, now it is a private corporation that is government funded. However the purpose and "company culture" that prevaded the BBC USED to be about public service, while in the west it was about propaganda and advertising, which is why the BBC was funded by taxes in the first place. However over the years things have changed, while the BBC is certainly better than the american media, has deviated from its traditional values considerably.
Twitter feeds and live blogs provide a surprising amount of information from citizen journalists that often proves more accurate than reporters.
RT: Totalitarians with inferiority complex
CCTV: Communist sympathizers who like to shop.
CNN: liberal bleeding hearts
FOX: biblethumpers and brimstone
BBC: elitist tea drinkers
You see it as biased because you treat US media spin as the norm.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, so technically it's "state-owned". However, throughout most of the Middle East, its primary role is as a media outlet not controlled by either the national government or western business interests. And if you actually watch some of its reporting, you'll see that on issues outside of Qatar, its slant is different but certainly no more pronounced than your average western news outlet.
I am officially gone from
I, personally, see this trend as a major problem for democratic processes. If we can't really know what's going on, we can't vote sensibly on it. While this is a problem with mainstream media, anyway, the existing problem is a lot less severe than would be an unabashedly (or covertly) state-sponsored news media--and despite what we might think, people will undoubtedly believe such tripe, much as most people "buy into" the less-than-objective news we currently get.
So, I'm asking the brilliant minds of Slashdot what a better solution might be. I mean this as a serious question, so please no trolls, flames, etc.
For the sake of completeness/initiating the conversation/clarity: /. does. Possibly some "real" reporters will get in on it, but I don't know how they'll make a living. Otherwise, this means that everyone is doing journalism in a mostly (or strictly) amateur capacity, which will (typically) produce low-quality stories and lack journalistic legal protection in those countries that provide such. Also, it's likely to be dangerous for those who don't know what they're doing. This still won't address the issue of how much it costs to report important, non-easy news stories, but the lack of ad-driven funding could provide for a more "serious" tenor to the content (by way of not catering to popular-but-vapid content).
Options we have so far (which seem to be increasingly inadequate):
1) Traditional media. It's dying. I think we can all point to a handful of compelling reasons why it'll continue to die.
2) Paywalls. Nobody likes them, and they're arguably little better than unabashed state media, since one has to pay for a lot of them in order to sort out what's nonobjective. (If someone knows a fix for this, let's hear it!)
3) Free (as in beer) news--ad-sponsored. It lacks funding required to do a lot of "real" investigative reporting, and as such, it isn't likely to send a reporter across the world to report on the latest war in which our soldiers are fighting. (Let's put the topic of what wars they should be fighting aside, for the moment.) Also, I'm sick of seeing "lowest common denominator" content--no matter how cute those cats are.
4) Purely user-contributed news--similar to an "open-source" approach. Also suffers from "lowest common denominator," but can have some amount of filtering, much like
5) Other?
One final thought: how can we prevent whatever we end up with from becoming just as bad/useless/corrupt/biased as current and trending options?
I look forward to reading your thoughts. I don't know how we might go about implementing any wonderful ideas we come up with, so if anyone cares to tackle that "porcupine," I'm all for it. Otherwise, it's a fun mental exercise, and might inspire some reader who actually has a say in such matters.
It is naive to think the government has no influence over the BBC, well, some governments at least. It is foolish to think the BBC is unbiased. True unbiased reporting is unheard of in the world, it would require every story to consume more storage resources then fit in the physical universe. What am I talking about? The Israel/Palestine conflict is a prime example, since it has been decades, no centuries, no millenia of tit-for-tat, if you want to report the full story, you need to include all of human history, each time. Would make the morning paper a bit thick.
Cut bits out? Then your bias is in the bits you cut out. The BBC always cuts so that Israel is the aggressor and never reports a story until Israel has retaliated. Check their reporting.
