As for other public broadcasters, in e.g. Finland Yle is trusted by 82%, by far the highest for any media.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...
Nearly everyone accepts that taxation is justified for some cases where you can't really avoid benefiting from the expenditure, the textbook example being public goods like defense (you can't opt-out of benefiting from the defeat of an invading army) or a lighthouse (you can't stop a sailor who didn't pay from seeing it).
And post-communism most people accept that taxation is not justified for many other cases, for example, using tax money to gift the president a private golf club would not be moral (he can buy golfing time with his salary or prior wealth). The benefit only accrues to the user in that case, and they can easily pay for it themselves.
In the past you could argue that state media was more like a lighthouse, because signals were broadcast from towers unencrypted and there was no way to restrict reception to people who paid. So, pass a tax and make everyone pay if they own any kind of receiving device at all.
But technological progress has changed everything. It's now easy to restrict broadcasts to only people who paid for them. TV/radio is no longer like a lighthouse, it's now more like a magazine and therefore it's immoral to tax fund them because they're not public goods anymore. You wouldn't be happy to find the government had forcibly subscribed you to the Wall Street Journal, right? You'd point out that people who want to read it can just buy a copy themselves. Same thing for TV/radio.
Again, to see this, just consider how you'd feel if FOX News launched a German version and you were forced to pay for that against your will. Would you find that moral? Don't try and claim subjective quality judgements make a difference; obviously plenty of people think FOX News is high quality, that's why they watch it.
Okay, but Fox News is obviously fundamentally different because it's a private entertainment program. That's why it's bought out and influenced by the ultra-wealthy. It's a propaganda program for capitalists. You can't just say that's "the same" as a neutrally-funded public program.
You can't "sell", so to speak, public services. That's why republican generally oppose it - they can't give a slice to their cronies so they don't want it. The problem with things like SS, which the right has attacked and attempted to dismantle the second it was written into law, isn't that it's "unfair", it's that it's not private. If you actually look at the proposals for dismantling SS, they all involve privatizing it, aka stealing it and handing out slices to their cronies.
Things like PBS and NPR getting public funds and being allowed to exist is a problem to the right because it means it can't be bought and controlled like Huff Post or Fox can.
Nobody actually thinks Fox is high quality. That's not why they watch it. They just perceive other news to be just as bad, and it's cathartic to hear their own lies screamed back at them.
No, that's not my argument.
My argument is that public and private media have different incentive structures so you can't just compare them like that.
And, in addition, the right hates anything public. Of course they want to dismantle public media, because that's what they do. They want to dismantle public schools too, and social security. Because then they, and their friends, can get their slice. The problem with public programs is that rich can't buy them.
And this isn't an unfair characterization of the right, this is their explicit goals. Again, with SS, the second it was made into law it was under attack by the right. They'll lie to you and say "it's insolvent! It doesn't work! We need to privatize it... if me and my cronies control it, then it would be much better!" But of course, what happens is they sell it off, you don't get your retirement, and the money gets stolen. They know that, that's why they want to do it.
> FOX isn't a private entertainment programme, it's a channel that's focused exclusively on news and current affairs.
See, this makes me think you're trolling. Come on now.
A core reason for having a robust public broadcasting system is that it lifts the quality of the entire information ecosystem.
Saying this as a Norwegian. I happily pay around 200/300 dollars a year for it out of my taxes.
You'll find broad/majority support for state broadcasters in Northern Europe. The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait. Doubly so in small countries with just a few million citizens.
Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society. Some would say paywalling a baseline of local knowledge constricts civic participation and is immoral. But that's a lame value judgement and should rightfully be dismissed.
> The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait
State media is much more than just news, so are you agreeing at least that all of the non-news production should be defunded?
But, of course it's viable to do for-profit news. There are plenty of successful private news companies out there that aren't niche. You are welcome to define all news you dislike as ragebait but that's clearly not an argument, it's just a "lame value judgement".
> Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society
It's not free and it's not non-commercial. People are paid to produce it via ordinary commercial contracts, and then people are forced to buy it. Nor is it a critical part of society. Society did just fine before state media was a thing. Meanwhile the injustice upon innocent people remains, and the existence of it harms society itself greatly via other paths as well.
> Meanwhile the injustice upon innocent people remains, and the existence of it harms society itself greatly via other paths as well.
Your hyperbole is exasperating. I'll pass.
Such organizations are important for the voting public to remain informed and thus elect with an informed choice.
... It would also not surprise me if ~25-35% of the US population 'did not trust PBS / NPR' because they didn't like what they heard and thus preferred to disbelieve the sources.
It wasn't always quite that bad, it used to be the same stuff repeated for people in venues like lounges at airports or restaurants that wanted to cater to business crowds.
