Re:Journalism Needs Government Help
by bobbyi on Tuesday July 13, 2010 @09:30PM
(#1513302)
The conflicts of interest for a corporate-owned news outlet are worse than those for a news source that receives some government support.
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How's that?
Each country has millions of sources of private-sector income, but only one government. There's the occasional potential for conflict of interest when a news outlet has to report on the doings of its own parent company, but news stories about news companies are quite rare and news stories about the Government happen every day.
That's because news companies are beholden to their advertisers rather than their readership. It's something you can see in (for example) the video games industry where the major magazines often handed out curiously high review scores to games coming from publishers that bought lots of advertising.
Another example would be newspapers which rely upon real estate advertisements for a large portion of their revenue; you won't see an article that's critical of the real estate industry in these papers.