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Consumer Groups Want To Tax Facebook To Save Journalism (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: How to fund ethical journalism in the Facebook era is the multi-billion dollar question of the hour, and a technology-focused consumer group by the name of Free Press believes it has a solution. The group has unveiled a new proposal that suggests taxing all online targeted advertising, then using that money to fund the nation's struggling news empires, big and small. The program would apply a 2 percent tax on companies generating more than $200 million in annual targeted-ad revenues, then use that money to create a "Public Interest Media Endowment." The $2 billion collected annually would then be managed by the government itself, or an outside, existing institution such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Such a tax would most obviously apply to both social media giants, but also the giant telecom monopolies increasingly trying to elbow their way into the online ad space. This endowment, in turn, would help fund local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and "news and information for underserved communities," suggests the group. "The problem for journalism is that Facebook and Google control nearly 70 percent of this marketplace," Free Press Director Tim Karr told Motherboard via email. "And neither are news organizations. In fact, only one of the top ten digital advertisers in the U.S. (Verizon Media Group/Oath) is in the news business (HuffPost, Techcrunch), and then only partially so."
Porn and actual sexcapades for people who aren't getting any.
News just makes people upset. Blowjobs make everyone involved happy.
It has a good reputation but with local people reporting on the ground, there's no need.
Just go do something productive instead.
Even if it was useful, most journalism is political activism.
Like the attacks on Convington students showed.
I could name many more examples, this good reputation is undeserved.
Walter Duranty covered up the Holodemor and got a pullitzer prize for it.
So it was never deserved, only now the people can refute these elites.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
If people like journalism a lot they will pay for it.
Start doing journalism that sells and that people will support.
Why should a new tax have to look after any normal "job"?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
all the job sites, ebay and craigslist functions were originally controlled by the newspapers. if you wanted a job in NYC, you bought the Sunday NY Times. if you wanted to hire someone, you advertised in a newspaper.
They acted snobby when the internet came and watched their revenues vaporize
No one wants the truth, they want the popular opinion...
No need for journalists any more.
Lets tax companies that make things and employ people and give that money to CNN (and the like) so they can have more people on air telling us to throw high school kids into wood chippers because they dared to wear a red cap.
That will solve everything and not make things more divisive.
Is this an early April Fool's joke?
I sure would not be happy giving a blow job. Good luck with the initiative though. You would need to educate people in a completely different way. When will that happen?
No. Public subsidies for journalism are wrong on so many levels. As wrong as public financing of political campaigns, though those are very popular.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Ads moving to other media adds pressure, yes. What killed journalism is a lack of trust due to biased reporting and rushing to the next scoop, facts be damned.
Probably more likely a group funded and run by a major publisher, much like how the coal industry runs numerous anti-nuclear groups portraying themselves as grass roots movements.
Just shutting down Facebook? It's really not worth the bandwidth it takes up.
To fund a thing is to control that thing.
Government funding for the press easily and quickly turns to government control of that press.
And unless government funds every single voice, the funding becomes unfair endorsement of particular voices.
I was waiting for some politician to claim they could pay for (legislation du jour) by taxing social media....
It just sounds like keeping something alive when it's no longer needed. If news media can't survive on its own, let it crash. Whenever something crashes, it will be revived in a better form if needed, and gone forever if not.
... I see : Opinion, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective, Why X is Y, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective...
I think I found the issue with "Journalism".
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Translated: formerly "mainstream" TV channels and newspapers, both liberal (e.g., NYT, CNN) or establishment-conservative (e.g., WSJ, The Economist), with a globalist editorial line, which call "fake news" anything else, with a fraction of the viewers/readers they used to have in the past and some even close to bankruptcy, finally unable to influence the public opinion with their defunct, derelict theories on how world trade, multiculturalism and mass immigration were supposed to be nice things, and, most importantly, unable to accept that voters around the world are literally shi**ing on their "ideas" at every single major election or referendum.
