It seems like someone in the media, at least at some sufficiently high level, should be able to distinguish between those scenarios. It also seems like that level can’t realistically be any higher than whoever runs a specific newspaper, for example (rather than the CEO of the company which owns that newspaper as well as ten others and a TV station or two).
I don’t think you’d need to be in the media, necessarily. A lot of information about what the government does and how it does it is in the public domain if you care enough to look, at least in the United States; it should be possible to get fairly detailed financial information, for example, for most everything that isn’t concerned with war or spying. That isn’t perfect, especially since it’s hard in many cases to find private-sector projects to compare against, but if you’re interested in finding a true measure of government efficiency it seems like a better place to start than media reports.
It seems like someone in the media, at least at some sufficiently high level, should be able to distinguish between those scenarios. It also seems like that level can’t realistically be any higher than whoever runs a specific newspaper, for example (rather than the CEO of the company which owns that newspaper as well as ten others and a TV station or two).
I don’t think you’d need to be in the media, necessarily. A lot of information about what the government does and how it does it is in the public domain if you care enough to look, at least in the United States; it should be possible to get fairly detailed financial information, for example, for most everything that isn’t concerned with war or spying. That isn’t perfect, especially since it’s hard in many cases to find private-sector projects to compare against, but if you’re interested in finding a true measure of government efficiency it seems like a better place to start than media reports.