Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
The news agencies backed by Russia and other similar governments aren't dependent on getting views either. Don't be so quick to propose that model as a solution.
The problem isn't that journalism is profit driven. Were that the case, this would have already happened decades ago when the news media was every bit as profit driven. In some ways it already did happen, but we look back at those good old days through a rose colored lens and neglect to remember that there was similar levels of sensationalism and partisanism. Look at something like the National Enquirer and tell me that fake news is a recent phenomena. The term "yellow journalism" dates back over a century. None of this is a new problem.
The real issue is that the internet and a host of other technologies have made it incredibly inexpensive for anyone to do reporting, which means that the traditional news media is being squeezed by independent or small organizations that don't have the added expenses that old outfits have. When something becomes less expensive to produce, you naturally get more of it. Now there's hundreds of people offering hundreds of takes.
If you want a conservative point of view, there are people who will provide that. If you want a liberal point of view, there're plenty of people to provide that as well. There's everything in between and even more extreme. If you're a batshit crazy loon, there's someone out there catering to that as well. They were always there, but it was a lot harder to distribute their little pamphlets or newsletters 30 years ago, whereas today they can broadcast to the entire world and powerful search engines and social media have made it easy for people to find what they're looking for.