So now "ethical journalists" want to extort money from Facebook and Google just like gangsters. Note that article 11 of the proposed new EU copyright directive is exactly about this.
If you want to have ethical journalism, how about not starting out by taking other people's money away to fund your own pet project? And how about reporting facts instead of speculation as news? How many times have we seen during the entire Mueller Russia hoax sensational headlines and "bombshell" statements from anonymous sources, with most stories ending with "So far no evidence of Russia collusion has been found." Apparently being ethical to these guys means writing all the agitprop that's unfit to print.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Journalistic standards have become nothing more than an idealistic concept. Take the Covington kid was tried and convicted in the media for what was effectively face crime. Even a basic check of the facts would have quickly shown that the kid was innocent of the accusations laid against him. Unfortunately it took a $250 million dollar lawsuit against the Washington Post to get them to correct their previous coverage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Their journalists finally remembered their 'standards' and wrote up a much more accurate story. Too bad it took a $250 million defamation lawsuit in order for it to happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Fact of the matter is that journalism is dying because people don't trust journalists.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_...
If you don't trust someone you don't value them. If you don't value someone you will try to avoid paying for their services.
A free press requires a free market solution. Any market that accepts government handouts is beholden to government interests, ergo any tax that subsidizes the industry is not in the interest of Freedom of the Press.
Online magazines need to think harder about how to monetize their websites. Perhaps they could write up a Terms of Service that explicitly charges for sharing their links? It fits their argument - journalists as content creators are what add actual value to social media sites. Perhaps the social media sites should be following the same rules that newspapers and magazines have been for decades.
Well, I think things will be coming full circle.
In days gone by, I remember the news (the big news anyway) being something a journalist worked away on for some time, following up leads, evaluating, and getting to a truth (or at least a stab at being impartial) of the matter. That's how they won big awards, and gained reputation, for uncovering things that needed to be uncovered, and for spending weeks, months, or years tracing stories, going through all kinds of data, analysing and filtering out the extraneous junk to come up with a solid timeline, and a solid set of facts.
Yes, sometimes the stories were couched in sparkly language, but it was based on solid evidence.
With the rising of the internet, 'news' had to compete with "blogging" as a source, and rather than staying reputational (big news outlets meant high quality news with long term stories), they chose to dive to the bottom of the barrel, and treat journalism as something to be acquired as cheaply as possible.
This, I suspect, was exacerbated by people going "Oh, we can get our news through this 'free' site", and not worry about reputation, as they were used to having a high reputation source available, and assumed all news was of that quality.
Now, we're in the situation where there really isn't a high quality source of news. Almost everything has descended to tabloid, retweet, copy/paste of blogs and unverified releases. And people are starting to worry that they're being told porkies.
Well, duh! That's what you get for having no high quality, objective news source.
Now people are scrabbling to find that objective source via "fact checkers" which are themselves often relying on funding.
The only possibilities I can see are to have a subscription basis for high quality online paper that is as objective as possible, presents facts, and avoids sensationalising, or do it as an "open" project, such as Wikipedia, except for news (a lot more time pressure on the volunteer moderators etc.).
But one thing's for sure, we need that high quality journalism back. And it needs to earn its reputation.
Let the fake news die. I won't miss it.
That's only something you assume, not based on experience.
It's like all the math anxiety from yesterday, you've been taught to be anxious and fearful about it, by a prudish and self-torturing culture.
With proper therapy, we can get you to find it a joyous and fulfilling experience like it really is.
This is an extremely bad idea probably put up by a journalist does not like the idea of searching for another kind of job.
This kind of idea is common amongst heavily unionised workforces who have the attitude that my grandfather made widgets, my father made widgets and by Christ I am going to make widgets even though the manufacture of widgets is no longer financially viable because the market for widgets has largely disappeared due to technological changes and changes in fashion.
This idea has been tried in the UK. Left wing governments tried to save jobs by using tax payers money.