Fox does the opposite. Both are lying scumbags, just because you like the lies of one the scumbags does not make that scumbag unbiased.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Think the Government and the British state don't have a large measure of control? Think again
Officially they don't. There have been numerous governments that have criticised the reporting of the BBC but been unable to prevent it - the BBC dutifully reported NATO airstrike civilian victims during the Balkans wars, leading to government criticism that BBC in fact stood for "Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation":
"During the Nato bombing campaign the British government was sharply critical of BBC coverage. At one stage some government officials referred to us as the Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation."- The Guardian
Now, contrast this situation with an actual state controlled media - do you think such a media would even be allowed to report on civilians killed by the state military (a fact that goes against the military line that these are "no-collateral-damage precision airstrikes"?) And to continue to report on such victims of your military, even when it angers and displeases the government? And it was not just the Kosovo War, during the Falklands War government ministers accused the BBC of unpatriotic and neutral reporting - one minister angrily naming it the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation", another the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation".
The notion that the TV license isn't a tax and the BBC isn't state-controlled is a delusion.
Compare the BBC and its successive spats with various governments to an actual state-controlled media and you will see a big difference. Do you think that real state-controlled media broadcasts any criticisms of the government? Would a real state-controlled media be allowed to report repeatedly on allegations that the government mis-represented the evidence for going to war? If so, why do we not see this kind of criticism coming out of, say, the Chinese state media?
Well I think the first problem is that you assume that "in order to vote on something correctly we need to know what is going on". The problem is that the actual voting process is completely agnostic to whether you actually know anything or not. Even if you were to make a scientific study and analysis of a certain policy up for vote, there will be the hundreds who won't bother studying the question at all. The democratic process has no intrinsic method of filtering competence from incompetence at the voting booth. In fact to even suggest something like a requirement to vote (such as property ownership) , have been deemed 'undemocratic'.
The problem is actually more fundamental than just good media, and I don't see an easy answer.
5) Other: BBC -like,
that is a public news service, funded by the taxation or a license. Yes, it is not fully free from the government control, but it is still better than commercial services which seem to be levitating to more entertainment (cats) and to less expensive reporting (Syria).
I guess all news sources are biased, and you need to take more than one point of view if you want to be able to form your own balanced opinion.
I'm glad at least one person on Slashdot gets it. It's not "Fox News Lies!" or "MSNBC Lies!," "RT Lies!," "BBC Lies!," etc. They all have skin in the game and they have a particular mindset and worldview to which they want to cater. You're not going be able to go out there and verify everything they say, so all you can do is try to get as many angles on an issue as you can in order to grasp the reality of the situation.
That's not really the cause of the situation, though. The cause is that the self described bastions of free media aren't doing the job they promise their readership, and haven't done so in at least a generation. So the readership has wised up and no longer spends money on newspapers and "serious' magazines as they used to, and the alternatives "state sponsored media" therefore have an evolutionary advantage.
The solution isn't for the public to bite the bullet and accept unpalatable new ways to fund media, the solution is for the old media giants to either die off (most likely) or return to offering a quality product (most unlikely).
Good suggestion.
From what I've gathered, it's similar to PBS and such, but with much more "serious" funding. I am, of course, "antsy" about the nearly-unavoidable government influence on anything the govt. funds, but if it can be somehow overseen in a meaningful way or mostly independent of such funding (perhaps by having its own income sources), this would be less of a problem.
Unfortunately the BBC TV is no longer the 'bastion of truth' that it used to be. With the introduction of 24hr news, it has fallen into the trap of chasing quick and cheap headlines , much like a tabloid newspaper, and is really now just a marketing outlet for better prepared organizations to deliver their message to one and all. Look for any searching questions or background checks on the 'experts' and you will be watching for a long, long time. It is quite rare to find strong cases made for issues against the BBC's own agenda, which is of course very left of center politically. BBC radio is a better option for informed debate and comment.
Contrast that with RT. Laughable you say ?
Well, I find some of the programmes far more informative since they actually debate and argue the issues rather than delivering the official line, as with the BBC.
Lets take a look at three progs from RT that you wouldn't get on the state sponsored BBC.
Julian Assange show: The world tomorrow.
Love him or hate him, what you get is influential world figures giving their point of view direct.
Far more informative than the spun versions of isolated quotes you get in mainstream.
Keiser report:
Difficult to find too much wrong with the logic delivered by this guy.
