Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded

Only about 15% of PBS and 1% of NPR come from federal funding. The vast majority of both come directly from community, non-profit, and corporate support. The Voice of America is the only state funded media.

There is a separate discussion about whether or not that is actually good for a society, or just adds a path for state-influenced propaganda.

One of the major problems with PBS and NPR is they aren't publicly funded enough so they have to get a lot of funding from billionaires' foundations.

¿por qué no los dos?

Elaborate, friend

OIL and coal. Anything and everything oil related should absolutely not be allowed to be private or for-profit under any circumstances. I will take this to the grave for two simplified reasons:

1. Oil, fuel and all related is too ingrained into our society that you can't escape it. Should not be profit driven.
2. It's catastrophic effect on our habitat. Pollution, global warming, etc.

Thank god there are literally no possible consequences to the government running the entire economy.

Amen

Amen

Or public relations and marketing.

That's why you have multiple outlets within a public system, governed by a public institution chosen by those outlets instead of any government. Subsidize those outlets by subscribers regardless of political affiliation.

There are examples of this system or systems like it working, more or less, in various liberal democracies across the globe. And with across the globe I mean mainly within Europe.

Japan has a fee on any device capable of receiving a television signal (cost varies based on capabilities) used to fund the NHK and one reason was to keep the government influence out. Today, it still often has huge bias and avoids certain reporting and tows government lines. Sometimes translations over English or other languages completely changes what the people are really saying. NHK does produce some good programming, but they also are definitely up the ruling party's ass.

It can be, and it's a valid point. But some countries do publicly fund their government broadcaster and have safeguards in place to maintain journalistic integrity. It can be done properly.

Australia is one: https://about.abc.net.au/who-we-are/the-abc-board/. The ABC regularly has fact checking articles for politicians on all sides and has exposed many a government scandal over the years.

My country has a public broadcaster called NRK, which is funded by taxes paid by the people. By law they are funded by the public, but they have full editorial freedom (NRK-plaque) and they got a special board made up by members of the public to handle complaints and ethical issues. They are governed by Medietilsynet (eng.: The Norwegian Media Authority), and have a special responsibility to support democracy and public knowledge.

NRK digs up dirt on and criticises members of Parliament (Storting), Parliament itself and the different ministries.

Preach

im assuming whatever conservative parties are there

Yes, it's important to believe nothing and criticize everything. But in this day in age, I'd rather trust the publicly funded stuff than the privately funded media, due to the amount of scrutiny

For some reason state run media = bad, but media run by oligarchs who have proven themselves to be complete dickheads on multiple occasions = totally fine.

In india we have publicly funded news but most people say they are propaganda machinery for govt !

Not only that, it also puts control of the state media (or anyway, strong influence) in the hands of fuckwits like Trump.

Rightly so. Publicly funded media is basically a propaganda outlet.

let them jump up and down like the chimps they are

That’s what she said.

if that funding were guaranteed and beyond the influence of those government officials, then they wouldn’t have any fear of revenge-based budget cuts.

this could be accomplished by putting control of the funding into the hands of multiple levels of committee oversight so that no one person or even a single committee could threaten it.

Publicly funded doesn't mean government controlled, PBS and NPR only get about 10% of their budgets from the government. Most of it comes from Viewers like You! (Donations)

No - if you make the funding independent from taxes then it doesn't have to be in favour of the government.

The German publicly funded journalism is a mandatory payment by everyone unrelated to their taxes (which makes it a favourite target for right wing people claiming it's unfair because it's too liberal for their taste when it's literally the definition of fact and science based centrist reporting)

The are often critical with the government and not propaganda at all.

So libraries are propaganda stores?

In Europe, we have public services news organizations, that are still independent. While not perfect, they're more independent from their state than most newspapers are from their shareholders. You can read more about Arte, the European public service channel dedicated to culture