Why YSK: good journalism has a lot of costs (and not one-time-only), in time if not in money, so if any “news” source isn’t at least trying to get paid somehow*, then it indicates that the supply at zero price exceeds the demand (it is a “free good”), which means one of two things:

Edit: After a lot of discussion and some more thought on my part, I am no longer sure that a single binary choice captures all the possibilities here. The concept of a “free good” is a standard one in economics, with essentially the definition I gave above, and it is still true that most journalism comes with significant costs (and not just in money). So, if there is no effort being made to recover that cost (e.g. by asking for charitable donations, or some other significant material contributions like volunteer work), then I don’t see how that “journalism” can be legitimate.

The point I was trying to make is that, e.g., internet sites that claim to offer vast amounts of easy, “quality” information (and it is questionable what that even means), on a regular, ongoing basis, but ask absolutely nothing from anyone in return, are likely some kind of scam. Because, if that were actually true, then they would have no way of actually supporting themselves on a long-term basis. Some people don’t care about long-term sustainability, of course, but they don’t tend to stay around for very long.

Original text follows.

  1. a lot of people like and use it but the publisher, or someone backing them, is still paying the substantial costs associated with investigating/researching, editing, and hosting it (and are arguably being quite charitable), or

  2. not many people find it useful or access it often, but it is still being offered/promoted by someone who has some other motive (not necessarily nefarious, but also not all that charitable).

If the latter, but they still publish timely coverage of “newsworthy” events, which would otherwise make a lot more people want to read it, then they are likely may be (edited) “tabloid”/“propaganda”/“yellow journalism”/“clickbait”/“listicle”/whatever term people are using today for “not a very credible news source”.

* Even if that’s through asking for charitable donations, though that unfortunately is often not very successful despite the fact that, one might argue, when you benefit and have the financial means to pay but don’t, then that is unethical.

Also, note that the existence of barriers to unfettered use can be considered a kind of “price” (from the “buyer’s” perspective at least), which is both annoying and can serve to limit the “quantity demanded”, making it easier to keep the “quantity supplied” high enough to meet the demand.

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 year ago

    I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.

    I propose no such thing! Quite to the contrary, what I am saying is that you are not scrutinizing the question enough. Specifically, the biases that all corporate media has towards promoting the idea of the near-monopoly on “legitimate journalism” held by corporate media and friendly state media, as well as promoting the institutional powers and corporate backers upon which they ground their business. I likewise think people shouldn’t rush to accept state-funded media as being “independent” when they have largely demonstrated a deep-seated bias towards promoting the interests of their state sponsors. This is not a coincidence!

    People that are invested in getting stories that are against the interests of the country they are in must first recognize that it’s an uphill battle more complicated than the consumer lifestyle bullshit offered by the sources that – thanks to their capital giving them immense brand awareness – make themselves “easy to come by”.

    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.

    Tell me, does anyone who follows a news source not profess that they want “accurate information”? From CNN to Epoch Times to Breitbart to Yahoo News (funny how underrepresented the left is in major western news sources, by the way), does anyone say “Oh, I don’t care if it is accurate.” No, of course not! And yet, it should go without saying that people clearly have a bit more going on than that for a source like Breitbart to have success. Of course, once we establish some people are acting against their professed desire for accuracy and are happily being fed bullshit, this also brings oneself into question.

    So if it’s not merely what they say they want, what do people actually want?

    Let me take a slight detour: What is ideology? A set of beliefs regarding both values and empirical facts, I think everyone can agree on that. What is the basis for the adoption of ideology? This is much more contentious, but I think the most foundational element of this has only one good answer: Ideology is a survival strategy.

    Ideology is a huge topic, theoretically infinitely huge, between the immense weight of the historical record, the epistemically infinite possibilities for the future, and the stipulatively infinite number of different values someone can choose, and the endless ways these can relate to each other in various forms of inference. People don’t have time for that, and yet in their desire for meaning and connection (along with being directly instructed to) there is pressure from an early age to develop an ideology, so they use what they virtually always do: heuristics, preconceptions in the form of perceived correlations generalized so as to be all-encompassing to their subject matter. This makes it much easier to develop at least a rough ideological framework, but it does not help determine which simplified ideological tenets they ascribe to. This, again, can be explained as a survival strategy: People become enculturated to groups that they are attracted to, and they fall into such groups for material reasons, whether perceived opportunity for gain, promise of security, or being spurned by other groups, all with an immense bias towards locality.

    In short, ideology is functionally a way to relate to society on the basis of what is the most profitable or convenient. Capital-T “Truth” is only relevant insofar as it directly impacts one’s own living conditions, and even then it might take up an antagonistic role (see antivaxxers).

    So, returning to the original topic of media consumption, I would like to advance the thesis that people want media that comports with their ideology, which means media that they find convenient or profitable for navigating their day-to-day lives. Whether the media advances ideas that are capital-T “True” is not relevant if it is functionally very distant from someone’s life in either geography, chronology, or social grouping.

    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!

    I don’t follow the second part, but I think I’ve demonstrated that the media being “free” to provide accurate information doesn’t mean very much to the information that they will provide. They can do great research, but their vested interest is mainly what amounts to pandering to the ideology of their target demographics.

    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”.

    I don’t see how this is relevant other than finding a way to bring Tankie Discoursetm into this, which I think we can really do without for the time being unless you’d like to use it to construct a more relevant argument.

    I look forward to what else you have to say.

    Complete aside, Citations Needed is a cool podcast that is free

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        I can see that you took note of my commentary on word choice, but you seem to be discounting the idea of charity on the part of whoever runs this hypothetical indie media outlet (see lemmy itself) even as you accept the idea of the audience engaging in charity. Of course, there are scams like PragerU that run at a loss as propaganda outlets, but we can see that they do this by being bankrolled by billionaires.

        The idea of a service being “illegitimate” when it is not trying to sell things is bizarre, since your argument seems to lead to the conclusion that “it is outside of the economic framework I have put forward” without explaining the basis for the hypothetical scam.

        • @[email protected]OP
          1•1 year ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]OP
          1•1 year ago

          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.