Alternatively, you can listen to the BBC , IMF, Euro muppets etc. telling you every 6 months that "The banks are NOW solvent".
(at least even they have been questioning the rhetoric recently, but it took some years AND they simply don't dig deep enough)
Cross Talk:
You actually get debates / heated arguments about the issues. Again, much better than some PR exec delivering a sermon.
So I'd say that if you want to have a rounded , informed opinion, then you need to take channels such as RT onboard and not dismiss them as some 1970's Soviet mouthpiece, which I'm sure they were in the past. They even had a debate criticizing Putin heavily a while back when he was being re-elected.
State Sponsored is the problem with the wording
The BBC is funded via the government (through a tax on possessing equipment capable of receiving) but is not government controlled, how independent it is is a matter for debate, but the alternatives in the UK have not shown they are any more independent of government influence ...
RT is government funded, controlled and run ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
That's how I used to think too. Then I realized that hearing lies on all sides didn't make me any more informed, it just made me think I was.
Today I'm relatively picky with my news and sources of news. I look for sources I can trust, and if they betray that trust, I'm hard on them.
Who to trust? Not many sources. Some organizations, such as the Guardian Newspaper, have a history of strong independent reporting that means I'm more likely to get the truth from them. Others, such as those parts of the financial press that concentrate on core news, not opinion, are good too. Both the FT and the news part of Bloomberg are pretty good. The comment on the latter is fairly awful and can be safely consigned to a trashcan.
And the BBC? Well, that's more complex than most people give credit for. The BBC is mostly independent, and to be honest, the government connections have never been an issue with the Beeb. The issue is some guy called John Birt, who, before becoming DG of the BBC ran its news department, and changed its culture, from what I can figure out, pretty much permanently. That is, I take a peek from time to time, decades later, and still see the same hacks and analysis style.
Basically, Birt implemented something called the "Mission to Explain", which meant news was mixed with analysis.
How would this work? Well, imagine if the news department had to cover sports (thankfully, this hasn't happened... yet.) At the beginning of the program, the news would report that Team A has lost its match against Team B. The anchor would defer to their Team A vs B playing game C correspondent, who would introduce three experts, who would explain how Team A did so badly, what Team A needs to do from here, and what Team B did right.
Seem reasonable? Well, the report would go out Friday. The game would be played on Saturday. Saturday in three months from now...
That's why I don't care much for BBC News. Especially as we weren't even talking about real experts, just the "armchair general" types.
BBC's independence? First class. The BBC was never fearful of government, it would bully politicians on air. Politicians in government actually hate it. Actual quality of reporting though? With some exceptions, dreadful.
To get back to the point though: the truth can rarely be found by looking at a group of biased media coverage, even if you're lucky enough to find contradictory outlets. You have to try to find the good journalists. Unfortunately, there aren't that many out there.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you think Fox News or the BBC or NPR don't already have a strong editorial bias, you're fooling yourself. Even if politically neutral (which none of them are), they all have a market-bias (commercial or otherwise). Fox of course is trying to embarrass its compeition, NPR is deliberately slamming Fox during its begging, er, 'pledge' drives.
At least with government-controlled media, the bias will be overt and inarguable.
-Styopa
Maybe in the future, you'll have ordinary citizens posting their short (tweet-like) reports, photos or videos of a breaking or continuing event to a refereed news site.
It will be the job of designated editors to filter the truth from the trolls and propagandists. The editors will be helped by simple algorithms. Posters who have already proved reliable both in terms of information and timeliness will receive the equivalent of a karma bonus, making them a more attractive "source" for the editors.
This Is different from Wikinews, which doesn't differentiate between reporters and editors. Everybody can report and edit.
It has an overall budget that the government provides, but the government gets no say in how it is spent ...
It has a controlling BBC Trust who regulate it, but have no say in the day to day running
It has a public service broadcasting remit so it must produce a certain amount of certain types of programmes, and it must get approval for new ventures from the Trust, but otherwise it is run as a non-profit company ...
Like PBS with money, a remit to produce good worthy programs, and government oversight at arms length ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
This article is red meat for right wing and libertarian nutjobs.