All that happened was unemployment was defered by approx two years at the expense of tens millions of pounds. As Maggie Thatcher said 'You can't buck the Market'
This whole thing falls apart when you ask the simple question of which "journalists" get money. Fox News? MSNBC? Intercept? Breibart? My local alternative newspaper? Who gets to choose?
The libertarian wet dream is that society collapses and then their prepper posing will become hothothot to the chicks as their nerdy SJW schoolmates or bosses will all be beaten bloody by Trump's biker armies with no reporters to cover it.
That's why libertarians can't stand trains, see: George Will, trains sap individuality, or the slightest hint of taxation or regulation to alleviate the tragedy of the commons. That the world is too crowded for this is why at the heart of most libertarian absolutism is an active dislike of anything that might stabilize modern society. Because obviously tough Randians will survive the Apocalypse in greater number than snow flake liberals and their tough but too stupid colored friends. They - well this is slashdot so you - would rather have famine and destruction than continue with this liberal experiment where women and darkies don't know their places.
I like what consumer reports does in *theory* and paid them for a subscription, but their site was 100% unusable unless I turned off all privacy and tracking tools and reset my DNS to plain vanilla (I have a dynamic block list of known tracking IPs & domains). The believe that they own and can aggressively monitize their subscribers is whatever the opposite of "pro-consumer" is; I have an immediate negative reaction to anything they have to say.
imagine a soft, buttery paw gently pressing down onto a sleeping soldier's face. forever.
That's an awesome idea. Some might argue this would be opening the doors to propaganda. I say that's fine. The more we bolster and amplify the current corporate propaganda machine, the less ignorant the populace would be. Fixing Facebook's journalism problem in this manner could ultimately fix the citizens in fly-over states by snuffing out their propensity to question authority or, worse, their desire to live lives free from authoritarian reality warping. With a Ministry of Truth amply funding news outlets, the U.S. could finally catch up to the rest of the civilized world!
People who had their parents pay to get them into Yale.
They know how to more responsibly spend your money than you do, obviously since they are better than you since they went to Yale.
And they will do it for just a small cut for themselves so they can be multimillionaires while deciding how to spend your money. This way they don't have to do a real job since they are better than you after all.
MIght as well say, Why have peer review in science. With honest diligent compentent people there's no need.
The whole problem with the cognitive bubble feeding poison from facebook trolls is the lack of journalistic integrity.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
... I see : Opinion, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective, Why X is Y, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective...
I think I found the issue with "Journalism".
It's saturation. Even with global connectivity, there's really not enough stuff happening that is newsworthy enough to fill content 24/7. The only way to generate that content is to start loading up on opinion pieces or editorials. Used to with newspapers, you had the opinion or editorial pieces in their own section. Now you have opinions mixed in with actual reporting articles, blurring the lines between personal opinion or reported fact. Sure, the opinion pieces always (well, should always) have disclaimers, but no one really reads them, especially because they are usually included in the little author bio at the top of the article.
With websites it's definitely a revenue factor. Gotta keep generating articles to get people refreshing the pages-click on an article, read it, go back to main page- and therefore generating more ad views.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's hard to unwind your bussiness model, snobbery or not. To compete with free craigslist ads? TO compete with nearly free e-bay ads? they'd have to go to no revenue almost overnight. How do you do that and support the NEWS function which isn't free? The were caught in a jam.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Taxes shouldn't be used with an intention to slow somebody down, force someone [not] to do something, support somebody's competition, etc. This is a crime, and a thing your hated Nazis would do. And criminals should hang. Yes, you, liberals.
You want to achieve an effect that you think is "the right thing to do"? Pass a *law*saying so. Just that.
Although keep in mind that it has to obey the Constitution. Your minds tend to fail at this point.
Nor should be texes used to collect more money from the rich just because they have it so it can be taken. This is theft. And thieves should hang.
Taxes are there to share the responsibility for the society (=nation) and enable delegation of public tasks to those who want to do them.
