Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
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While privately owned media is rife with coercion and censorship, public systems face the harshest accusations of ideological conformity and propaganda, with critics readily invoking authoritarian socialist regimes like the Soviet Union. But the problem here lies in authoritarianism itself, not public funding.
✏️ The argument being made is to separate the funding from the decisions. In that vein, it technically shouldn’t matter if money is coming from private or public interests, as long as the decision-making on the ground is firmly in the hands of the people. Naturally it’s easier if that’s done with public funding (i think). 🔗 View Highlight
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McChesney pushed for what he called “democratic media,” outlets funded by the public but free from both market greed and state meddling.
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the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), which would distribute federal funding for journalism democratically at the county level. The plan would allocate about 0.15 percent of GDP annually (roughly 100 per person in each county.
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in the nineteenth century, postal subsidies for newspaper delivery effectively represented 0.21 percent of GDP. We understood then that delivering reliable and accurate information to American citizens was a fundamental component of a functioning democracy and worth pooling our resources to pay for.
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The key innovation of the LJI plan is that citizens themselves would determine how funds are distributed. Every three years, adults would receive three votes to allocate among qualified nonprofit news organizations in their county. This multivote system would deliberately encourage media diversity, as no single outlet could receive more than 25 percent of a county’s funding. To qualify, organizations must be locally based nonprofits, operating for at least six months, producing original content regularly, and maintaining independence from larger entities.
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the LJI would establish no government editorial oversight — the only controls would be basic qualification requirements and citizen voting. All content produced using these funds would be freely available online.
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advocates for an ascertainment process where local communities determine their own information needs rather than having them dictated by market forces or distant media executives. His model is envisioned as a plan to liberate journalists from commercial constraints that hamper substantive reporting on issues affecting working-class communities and marginalized populations.
✏️ When you let the people choose things, they will choose what matters to them and what affects them on their scale. This is just more of combating the issue of scale and bringing things back to the community. Same with the thing about China’s custom bus routes that communities can vote on xref 🔗 View Highlight
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public media means public ownership of media institutions” — a fundamental shift from our current system where even “public broadcasting” remains structurally dependent on corporate underwriting and wealthy donors.