Sorry but this is almost all wrong. The BBC has never been government-controlled. It is state-owned and has been since 1927. It is not a private corporation at all.
It is subject to public service broadcasting requirements (as are Channel 4 and ITV, but not sure about Sky) and of course it has to comply with stuff like DA-notices but those apply to the whole media.
I have to agree that it isn't quite as good as it was, but IMVHO it is still ahead of the most popular traditional media in the US. There are quality US outlets though, but they're just not huge organisations.
It seems like you have a perspective problem. If you're used to only having self-funded or advertising-funded media, then all "state-funded" media must be the same. But they're not.
The BBC collects its license fee itself. If you don't feel like funding the BBC, don't buy a TV. RT is funded centrally from tax money. Russian income tax pays for it whether you have a TV or not.
The Russian government owns RT. The British government does not own the BBC. At best, they own the decision about which private corporation has the right to be the national broadcaster and could take that away from the BBC.
The Russian government decides at all levels who runs RT, as it owns it. The UK government only gets to decide the BBC's director general and its charter; much like shareholders in a private company, the UK government is an outsider with a stake in the BBC, rather than the operator.
The Russian government likely tells RT what to say. The BBC frequently says things the the UK government doesn't want broadcast and has to take the BBC to court because it has no control over what the BBC says beyond "we might recommend to the independent review body that they cut your funding in 2016".
If the BBC was located in Russia and acted the way it does in Britain, the Russian government would have closed it down and murdered its chief executive by now.
The BBC's equivalent to RT is a small part of the BBC called the World Service - this is not the same as BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC. The World Service has always been funded directly by the state, from taxes, but from 2014 onwards the BBC has to pay for it by itself.
Does my bum look big in this?
What could possibly go wrong. /s
I think state media is fine if it exists in competition with private media. But the supposed separation between the journalists and the people writing checks is at best a wire mesh door. It might stop overt manipulation but you're not going to get a state media that is highly critical of it's primary backers in government.
You might get the state media to attack one party in political systems that have more then one party. But they'll be consistently loyal to a given political faction. That is their camp in the government and separated from that alliance they wouldn't be able to attack either party.
It's amusing hearing countries like China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia being cited as examples of successful state media. These are all countries with spotty histories of tolerating political decent in media. In all three countries journalists have been jailed or killed at intervals for rocking the boat.
So sure, state media is working in those countries but in large part that's because it isn't totally safe to be a journalist in those countries. Russia has gotten a lot better and china is getting better. But there are always lingering allegations of secret police shutting up journalists. Not long ago an outspoken critic of Putin was killed in a mugging. And the notion that it was actually an assassination of a political critic was a popular conspiracy theory. No one besides the muggers really knows what happened. And both China and Saudi Arabia still openly jail journalists that piss off the wrong people in government.
I have no problem with state media. But if it's your primary source for news then you're ultimately having your impression of the world formed by at least one powerful faction in the government if not the ruling faction. Private media is also biased. But it tends to be the bias of the owners which can be a much smaller faction in the society. Further, where private media exists there tends to be a lot of it. And while one source can be biased most of the bias is canceled out if you consume a lot of different media.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In addition to state funded we should include other agenda-funded media like the Murdoch empire.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
NPR has world wide coverage of serious news, and is less biased than most news outlets
Hey, that's a neat trick!
"State government's aren't funded by sales taxes, they're funded by a license fee on retail purchases."
"Local public schools aren't funded by property taxes, they're funded by a land-ownership license fee."
"Roads aren't funded by gasoline taxes, they're funded by the pump license."
What's next? "We don't send people to jail, they just go on a 'Graybar Vacation'."
I'm stupid enough to be fooled by labels ... and I vote!
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
That's a distinction without a difference.
But where is the money going to come from to hire these “qualified agents”? That’s the issue for me, and I think Derkmead has it right.
Newspapers where a bundled item. You got 1. “qualified agents” (a.k.a. reporters) and 2. A distribution channel.
