<story><title>Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals</title><url>http://fair.org/home/worlds-richest-person-escapes-scrutiny-from-his-own-paper-and-its-rivals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.</text></item><item><author>RodericDay</author><text>&amp;gt; America is owed robust news organizations&lt;p&gt;Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.&lt;p&gt;However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via &amp;quot;the free market&amp;quot;, and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;ll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.</text></item><item><author>x0x0</author><text>It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don&amp;#x27;t pay for do or don&amp;#x27;t do.  Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water.  The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.&lt;p&gt;The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barrkel</author><text>This is an American canard, but it&amp;#x27;s not really true. Usually, public broadcasting reflects the consensus of where the middle is, with a slant towards social justice, almost unavoidable when criticizing public policy - usually stories are about something the government isn&amp;#x27;t doing, or is doing wrong, rather than shouldn&amp;#x27;t be doing.&lt;p&gt;If a public broadcaster publishes plainly biased stories, independent media can lambast them. But the shaming only has effect if the independent media is itself taken seriously; so the critique has to come from the middle ground.&lt;p&gt;What you won&amp;#x27;t get from publicly funded news is a rounded perspective on what opposing camps think. The extremes are lopped off; you won&amp;#x27;t get small government conservative ideology, and you won&amp;#x27;t get communist ideology. Being anodyne and factual is the best defense against criticism from both independent media and political sources.&lt;p&gt;If one&amp;#x27;s own position is significantly to one side of the political spectrum, naturally the middle looks like it&amp;#x27;s on the other side.</text></comment>
<story><title>Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals</title><url>http://fair.org/home/worlds-richest-person-escapes-scrutiny-from-his-own-paper-and-its-rivals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.</text></item><item><author>RodericDay</author><text>&amp;gt; America is owed robust news organizations&lt;p&gt;Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.&lt;p&gt;However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via &amp;quot;the free market&amp;quot;, and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;ll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.</text></item><item><author>x0x0</author><text>It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don&amp;#x27;t pay for do or don&amp;#x27;t do.  Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water.  The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.&lt;p&gt;The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>halter73</author><text>I think you&amp;#x27;re misreading the parent comment. They&amp;#x27;re not advocating for tax funded news organizations, but instead for a stronger social safety net. They&amp;#x27;re  theorizing that this would enable people to pursue journalism without fear of losing their livelihoods because of struggles in that market sector.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.</text></comment>