Old friend Kevin McLeod discusses current trends and what they portend (full post follows from FB):
I’m starting to see more news sources enforcing paywalls. There are efforts like Texture that offer a subscription deal with all you can eat access to their sources, and they have many. Access to The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, could conceivably become a feature of Amazon Prime membership. I’m fine with paying for access to quality news sources – we did that daily in the print news era.
But paying fails to solve another problem; paywalls break sharing. I can’t share paywalled news sources in social media because it automatically cuts off people who don’t subscribe to that source. I’m afraid we’re entering an era where only those who can afford it will have current events literacy, and those who can’t will be saturated with trash sources like Fox.
Good journalism costs money. I don’t want to see reliable sources dry up and blow away. But I also don’t want to see society become further polarized and segregated than it already is. If income determines quality of access to information it will lock in existing inequalities.
Maybe it’s time we considered the BBC’s funding model. Add a very small tax to bandwidth, something comparable to the universal service fee applied to phone bills, and use that to fund a public corporation that supports news reporting. Subcontract specialty reporting on complex topics – finance, education, global conflicts. Create a strong firewall against oligarchic and political interference in coverage. Get back to reporting metrics on the economy using plain language, realistic figures and formulas.
Are there better ideas? Main thing is, let’s not limit ourselves to doing things as they’re done now. Maybe there are fair and effective solutions that don’t require funnelling money to a handful of people running news conglomerates.
While I recognize the problem, I should like to point out that this is not truly a new problem. Prior to the advent of cable television, quality news came in two forms: print and broadcast, where the latter consisted of radio and television. The former category generally charged for their service, although the charge was not onerous for folks.
When cable came around, now one needed both a television and a cable subscription, which generally transformed it into a third category, because the charge covered all the channels. The broadcast category paid for itself through ads. While ads were also an important part of the print category, they also charged readers for the right to read their papers.
The supposed charms of cable were two-fold:
- No commercials. That’s right, that was one of the come-ons I vividly recall, as I was growing up when cable first became available. One of my dislikes of cable these days? commercials.
- Far more choices. Of course, more choices sounds like a consumer’s dream, but there’s a hidden implication here concerning the competitors in broadcast. Those competitor face a physical limitation more severe than the cable competition because the electro-magnetic spectrum can only support so many channels. Oh, we can be clever about it, and have been, but there are physical limitations. This has resulted in the government stepping in, over the years, to regulate who can use what where, as well as the content of those channels. For example, the Fairness Doctrine, since rescinded, required broadcasters of political (or controversial) content to also broadcast opposing content. (This may explain why I once ran across Lyndon LaRouche giving a political speech on broadcast TV. Just listening to him made my stomach churn. An early purveyor of national division, I suspect.)
I think Kevin’s worry, while admirable, is perhaps a little off the mark. There are sources of inexpensive, even free news. The real question is whether they are quality sources. Fox News may make itself easily available, but as long time readers know, their coverage of critical issues is flawed – as measured by conservative critics of the current radical GOP.
And I do have to wonder if government funding of news gathering is a wise thought. Granted, the BBC seems to do a fine job, but I’ve never really studied them, nor read relevant studies (which, if I’m honest, is a far more likely activity I would undertake). And how does the BBC funding differ from that of NPR or PBS? (Yes, I send money to our local public news organization, Minnesota Public Radio, since I listen to them on the radio.) Frankly, a little competition is a good thing, if the proper goals are recognized and guide the development of the news organizations. That is, profit, while necessary in most cases, is not the measurement of greatness that most corporate managers would like to think. The goal must be consistent excellence in the news gathering and communication efforts, with aggressive neutrality and fact-checking – we needn’t give credence to Flat-Earthers, amusing as they can be, just as Creationists should also be ignored, no matter how outraged they might be at relegation to the fringe areas of society.
So I think it’s not the access, but the quality of the organization, which is at question here.
