[Question] How would public media outlets need to be governed to cover all political views?

[ChristianKl]

As one of their questions Reporters without Borders asks for their World Press Freedom Index among others:

Do public media outlets cover all political views?*

Does the law provide mechanisms to guarantee pluralism and editorial independence?*

Do public media outlets ever ignore sensitive information regarding the government or
administration that is covered by private media?*

Is the pluralism of opinions of people in the country reflected in the media?*

Part of the case of the EU against Hungary is that its press is largely government-controlled or controlled by supporters of the government. Voices critical of the government have a lower share of the public attention. Philanthropically funded journalism that intends to provide critical media gets attacked as being funded by Soros and intended to manipulate the Hungarian people.

COVID-19 showed that there are similar dynamics in the United States and other European states where voices that are critical of the regime have a hard time being published . The fighting critical content for being Russian disinformation and Hungarian strategy of fighting critical voices for being influenced by Soros follows similar dynamics where outside influence is overblown and the narrative allows for acting against critical voices.

While some national governments have state media, the EU currently doesn’t have its own media outlet. Given the EU perspective of the problems in Hungary, funding critical journalism would be a good intervention. If the EU would start its own media, there’s the question of media governance. How could EU-funded public media be governed so that it will represent voices from the full pluralism of opinions of people?

[Dagon]

I think it’s helpful to always remember that “governance” is primarily adversarial. It’s only necessary when some individuals and sub-groups don’t actually want to do the things the governing organization is demanding. As such, the motives are completely broken for a governing body to control the majority of press outlets.

The problem is, the motives are broken for ANY entity powerful enough to have a significant voice to control or provide primary information sources. As soon as it’s useful as journalism, it’s even more useful as propaganda and manipulation. This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend—no matter how cynical audiences become, they don’t actually make better decisions on how media adjusts their beliefs.

That’s my summary of 21st-century information dissemination: the goodheart cycle increased faster than the consumers could improve their epistemic hygiene, and there’s no way to fix it (short of making smarter humans, aka raising the sanity waterline, which is an even bigger unsolved problem).

[ChristianKl]

This is driven by consumers, with producers following rather than leading the trend

That’s an artifact of how the success of articles is measured. On LessWrong I can’t see my pageviews, so I have no way to goodhart on maximizing page views for my article.

You can easily set up a publically-funded media outlet where you write into the governing documents that no journalist or editor is allowed to view pageview data.

[Dagon]

Umm. I presume you have other feedback mechanisms to predict/​measure/​feel the impact of your writing here. More importantly, I don’t think LW-style writing is likely to be all that critical to public sentiment, and I don’t think it’s a good example of something that would benefit from government funding or oversight.

[ChristianKl]

LessWrong is well funded by donors. It’s not funded by the government but money is spent to create public good. When EA money funds media it has more specific goals than government funding has but it is an example of different goals.

It’s an example of how optimizing for page views isn’t everywhere. GiveWell also doesn’t optimize for page views. They optimize for donations (which also causes problem if you listen to Ben Hoffman).

Buzzfeed used to hire some investigative reporters and did not care about the page views of the resulting articles. They hired those investigative reporters to gain prestige and be seen as more serious.

I see no reason why the EU couldn’t pay journalists to do investigative journalism in Hungary without optimizing for page views.

Part of setting up governance is getting the incentives right and hopefully, the incentives will be different than the incentives of the current outlets.

[Vanilla_cabs]

The EU already dictates a large part of the policy of its states, and the official media in said states are already massively pro-EU. What makes you think an EU owned media would be a good idea to correct that in the first place?

[ChristianKl]

I believe that it’s worth employing more journalists than are currently employed. It’s generally useful if different journalistic outlets diversity of interests so that a journalist who wants to write a story can shop around for an outlet that wants to publish the story.

There’s a desire to do something about perceived totalitarianism in Hungary and Poland. Given the available tools, I believe that funding media in those countries is one of the better ways to handle it.

The EU funds lots of things that aren’t automatically pro-EU. I meet a woman employed at a NGO here in Berlin that was as far as public sources tell is at least partly funded by EU money who was an activist against free trade agreements.

Julia Reda used EU funding to run a liquid democracy conference a while back. Martin Sonneborn is paid by the EU and wrote a good analysis of the latest Assange court case.

The key question is how money gets distributed and whether you can find a way that the outlet is incentivized for diversity.

[Vanilla_cabs]

The diversity of outlets that you desire sounds to journalism what diversity of products is for markets generally. It is generally agreed that free markets are more efficient than centralized planning. Why not do the same for media? It’s not like there’s a lack of independent or outsider funded media trying to survive while providing a different angle. But they’re not the targets of government funding. I don’t see how more funding could make it easier for those dissenting media to compete.

[ChristianKl]

Journalism can have different goals, one is about making money by giving readers what they want. One is about creating public good. Another is about engaging in propaganda and getting paid either directly (CNN’s Saudi Arabia coverage is likely in that class) or the media owner is paid indirectly by getting favorable government contracts (which seems to be how it works in Hungary).

There are plenty of independent media that tell you about Bill Gates wanting to microchip everyone but there are few independent media organs that provide substantial criticism.

If you want to see how such criticism looks like Charity’s pharma investments raise questions around transparency and accountability published by the BMJ is a good article.

The Gates Foundation happens to give money to most outlets that do substantial investigative reporting, so there are few places where such an article could be both published and the author paid for the reporting work.

The Wellcome Trust is similar even when it doesn’t fund media outlets the same way that the Gates Foundation does. It pushed for lab leak censorship in the beginning and likely influenced other policy as well. It made gigantic profits from the pandemic.

Having a good investigative journalist trying to make sense of how those profits were made and provide transparency would be very useful but we don’t have anyone in our media landscape who pays for that investigative journalism.

[Viliam]

COVID-19 showed that there are similar dynamics in the United States and other European states where voices that are critical of the regime have a hard time being published . The fighting critical content for being Russian disinformation and Hungarian strategy of fighting critical voices for being influenced by Soros follows similar dynamics where outside influence is overblown and the narrative allows for acting against critical voices.

And yet somehow everyone in USA and EU has heard about how COVID-19 is made up and vaccines are dangerous. Is the Hungarian strategy similarly ineffective?

[ChristianKl]

I would expect that most people in Hungary have heard some low-quality critics of Hungarian policy that’s at the quality level of “COVID-19 is made up”. Do you think that isn’t the case? I don’t know any Hungarian natives to explain to me in detail how things play out there.

[Viliam]

No idea. But yeah, “low-quality criticism” sounds plausible.

[Pattern]

How would public media outlets need to be governed to cover all political views?

This is an interesting question.

How could EU-funded public media be governed so that it will represent voices from the full pluralism of opinions of people?

Oh, public. Hm. How do libraries stay neutral?

[Dagon]

How do libraries stay neutral?

They don’t—libraries are notoriously biased in the material they carry. Fortunately, they’re local, so those biases tend to match their constituencies, though you can find many counterexamples with a cursory search for censorship outrage.

It’s a good dimension to explore, though—for the problem hinted at in the question (some news/​opinion perspectives not being available in many jurisdictions), is it a question of production, or of distribution, or something else that’s the limiting factor?

[Pattern]

It’s also relevant when libraries keep copies of stuff, like newspapers. (If I disagreed with that as a solution, it might have less to do with the choice of newspapers, and more with ‘is this just physical media?’ At the same time, it can be hard to tell the size of a digital collection. The presence or absence isn’t clear at a glance.)

Now I’m wondering how this compares to stuff like Library Genesis.