Indiana to launch state-run news source to compete with mainstream media

[downtown]

How can you know? If it's crap no one will read it and it will indeed be ineffective, which is obviously neither in the interest of the editorial team nor in the interest of those funding it. The audience reception remains the key.

I hardly find this more reprehensible than a private operator such as Ruppert Murdoch who assumes there is a political agenda behind his media empire. That empire is only meaningful because of the audience which is touched by it. If tomorrow people will consider it to be only junk and will stop reading it, then it would lose all of its power. Hence the same incitement to publish something judged credible/interesting to at least a certain audience.

Oh, as a media professional, I could not disagree with this more. The free market mechanism is absolutely terrible at slowing or preventing the publishing of "crap". Readers don't do a very good job at all at punishing outlets who publish horribly slanted, incorrect or sloppy stories, especially for political news. They are punished for being boring, or for having poor technical platforms, or not telling people what they want to read...but not for being wrong or slanted.

The target audience (and again, Indiana killed this project) for these releases are small newspapers in Indiana, many of which are running skeleton crews after layoffs. Even the most craven small town publisher wouldn't run a press release verbatim, but if it was packaged "like" an AP story, they would...and if the Gov's office decided to only publish executive news from their own outlet, rather than talking to other reporters, then the Gov's official line becomes even more important. If you don't have the money to publish your own stories (or to pay for a wire service fee), you're going to take what the state gives you, even if it's "crap".

Most states have some sort of news outlet. Indiana actually has one already, that publishes agricultural news. I think it's mostly run out of Purdue University, and outside of the direct report of the Executive branch. The Gov's office can't march down and change an NPR broadcast, or a Purdue wire service...but having a news wire service run directly out of the Governor's office that goes to newspapers *would* be pretty unprecedented in America.

Thankfully, the project was killed. If nothing else, yeah, it also a waste of money.

 

[Marla_Singer]

@Downtown:
What troubles me is that you seem to consider that, in a free press society, a governement-funded media publication would necessarily be "propaganda", "boring" and "money wasted". You have no hard evidence for that. This is only largely based on your very own prejudices.

People in this thread mentionned CBC and BBC as quality news providers. But if they are as such, it's because they are in competition with other medias and thus pressured to positively distinguish themselves in order to attract the audience towards them.

If CBC and BBC were monopolies, then they would probably be "propaganda" and "boring". And quite frankly, in a country such as the US where the most popular news channel is Fox News, I'm skeptical a ban in public fundings is that much a guarantee against crap news.

Hence why I believe that what is key is the freedom of press in general, not whether or not governement funds some of them.

 

[Marla_Singer]

And for the matter, I voted "yes" to your poll essentially because I disliked your angle which is preventing any real debate on the question.

You somehow enforce your opinion that governement-funded media outlets are evil and unnecessary in their very nature, which is an idea I find totally silly.

 

[classical_hero]

Not like NBC tells the truth.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

People in this thread mentionned CBC and BBC as quality news providers. But if they are as such, it's because they are in competition with other medias and thus pressured to positively distinguish themselves in order to attract the audience towards them.

The entire point of public networks these days is that they are not pressured to attract audience towards them.
And if they give in to that pressure nevertheless, content never gets better.
Case in point: German public television after they had to compete against private networks.
Result?
Race to the bottom.

edit: I think my point is the following: high-quality news / information is essentially a fairly trivial affair IMO. What I mean by that is that it is a fairly tangible and solid goal which everyone can aim at. If a public news agency truly tries to pursue that goal the least it needs is private competition to go for it. It just needs funding.
Though in practice this goal may be problematic to guarantee and private competition can be a sort of safe-guard against bad abuses of public media. But it by no means will guarantee its high quality. Only internal policy will do that.

 

[luiz]

If there are to be public media outlets they should stick to reporting statistics and such, and be completely devoid of commentary and opinion. They should be boring and strictly informative and basically just release important information that might otherwise not be properly covered by other outlets.

Maybe some countries are mature enough to have a BBC (and that's debatable), most aren't. See Venezuela's TeleSur (aka the Pravda of the South) or Brazil's TV Brasil (aka Lula News).

 

[downtown]

@Downtown:
What troubles me is that you seem to consider that, in a free press society, a governement-funded media publication would necessarily be "propaganda", "boring" and "money wasted". You have no hard evidence for that. This is only largely based on your very own prejudices.

People in this thread mentionned CBC and BBC as quality news providers. But if they are as such, it's because they are in competition with other medias and thus pressured to positively distinguish themselves in order to attract the audience towards them.

If CBC and BBC were monopolies, then they would probably be "propaganda" and "boring". And quite frankly, in a country such as the US where the most popular news channel is Fox News, I'm skeptical a ban in public fundings is that much a guarantee against crap news.

Hence why I believe that what is key is the freedom of press in general, not whether or not governement funds some of them.

Oh no, I don't think that simply being government funded, a news outlet becomes propaganda. On the contrary, I even mentioned a specific example in Indiana where it isn't, since the state runs an agricultural news outlet. The United States has a rich history of public broadcasting over radio and TV (PBS and NPR) that have produced lots of informative and entertaining productions. Only the most hardened political conservative, I think, would wholesale accuse NPR of being some sort of propaganda arm.

My objection here comes not with the fact that they are government funded. It's who in the government controls that media. The discarded proposal was for a media outlet controlled by, and reporting directly to, the Executive Branch of Indiana. NPR, or other publicly funded media outlets have editorial independence from the actual mechanisms of government. This would not.

That leaves us with a Conservative Governor, in a Conservative state, wanting to establish a wire service that his office specifically controls, whose target market are newspapers in small, rural areas with conservative audiences, while using state funds. Yes, that seems very suspicious to me.

If Indiana's government felt like affairs of the state were not getting enough media coverage, and wanted to establish their own version of the BBC or something, that would be another thing altogether (although also probably a waste of money, since it would be cheaper to just expand NPR) but then they would need to take steps to make sure that the Governor couldn't wholesale fire that guy because he didn't like what they were saying. That wasn't the case in this proposal.

 

[Hygro]

And that concludes another thrilling debate of "I made generalizations out of something specific and took umbrage."

 

[Arwon]

Why would they need a state-run wire service to get their press releases out there. Wouldn't, you know, their press releases do that?

 

[amadeus]

I think it's a fantastic idea. Now we can have a supplement for people who have already graduated from the public school system.

 

[Cutlass]

But why should a right-wing politician be afraid of free market?

They utterly hate and fear a 'free' market. To them control is everything. Especially over markets.

 

[plarq]

They utterly hate and fear a 'free' market. To them control is everything. Especially over markets.

I was sarcastic after Luiz's post against Latin American left-wingers.