Then around 2001 there was that terrorist attack on the US ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks ). Networks did 24/7 'news' coverage; ever more of a spectacle as time dragged on. In recollection their need for attention, to excite and draw in eyeballs, probably helped with the implicit goal of 'terrorism' to instill terror.
Rather than behaving as rational adults, digesting a negative event, reflecting on what could be done differently ( do not negotiate with terrorists, do not remain passive sheep on an airplane, and FFS lock the cockpit doors ); everyone 'blinked' and caved. Freedoms and liberty were traded for news as entertainment, security theater, and excuses to enter wars 'on terrorism' with unclear goals and objectives.
The 'Internet' probably didn't help in offering a cheaper and supposedly 'better targeted' venue for ads. Other than informative ads (X exists, it can do Y), I find the entertainment focus to be intellectual junk food and noise against the signal. It would probably be a public good if that were heavily regulated.
Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
Nonetheless, there's no reason not to go all the way. There should not be a TV license, let alone one enforced by criminal law. Regular subscription and video scrambling systems are enough and have been for years.
The BBC is very strongly left wing and even its own employees recognize that. Look at the positions they take on a wide range of issues and you'll find they're all Labour positions or to the left of Labour.
I can't find any evidence of BBC employees calling it "far left", all I find when searching for that is right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough as well as some more "scientific" analysis that seemed to show it having a right wing bias. Most news bias raters put BBC as centre or centre left (it probably is centre left by US standards).
Looking at the top 3 stories now, two don't have any obvious political slant, Australian elections and arrest of terrorism suspects, whereas the 3rd is about local elections and starts with lots of quotes from Reform UK about how well they're doing. Perfect opportunity for a far left org to insert criticism, downplay, or just not report on them, but seems like pretty straight down the middle reporting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881222
But as you just discovered, there are endless examples.
Dismissing criticism of BBC bias as "right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough" is almost tautological: yes, that's what bias looks like, the people it's biased against will disagree with them a lot. Not because they're just wrong and the BBC is just right, but because the BBC fires right wing journalists and hires/promotes left wing journalists who then tell themselves that left wing beliefs are True and right wing beliefs are False and thus the news should automatically be left wing. It has been like this for years.
A few more simple examples of institutionalized bias:
1. During Brexit Nick Robinson wrote an article saying the Today programme no longer has any obligation to balance its coverage of Remain vs Leave; i.e. stating in public writing that the BBC is biased.
2. Many on the right don't believe climatology is scientific or accurate, but the BBC has a written policy of refusing to interview or platform such views. They just systematically forbid it and have done for decades. They only report the left's view that there is a crisis. That's political bias.
3. The BBC broadcast a documentary about Palestine in which the child narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official.
4. BBC on the US election: "On the campaign trail, Donald Trump drove his message of fear all the way to the White House but it was based on a misconception. Rather than an invasion, America has long been dependent on the work of these migrants in agriculture and manufacturing, making them both essential and dispensable…For his opponents these feel like dizzying and dark times."
Of course if they discover they have a journalist who criticizes the left they fire him immediately citing neutrality (see Chris Middleton).
All this makes a mockery of the concept of public service broadcasting. The BBC is gonna die, it's inevitable, and when it does, it will be because its staff relentlessly abused the public for decades by exploiting the tax based nature of its service.
Just for the record in case someone stumbles across this in future. Chris Middleton worked freelance for the BBC and was let go for making a parody song criticising the winter fuel payment cuts. The figure criticised is ostensibly left wing, but repeatedly criticised for being too centrist/right wing compared to where Labour usually stand and his previously stated position. That's what happened here, the person fired was criticising him from the left, i.e. their political stance was too left wing for the BBC (or maybe the BBC doesn't allow strong political stances in any direction).
"Reform UK's Andrea Jenkyns is the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, marking a return to politics for the former Gregg's worker and Miss UK finalist"
She's 50 but the BBC's audience hears about what she did as a teenage girl. It's not an isolated incident. Nobody serious tries to argue the BBC is neutral, fair or objective anymore. Reform is the highest polling party in Britain, it's awful to make all those voters pay money to an organization that openly hates them.
> Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening!
Yes they did:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370983289112 "Stock markets crashing in response to tariff announcement"
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/17/npr_ceo_k...
Right?
- You claimed Fox never reported on the stock market crash, something easily disproved with a five second web search.
- You claimed having two sources yields 99% accuracy, a made up number.
- You claimed NPR, BBC and PBS have to show their sources, although they regularly report single-sourced or anonymously sourced stories.
- You claim you can hear a falsehood within one second of turning on Fox.
You're in the habit of routinely inventing numbers whilst criticizing others for perceived failures to be accurate. Given you're talking about the importance of an informed populace that's ironic and embarrassing.
Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to.
There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.