Media Mirrors

Here is an interesting discussion with Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies with a sociologist, Dr. Harald Welzer, and a data scientist, Leo Keller, who collaborated to study the difference between (A) official published accounts, and (B) public opinion. No surprises official accounts diverge from public opinion. This could be good and bad. Public opinion can be false, or public opinion gained through informal social communication unfiltered by mainstream media can in some cases be more accurate.

One issue briefly addressed is to what extent mass media has a responsibility to report public opinion as a counter to official narratives? It is an important question that media organizations are probably not asking.

Role of Media as a Mirror

At one point Pascal raised the question of the proper role of the media. I know he was partly framing the question for provocation, but I felt I had to post a reply:

@20:20 that’s a bit dumb Pascal? Media should be a mirror reflecting our society. The issue is when is public opinion being reported and when is institutional or lobbyist or other vested interest opinion being reported. The media has to apply filters, they cannot avoid it, since print/broadcast space is finite. The point of ethical journalism is to clearly lead with whose opinion is being reported, and then critically comment upon how likely the statements are to be true. All too often official narratives are peddled out as “the facts”. Even if government statements are statistically more factual than public opinion, an ethical journalist does not ever assume that is so for any particular official statement.

Social Sphere Bubbles

Around 26 minutes into the episode Leo Keller gives his opinion that social bubbles are no worse today than in the pre-Internet past.

This is reminiscent of other phenomena in healthcare and medicine, where apparent rises in certain mental illnesses or other afflictions can be seen in data, and yet these can often be a mirage introduced by simply more accurate diagnostics and greater understanding of mental health conditions.

But there also appears to be a conservative or establishment reaction.

Because the Internet freed up a lot of opinion to wider circulation, the mass media corporations have sought to try to re-assert their dominance. I think this should back-fire in the long run, and more or less prove that a corporate media model is undesirable, and even unsustainable. A for-profit motive will always attract specific partisan interest groups, and so cannot long term function as a trusted source of news, at least in a generic example.

If a for-profit news outlet can function with an entirely humanitarian motive, then good for them. But this is going to be rare, I suspect. More often I suspect the tendency of private for-profit media will be towards enshittification or platform decay. (A good future topic for anyone desiring to appear in the Annals of Improbable Research . Although I would hope it would be taken seriously.)

Failure of Commercial Media

The model of commercial media is failing us. If the motive to report is to seek sales, the journalism is instantly corrupted and untrustworthy. How do we take the paycheck off the table for journalism then… is the better question no one is asking. The principle is to make accurate reporting on socially relevant topics the motive. This demands journalistic peer pressure, as in any social grouping. Journalists need a code of conduct, standards, and the power to vote-up good journalism and vote-down bad journalism. If they do this job, they can be legitimately paid salary by the State, always and without question — the State issues currency by fiat, it does not get Its own currency form the “tax payer” or by selling bonds. Good journalists who have the trust of their peers can temporarily act on councils to enforce the standards and code of conduct and up/down voting, to ensure integrity of public media. The political partisans should have no seat at this table, and politicians only need play the role of funding approval for such systems, in the public interest, for public purpose.

That’s nearly all I wanted to write about for now on this topic. The means to create a public media that serves public purpose is entirely within our grasp. But only the knowledge of MMT will show the public that their “tax dollars”" are not needed to fund such public goods, and that will licence greater political support for public media with high standards.

In the past the “tax payer funded” myth has been an impediemnt to acheiving a decent society partly becasue the means to ensure and enforce jouralistic integrity is seeen as yet another drain on the tax payer. That’s besides the desire to even have a p[ublic media institution in the first p[ace.

The issue is, whenever we desire a public good service, how can we ensure it does not get politicized?

One response to this is do you honestly think any other company is not already politicized? DO you really think private media cartels are not already highly politically partisan?

So wake the F up!!!

We can have a decent honest public media service, fully funded, without any “tax payer dollars”. Here “fully funded” means employing all available journalistic and media content creation resources for public purpose, it does not refer to “finding the money”. Finding the money is never a problem.

Also, politicization is not a problem either, since journalism is highly political, in a good way! It serves a public governance purpose, it is informative, it should reflect the world.

The problem is getting partisan politics out of the public media, and making sure the journalists do not succumb to groupthink. That is a perennial struggle. I do not see any perfect solution, unless you want to trust AI Bots to do all the public journalism, but then the Bots are biased by whoever writes their algorithms, so that is not perfect either. The sane option is to improve our education systems, train journalists spiritually, to be ethical above all else, and to allow journalists to hold each other to account, by motivating them with a desire to seek truth, not a desire for a paycheck. The paycheck should be automatic, so entirely removed from discussion.

Such systems take time to mature, and need constant vigilance. If you ask for a perfect media system you are away with the fairies, there is no such thing, since no one is perfectly ethical, and no one is free from bias and prejudice. But it is always possible to work hard towards achieving perfections. That work is what it means to be a spiritual being. Not to necessarily be perfect, since that’s impossible, but to work hard towards greater perfection.

Even if today you are really terrible at your job, if you can make progress in perfection then you are doing something good.

Related is the thorny issue of who or what decides what is “The Good”? What is “ethical”? If you worry and fret about that too then you are being ridiculous. No one has a monopoly on what are correct morals and ethics, but these are often universals that we all agree upon, and in such cases there really is nothing to worry about. In cases were there are cultural grey areas on what “ethical” means, then that’s something interesting for us to muddle through and learn from, not to shy away from and go all pomo in thinking morals are all relative and have no universal grounding. Such postmodernist thinking betrays the poorest and most oppressed.

The wealthy rentiers, and the polluters and exploiters, have no claim to moral superiority whatsoever, and we have no obligation to consider their opinions as having any merit.