The Internet does a wonderful job of distribution and aggregating information. Wiki, Google, and it’s ilk do a decent job of promoting and editing important stuff. What it does not do well is original, unbiased research.
But you still need a unbiased reporter on the ground in Syria taking pictures gathering data. This is something the Internet is good a providing. It’s got ADD and has a hard time concentrating on a single issue at depth.
I'm glad at least one person on Slashdot gets it. It's not "Fox News Lies!" or "MSNBC Lies!," "RT Lies!," "BBC Lies!," etc. They all have skin in the game and they have a particular mindset and worldview to which they want to cater. You're not going be able to go out there and verify everything they say, so all you can do is try to get as many angles on an issue as you can in order to grasp the reality of the situation.
If you want to know how old the earth is, you don't go out and ask a dozen people off the street to "get as many angles on an issue as you can", you try to find a reliable source. In this case, that means you find a scientist, and if you want a precise answer, you find a geologist. That's because reality isn't a compromise; it either happened or it didn't. You don't go, "some people say the earth is 3 billion years old, some people say it's 6,000 years old, let's meet somewhere in between and call it an even million."
Similarly, if you want to be informed about the world, you find a reliable source. Some of them are simply more reliable than others- NPR has very good news, the Wall Street Journal's reporting is very good (I'm less a fan of their op-ed pages), the Economist provides good news as well. This isn't a question of political slant; these news organizations cover the spectrum (NPR on the left, Economist center-right, Journal on the right). But in each case, the people working as reporters for these organizations are capable of putting their political agendas to the side and reporting on what really happened. The Journal, for instance, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and so they have an op-ed section which works as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party just like Fox News, but they've actually managed to keep their reporting separate from that. I'd argue that getting your news exclusively from any one of these sources would make you more informed than listening to both Fox News (a terrible right-wing channel) and CNN (a terrible left-wing channel) and then trying to triangulate the truth.
"What it does not do well is original, unbiased research."
The traditional media don't do that either.
1) It may turn up information sponsors don't want known.
2) It may criticise a group who will complain to sponsors
3) It may embarrass the owners
4) It's more work
5) Nobody cares
although that last one is the perception of the marketing department and owners more than the truth. It's true enough for enough people to keep making money, though. The internet does a much better job of unbiased research. In fact, doing ANY research at all is better than traditional media manage today.
are the best news outlets out there simply because they report on real newsworthy events like politics, the economy, world conflicts, and so on. NPR has become a series of puff pieces on sports and entertainment with perhaps one or two very *badly* researched news stories. CNN too focuses on entertainment. Fox is a propaganda noise machine. The networks are bland pablum, safe for 6- and 86-year olds, while the rest of the USA's media are at the level of Entertainment Tonight, The National Enquirer, AM talk radio and NewsMax.
If you want real news now, you go international. You go to blogs. You go to the remaining local papers across the world. Any privately owned major media outlet now is just a corporate propaganda and distraction device.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Newspapers are not dying everywhere in the world, you know? I know it's happening a lot in the US, but we Europeans seem to keep buying and reading them :)
I can't speak for everyone, but I know my [country's] newspapers are doing very well thanks to both print and the web/apps. Lots of new revenue options including non-news services.
BBC is is what you want an independent academically styled institution to be. The truth will out so to speak.
The Cameron and Harper governments are both not fond of the BBC or CBC news arms respectively, because as arms length organizations interested in facts gets in the way of their narratives. But of course that happens to every government to some degree. When you give people free speech and tenure they'll say things you don't like. The BBC over the years has made the case very that they are interested in reporting facts, and the public on the whole, including the public outside the UK generally recognize that.
In the particular hot spots of the world right now Xinhua and Al Jazeera and Russian state news agencies have special access in that the people in question don't want to make enemies of China/Russia or the arab people. They're already enemies of the UK so shooting BBC reporters wouldn't be much of an added burden for them.
The 'programming' arms of BBC and CBC, that bid for olympics and TV shows and so on are probably legitimately not needed at a public level anymore. There was a time when you wanted to ensure quality programming was available to anyone on the cheapest TV and Radio options available, but I think the time and mechanism for that have moved on, at least from how they're doing things now.