In a 'fair' society taxes should be equal (*constant*) for everyone. You live in a society, you pay your part, eg. $10000 a year. Nobody should care how much you earn.
It is up to you to decide what is a public service, be it roads, free education, free healthcare, etc.
This is capitalism.
If you want to be generous towards people who earn less, you invent *linear* tax.
This is socialism.
To have it you don't even need to *give* anyone anything. You just *take less* from poor for the same services everybody receive in a form of public tasks.
Now you can start *giving* money and services away to privileged groups (privileged by law), ie. mainly the poor people. Welfare is the most notable example.
This is communism.
And it ends in creation of the class of parasites, and then criminal groups in the government whose only reason to exist (and betray the interest of thier country) is to keep the status quo.
See USSR and European Union.
Wake up, dumb liberals. Or go to sleep forever.
Taxes on media, with the limited exception of taxes on over the air media*, are unconstitutional.
You ***cannot*** tax social media, Internet, or websites specifically. Will these legally illiterate state legislatures get this through their thick skulls already? Because the moment they pass this type of legislation, they're going to get sued, and lose. These precedents are so well established that I don't know why these morons think the Supreme Court will turn around and overrule them or give them a free pass.
I don't look forward to suing these states, since usually you can't recover damages, but I sure as hell will do it anyway out of principle. I don't want to see my country turn into a pile of dogshit like the EU which doesn't have freedom of speech.
* Public EM spectrum is a limited resource, so the Supreme Court allowed the government to regulate it a bit more than regular communications, since EM communications can interfere with eachother. The fact mobile internet is used to deliver facebook is irrelevant though since that is beyond the scope of the exception.
If people like journalism a lot they will pay for it.
Why do you think that? They never have. Most journalism in the last 100 years was not primarily paid for by the end consumer but by advertisements. Most journalism that has tried to bill the end reader directly hasn't worked out because the economic model doesn't work very well.
Think about it for a second. How do you assign a value to information you don't have yet? That's what selling stories It's impossible both for buyer and seller. I don't know what a piece of information is worth until I actually have that information and at that point you can't sell it to me. But a journalist has no way to know what value I assign to a particular bit of information or story. Any price they charge is a pure guess. Newspapers get around this by bundling a wide variety of data in the hopes that I will trust that some of it will be valuable to me. They do not and cannot know what value I will place on any given story so price setting is basically impossible. Advertising works because the advertiser doesn't really care about the value of the information, they just want eyeballs for a given demographic. So the newspapers basically give away the information and make their money from people who don't actually care about the story content.
Why should a new tax have to look after any normal "job"?
Lots of important and necessary jobs are supported by tax dollars including but not limited to police, fire fighters, road construction workers, teachers, soldiers, and many many more. Journalism is unquestionably important and necessary in a free society. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't have tax supported journalism but it's not like we don't support LOTS of "normal" jobs with tax dollars already. Some of our best quality journalism (NPR and PBS) is already supported by tax dollars.
Please. It's a political action group aimed at jobs and salaries for newspaper industry persons.
Parroting the source article's white washing words is faulty on many levels.
I suppose, by the same logic we could add extra taxes on the biggest single users of roads by number of miles driven and send a check to everyone in the USA as reimbursement for that entities over-use of the roads - hang on it's the combined federal, state and local governments which drive the vast majority of miles in this country, not to mention they're the largest single polluter , larges consumer of gasoline, largest user of electricity, largest user of ....
When Journalism becomes Activism it is no longer Journalism. "Fund struggling news empires"? Best oxymoron joke I've heard all day! When you have to "fix" the news to "sell" it, it's no longer truly news. Imagine a world where Journalism was not biased or distorted? Don't kid yourself, you are always being lied to
and manipulated instead of being told the truth.
It is better propaganda than "special-interest group for corporate welfare for the media."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Why not make it illegal it to be called news unless it is on the .news domain. Membership of .news domian is dependant on following an ethical model. Any content that is posted outside the news domain has to pay a tax. Content outside without attribution = tax x 10.
