I believe that it’s worth employing more journalists than are currently employed. It’s generally useful if different journalistic outlets diversity of interests so that a journalist who wants to write a story can shop around for an outlet that wants to publish the story.
There’s a desire to do something about perceived totalitarianism in Hungary and Poland. Given the available tools, I believe that funding media in those countries is one of the better ways to handle it.
The EU funds lots of things that aren’t automatically pro-EU. I meet a woman employed at a NGO here in Berlin that was as far as public sources tell is at least partly funded by EU money who was an activist against free trade agreements.
Julia Reda used EU funding to run a liquid democracy conference a while back. Martin Sonneborn is paid by the EU and wrote a good analysis of the latest Assange court case.
The key question is how money gets distributed and whether you can find a way that the outlet is incentivized for diversity.
The diversity of outlets that you desire sounds to journalism what diversity of products is for markets generally. It is generally agreed that free markets are more efficient than centralized planning. Why not do the same for media? It’s not like there’s a lack of independent or outsider funded media trying to survive while providing a different angle. But they’re not the targets of government funding. I don’t see how more funding could make it easier for those dissenting media to compete.
Journalism can have different goals, one is about making money by giving readers what they want. One is about creating public good. Another is about engaging in propaganda and getting paid either directly (CNN’s Saudi Arabia coverage is likely in that class) or the media owner is paid indirectly by getting favorable government contracts (which seems to be how it works in Hungary).
There are plenty of independent media that tell you about Bill Gates wanting to microchip everyone but there are few independent media organs that provide substantial criticism.
The Gates Foundation happens to give money to most outlets that do substantial investigative reporting, so there are few places where such an article could be both published and the author paid for the reporting work.
The Wellcome Trust is similar even when it doesn’t fund media outlets the same way that the Gates Foundation does. It pushed for lab leak censorship in the beginning and likely influenced other policy as well. It made gigantic profits from the pandemic.
Having a good investigative journalist trying to make sense of how those profits were made and provide transparency would be very useful but we don’t have anyone in our media landscape who pays for that investigative journalism.
I believe that it’s worth employing more journalists than are currently employed. It’s generally useful if different journalistic outlets diversity of interests so that a journalist who wants to write a story can shop around for an outlet that wants to publish the story.
There’s a desire to do something about perceived totalitarianism in Hungary and Poland. Given the available tools, I believe that funding media in those countries is one of the better ways to handle it.
The EU funds lots of things that aren’t automatically pro-EU. I meet a woman employed at a NGO here in Berlin that was as far as public sources tell is at least partly funded by EU money who was an activist against free trade agreements.
Julia Reda used EU funding to run a liquid democracy conference a while back. Martin Sonneborn is paid by the EU and wrote a good analysis of the latest Assange court case.
The key question is how money gets distributed and whether you can find a way that the outlet is incentivized for diversity.
The diversity of outlets that you desire sounds to journalism what diversity of products is for markets generally. It is generally agreed that free markets are more efficient than centralized planning. Why not do the same for media? It’s not like there’s a lack of independent or outsider funded media trying to survive while providing a different angle. But they’re not the targets of government funding. I don’t see how more funding could make it easier for those dissenting media to compete.
Journalism can have different goals, one is about making money by giving readers what they want. One is about creating public good. Another is about engaging in propaganda and getting paid either directly (CNN’s Saudi Arabia coverage is likely in that class) or the media owner is paid indirectly by getting favorable government contracts (which seems to be how it works in Hungary).
There are plenty of independent media that tell you about Bill Gates wanting to microchip everyone but there are few independent media organs that provide substantial criticism.
If you want to see how such criticism looks like Charity’s pharma investments raise questions around transparency and accountability published by the BMJ is a good article.
The Gates Foundation happens to give money to most outlets that do substantial investigative reporting, so there are few places where such an article could be both published and the author paid for the reporting work.
The Wellcome Trust is similar even when it doesn’t fund media outlets the same way that the Gates Foundation does. It pushed for lab leak censorship in the beginning and likely influenced other policy as well. It made gigantic profits from the pandemic.
Having a good investigative journalist trying to make sense of how those profits were made and provide transparency would be very useful but we don’t have anyone in our media landscape who pays for that investigative journalism.