Public funding is not the solution. Too many conflicts of interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds them?

Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...

You may say that things won't go that way but since there is no way to check then we need to rely on trust and the trust in the mainstream media for good or bad reasons has plummeted in last decade.

And don't take this comment as an endorsement of paid news media, they have the same exact problems.

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afavour 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...

This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. It is possible to do, though given the current state of US politics it doesn’t seem remotely likely.

	▲	rdm_blackhole 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. That is a very nice solution but it doesnt work in practice. If the budgets are decided by the government then there is always the possibility that neutrality on some subjects may be missing or that some amount of pressure will be applied in order to get some stories buried or on the contrary exacerbated. Since there is no way to know which is which then how can you trust it? Personally I don't.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Currently the most succesful method of assaulting the "marketplace of ideas" is by overwhelming channels with content. Most of our guard rails and fears were around government over reach, not through the attrition of attention and via the production of overhwelming amounts of content.

As a result, more competition (more speech) has been defanged as a solution.

Producing Local news is never going to be more interesting and attention grabbing, and thus revenue generating, than pure dopamine stimulation.

To keep local news alive, it needs money.

A public news option may seem sub ideal, but the option is on the table because the other avenues have been destroyed. Hell - even news itself is losing. The NYT is now dependent on video game revenue to keep itself afloat.

The common ground of the eralier information ecosystem was a result of chance. New factors are at play, and if we want it to survive, then we need to address the revenue issue, some how.