Even with global connectivity, there's really not enough stuff happening that is newsworthy enough to fill content 24/7.
Well, a man can't consume content 24/7 - have to work, eat and sleep too. Maybe they should consider that it's OK not to have constantly new fluff (like actual dead-tree newspapers) but have stuff that's actually worthwhile reading...
Fake news isn't worth saving.
I am for consumer choice, and the market should determine what sites are most popular based on consumer preferences and traffic. If the consumer rejects dinosaur media, then so be it. If a media site does not like freeloading, then put in a paywall. If people want to distribute a permalink to an interesting article, that should be their right to do so, royalty free. The destination news site is always free to paywall. The permalink if anything is free advertising for news sites and certainly should not be link taxed. No need for nasty link taxes and more rules and regulations or any kind of government intervention on this matters. Governments need to get the hell out of these things. The private market can provide solutions and the markets work beautifully to balance these things out.
The dinosaur media thinks they have a right to dominate distribution of news and want an entrenched monopoly using corporate cronyism and corruption to give these media sites special favors that exempt them from normal consumer market preferences that everyone else has to work under. The beauty of the market is it respends to the demands of the consumer and is a kind of market democracy where the consumer can vote with their feet regarding what they want to support. When you create special taxes to benefit some large media companies, we are essentially creating a form of elitism and tyranny.
the only regulation which makes sense for sites like facebook is a "right to be forgotten" law which allows people to fully delete their accounts. If people do not like facebook, they should not use facebook. If people do not like what a certain newspaper publishes, they should not subscribe. If they want to subscribe, they can pay for a subscription to get past the paywall.
I do support common carrier rules for ISPs and credit card and payment processors to ensure everyone has a platform. There is a delineation between content providers/information service and a common carrier. The common carrier is the company that provides the cable or antenna repeater carries data from point A to point B. Due to the natural monopoly/multipoly characteristics of this, common carrier has been justifiable to ensure a free flow of information and the multipoly cannot be abused by a common carrier. Even if the company plays both roles, the part of the company that is common carrier should operate by those rules and the information service part of it not. Information services are not regulated as common carrier and are not natural mono-multipolies, people can create their own information service to offer opposing views. This is how Facebook should be treated. If people do not like Facebooks policies, they should create their own.
The information service/common carrier distinction is more dubious , arguably, with cloud and hosting services. Cloud and hosters are may not common carriers since they do not transport information between disparate geographical locations. Due to the architecture of the Internet, it can be important for people to use a hosting or cloud service to have access to the internet. Direct line access can be expensive or infeasible due to cost of real estate and other factors and the limited available of high bandwidth capacity facilities. One way to address that is to expand access to high bandwidth common carrier facilities. Cloud and hosting services make access much more affordable, due to economies of scale from bulk access to high bandwidth facilities. Common carriers could be encouraged to provide high bandwidth hosting lines to more locations however to encourage companies to be able to run their own server farms and not be dependant on a cloud.
Applying common carrier-like rules to hosters and cloud providers is a controversial and debatable subject. One problem is identifying a legally definable differentiating characteristic between them and a site like Facebook. While a site like facebook allows people to store their content on it and have that visible to others, Facebook wraps the content with their own conte
"We couldn't figure out a way to stay in business, but those guys did, so we want the *government* to legally attach us as parasites to them"
Means those resources are beholden to the government. There's enough complaints about access journalism right now... can you imagine if the survival of news paper relied on such access and spun coverage of specific individuals in high places? It would almost be like.... well almost like what we have now, but much much worse.
The people who they claim need it aren't going to use it. It's just another stupid idea to waste other people's money.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Scrolling down the NYT and WAPO Twitter timeline... I see : Opinion, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective, Why X is Y, Opinion, Opinion, Perspective...
I think I found the issue with "Journalism".
You do know the Twitter timeline is curated based on what you engage with? What does this tell us about what you engage with on Twitter?
