I used to look forward to listen to NPR

What we should expect is that the company will hire serious journalists, have the freedom to pursue serious journalism in ways profit-seeking companies may not, and will be less prone to the wild swings that reactionary politics force profit-seeking media companies to pursue. Will it turn out that way in practice? Likely not (because the journalists at NPR are people and are affected by what the top dogs in the media world say is newsworthy). At best, it'll be in matters of degree.

I think a great example of the sort of work that profit-seeking companies aren't doing anymore in the way they should is the investigative journalism at ProPublica. They're a non-profit and are lapping the field right now in terms of the quality of the work they're putting out.

 

The truth about NPR’s funding — and its possible future

The whole thing about NPR receiving federal money is way over played. NPR directly receives almost no money. It is the public radio and tv stations that do get federal money, and some of that money is used to buy news content from NPR.

With the advent of podcasts and other media NPR is likely becoming less reliant on indirect public funding.

 

I understand this is what you expect. I am interested in why we should expect this to be the case. We need some mechanism that connects the companies’ decisions to the resultant quality. E.g. In economics, one of the main mechanisms that increases quality of goods is selective elimination of poor competitors. I.e. The reason why TV shows are good today is that many of the inferior shows/studios were outcompeted by the superior ones.

Under your theory, it seems that once we accept that profit seeking leads to bad outcomes, then it is given that public subsidies would lead to better outcomes, even without connecting this funding to these better outcomes. If Goldman Sachs is not performing in the interest of the public good, should we expect them to start to do so if we simply give them public funds without any oversight on how they use it?

I haven’t personally read much from ProPublica, but it sounds encouraging indeed. I do think (as is largely the case with NPR as @l_boy noted above) that even as a non-profit, there is a connection between their outcomes and their funding. If ProPublica started to produce only biased articles that simply exerted tribal superiority, I think most of their funding would dry up. They have an interest in maintaining quality. I think that is a fantastic thing, and I am heartened to see their efforts. I just worry about the state getting involved in such efforts, as I agree with you that the state shouldn’t be involved in assessing journalistic quality, but I also think we shouldn’t expect great results without some mechanism to assess quality.

 

Wasn’t npr originally founded to get radio to unserved rural areas?

 

So why is the government funding tv and radio stations? I don’t have the answers. I listen to npr because it is sometimes commercial free news. I watch public television to watch all creatures and mystery and nova. I find it interesting that Sesame Street airs on hbo first before airing on public television.

 

I'm guessing this is sarcasm?

 

Of course

 

I haven't listened in years but when I did over the years, NPR seemed like a parody of itself. Not in a horrible way necessary but in terms of the obscurity of whatever little event or issue was being discussed. I always found it more amusing than overtly partisan.

 

I really enjoyed Red Green but I believe that was PBS, not npr.

 

Why should we expect it wouldn't be the case? Compare to public universities. Should we expect it wouldn't be the case that public universities will hire well-qualified and talented academics?

I'm also not saying that profit seeking leads to bad outcomes. I'm saying that profit seeking creates certain incentives that leave gaps that entities that aren't profit seeking are better suited to fill. Think about public vs. private education. Think about law enforcement vs. private security.

Couldn't these same criticisms be lodged at public universities or public education more broadly? How do we assess the quality of UF's education? Do we assess it based on whether we agree with the viewpoints taught at the university? We shouldn't. (Unfortunately, some do.)

I'm not saying there's no mechanism to assess quality. I'm saying that assessing quality shouldn't turn on their point of view.

 

Someone recently pointed out to me that I was watching Sesame Street, not NPR.
It’s a common mistake.

 

Somewhat related and I didn't want to start a new thread. Traveling overseas and I turned on cable tv for the first time in years. The German is way too fast for me but I found CNN and BBC.
CNN actually aired part of an interview with Marjorie T Greene and she didn't seem like an idiot. They didn't paint her in a bad light which I was expecting.
Still much preferred BBC which I read online at home.

 

Again, I don’t think we should have any particular expectation, but probably subpar is more likely than excellence just due to how hard it is to achieve excellence. As Richard Dawkins once wrote (paraphrasing), for however many ways there are of being alive, it is certain there are vastly more ways of being dead. In a random walk, the odds of landing in a sublime place must be low, as most places aren’t sublime.

Now I do believe that these hypothetical people who we are finding would want to make great journalism. Of course, this might actually be true of many of the worst journalists today. The problem is how.

Your reference to public universities is a good one. In fact, I think the problem there is even worse, as the ultimate outcomes of educational interventions are virtually impossible to measure. What parts of who you or I are today owe themselves to those semesters we spent at UF so long ago? Who could possibly say? There is no way that the people who make those university rankings can appreciate the actual goings on of the classrooms of those institutions and the impacts they have on those souls in the seats.

On the other hand, people can actually read most of what ProPublica produces, so I do think their journalism awards reflect the underlying reality of their work, at least roughly. Does this more or less public funding should go to media vs secondary education? There’s no answer to this. For me, funding should go to public goods that cannot be provided by private enterprise. The US military is clearly one such good. You or I can’t buy our own personal militaries. For media, I am not so sure. If ProPublica (or NYT or WSJ or BBC etc) is great, and you a regular person can see that, why can’t we trust you to consume their great coverage and therefore create a niche for more great media companies to emerge?

 

Your ridicule of private media is appreciated, even though I assume it was somewhat directed toward me, but it only takes on the easy part and ignores the hard part. Of course private media is going to be terrible in many ways, but what kind of media isn’t?

“One thing is clear. If we ensure that the only broadcast media are those that can draw government funding to approve the output, it’s sure to be more factually accurate.”

Equally easy target right? Economist Mike Munger uses an analogy of a pig beauty contest to illustrate this point. There are two finalist pigs. The judges see the first pig and exclaim, “This pig is ugly and filthy! The second pig wins!” Before we award it the blue ribbon, we have to actually look at the other pig.

 

I've had plenty enough to look at as to the other pig, especially recently, in which the right wing has discovered or or rediscovered the power of money to shape the perception of reality. All of these moves to defund conceptions of public media are simply attempts to ensure they can define what is truth for sheer illicit self-interest.

 

Here's the genetic heritage of the other pig
On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.[16][17] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step toward socialism.[16] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.[16] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry.[16]

The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)[16] to use their private charitable foundations − which did not have to report their political activities − to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.[16] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[18][19][20] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[21][22] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."[18] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.[23]

Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.

Lewis F. Powell Jr. - Wikipedia

 

Sorry. In my analogy, the other pig was the alternative to privately funded media, which I do agree can be a pretty ugly pig.

 

I don't see it as a question of trusting the consumer as much as there being value in having media sources that aren't chasing profits or as beholden to donors. Government funding does come with its own challenges and pressures, though. But I see a utility in it. When it comes to its online reporting, I think NPR adds value. I can't speak to radio or podcasts.

 

Sounds like an attempted intellectual coup indeed. Little doubt there are many other efforts like it occurring each year. The question becomes, what do we do about it?

To my lights, we’ve never bested James Madison’s answer to this question: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” He further counseled that “by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.” I am sure many people actually agree with the frightening goals you’ve quote above, but clearly many have the exact opposite desires as well. We will never be able to legislate away bad ideas, but through uploading values such as freedom of speech and press, I think we can make sure competing ideas are always with us. And then we have to trust our citizens to be able to discern among them.