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A comment on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home. Parent comment

Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by exceptione on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:11AM (#46602016) 

  > the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
Media are the fourth estate. As such they are indispensable in a democratic state based on the rule of law.

How to kill it:

1. abolish the fairness doctrine. Selling fakes and lies = big profit. => fox news e.a.

2. Let moneyed interests run the show. Control the narratives => poor people voting for the billionaire interests at their own detriment

  > I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this.
I am not sure if it is still possible to mention public broadcasting because of dominant narratives ("public service bad, billionaire company good")¹, but left alone they will do a very good job usually.

1) As an exercise, who sponsors this narrative?

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Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by snarf21 on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:16AM (#46602080)
I fear that in the last decade, even the PBSs of the world have pulled back. They still create content but they have been very loathe to come out against any interest that the billionaire philanthropists might object to.
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Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by exceptione on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:21AM (#46602134)
I don't know too much about PBS specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not immune to Elite Capture¹

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture

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Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by pksebben on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:59AM (#46602730)
woof, that article. The examples section doesn't contain a single concrete example and after reading the whole thing I can't tell whether they're talking about academics publishing news articles or congress' revolving door. Wikipedia has been struggling lately. Maybe that's what they're talking about.
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Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by exceptione on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @12:24PM (#46604263)
effort.

"Andersen et al. 2022 found that about 7.5 percent of foreign aid is diverted by elites." etc

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Re:Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home by stackbutterflow on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @02:07PM (#46606122)
One problem is the billionaires themselves. It's too much power and influence in the hand of a single person. They can fun newspapers at loss and have them spread any kind of lies or narrowly biased news for decades.

Billionaires would be less of a problem in a world where we'd all be multi millionaires.

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