Nope, no sig
What we need are journalists that don't suck incredibly hard at their job.
All the journalists that are losing their jobs right now are losing them because they work for garbage idiotic loser firms like Buzzfeed.
Tim Pool is one of the best journalists. Like REAL journalists and objective journalists I've seen in a loong time. And I know, I know.. You lefties think he's biased, that's how STRONG the bias is in the mainstream media. You look at someone like Tim Pool and his objectivity looks like bias because the baseline that is 99% of the media is extremely biased like MAD towards the left.
Continuing on, Tim used to work for Vice Media. He left because he SAW THIS COMING.
I mean forgetting about politics for a second, look at all the horrible copy/paste borderline plagiarized articles that firms like Buzzfeed, Vice, etc. put out.
Now compare that with other quality journalists who are writing actual good content.
The way to keep your job has always been providing the most value to the company. However, if the company is a sinking ship because they're stupid, then you should find another job. We all should work for a piece of sh*t firm and go down with the ship and end up broke and penniless and jobless as a result. This will teach a LOT of things. Like for instance, don't stay with a sinking ship just because you're getting a steady paycheck because that paycheck won't be there forever and it takes a long time to find a job.
Best way to save journalism is actually to be a good journalist. Be objective, not biased, and actually do good work.
Really had to do politically though if you're a political journalist because if you're not on the left you're going to be fighting an uphill battle of true bigots and triggered idiots who are in positions of power.
- Alex
Let it die.
How about we make advertising worthless by not clicking on the bloody ads?!? Then we wouldn't have these massive advertising giants controlling what we consume. Charging for content would be the norm again. People would evaluate and choose their preferred aggregator, and journalism could thrive again via pay-per-view revenue - just like the old days. Information is free; good information is not.
FTFA:
In fact, only one of the top ten digital advertisers in the U.S. (Verizon Media Group/Oath) is in the news business (HuffPost, Techcrunch), and then only partially so.
HuffPost is in the news business? Looks more like 100% opinion to me.
This seems conflicted to me.
... but it also presupposes journalists and journalism are too sketchy, undesirable, and underwhelming for people to freely pay money to support them.
The proposal is obviously intended to help journalists
In some ways this is an attack on journalism.
We can save independent journalism by making it depend on government funding! Uh, wait...
Horrible fucking idea to introduce any tax for any reason. The government has plenty of money, just has to stop wasting it.
Why do they act like they are entitled to other people's time and money?
.. that'll fix journalism.
Investigative Journalism has stopped at the New York Times because of the NSA's targeting of Journalists.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals not corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Calling this the "free" press is entirely disingenous. Old media is demanding that people continue to give them a platform after most of the world has moved on. That is not "free" that is the opposite of free.
What is going on is that American pro-regime propaganda is demanding a platform and that tech has to pay for it.
Before the internet, these people did a shit job and seldom lived up to their own rules or standards for objectivity. They also held a monopoly on media for the longest time.
Now they are demanding the government gets to chose which private publications get money? What? Unlike, lets say the BBC, there is not going to be any public oversight on content either.
This is glorified robbery. A tax to directly fund private interests of a failing business model.
captcha: unable
The government needs to stop paying money to big corporations and enrich the privage entrepreneur, aka people who can do blowjobs.
What we really need to do is tax all video sharing sites so Hollywood can keep on giving us great films.
Hell NO!
If a commercial enterprise cannot survive it should die. This is how capitalism works!
so get journalism officially eating at the trough of government handouts provided thru taxation of others, "subsidizing" their survival? that surely leads to an independent free press that totally will not do everything it can to get politicians elected who'll feed it MORE, no sir!
yeah right. I have this bridge for sale, you can then flip it and use that to fund your poor dying press
Sounds like a money-grab scheme to me. The last thing in the world we need is a government-sponsored Ministry of Propaganda. Imagine what it would look like if Trump controlled the news (or Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, etc.). Worst idea ever!