Media Reform from First Principles

Public funding of independent media mastheads to provide a central repository of truthful and accurate reporting, that crowds out and defunds fake news.

I have been thinking about whether media should be publicly or privately owned. Previously I had the opinion that media should be placed on a free market landscape with direct subsidy via taxpayers money through vouchers. This subsidy would offset the loss of advertising revenue to digital while giving consumers a direct voice.

Nevertheless I had concerns about this approach due to the relatively small proportion of people who consume publicly funded media. The fact is that only something around 20% of Australians routinely consume ABC or SBS programming would potentially leave these providers underfunded due to a lack of advertising revenue to supplement their income.

In conjunction, my other concern is that the one fifth of the people who are disposed to consume public media have a disproportionate responsibility for oversight in ANY democracy. Allowing the remaining 4/5 of people a one-to-one influence over what media is funded provides too much of an opportunity for abuse by private media providers who, as we know, see a commercial advantage in giving those 4/5 of people what they want to hear. That is often news that reflects back their audience's base instincts and emotional reactions to issues like immigration, crime, the unemployed, homelessness, drug abuse and other issues that evoke strong emotional reaction without significant understanding of a systemic causes. So we have a quandary based in the commercial inducement to service ignorance and instinct, rather than undertaking the unpopular work of explaining complexity, which these 4/5's of the population lack the desire or capacity to understand.

In our evolutionary past, one fifth of people provide guidance to the tribe through their superior understanding of complex systems. For hunter gatherers, this might have included weather prediction, conflict resolution between feuding families, trial and punishment, maintaining relations with neighbouring tribes and predicting availability of game. The remaining 4/5 of the tribe monitor the effectiveness of their leaders through their own well-being - do they feel nourished (or hungry), relaxed (or stressed), peaceful (or under threat), uncertain (or certain) about the future and their place in the tribe. So there is dependency between the effectiveness of leaders, and the outcome of their decisions, based upon an understanding of complexity. If the tribe suffered, there was no else to blame except the leaders.

Unless the well being of the 4/5 is maintained, leaders' positions become under threat, which is fair and reasonable. In modern society, this nexus has broken down, especially in private media mastheads. By providing leadership for it's viewers and listeners and readers without being held responsible for the outcomes of their decisions - that manifest as the biases behind the articles that they choose to put to air or put to print. When regressive social policies and in unequal economic policies, private media will blame the 1/5; intellectuals, scientists and progressives who embrace complexity, but whose policy recommendations are ignored or falsely represented in the private media. Hence we have a very nice bait and switch arrangement where private media service their personal interests by giving their audience a temporary lift in well-being by servicing there tribal and self-interested reactions while at the same time asserting that the 1/5 are to blame for the physical detriments that their followers suffer from poor laws, poor regulations and poor governance that result from the lack of oversight of, or even active collusion with, regressive politicians.

As a result of this capacity for private media to utilise absent tribal structures I propose that privately owned media mast heads are ultimately detrimental. This then suggests that all media mastheads should be publicly owned, but at arm's length from the government of the day which can similarly use the mechanisms of a private media to service their interests. Hence Australia's and the UK's (and other Western Democracies') model of having multiple independently run but publicly funded media organisations seems to be the ideal. If however ALL mastheads were publicly-owned, companies like Netflix and Breitbart might capture the interests of the 4/5, so we therefore need responsiveness built into the system.

I therefore propose a system of large publicly funded mastheads which are each given a set amount of core funding. The mastheads compete with one another across all mediums. Each masthead is managed by a board, with a third of its members voted for by each of three constituents: the masthead's journalists, any of the preceding year's content producers, and a national, independent media standards body.

• The media standards body would ensure that each article was based in truth, not that it was "unbiased" or incorporated "both sides" of an argument. It is past time we recognise that there is only one reality, rather than multiple subjective realities as postmodernists wish to believe. "Truth" also implies the whole truth, rather than gross simplifications or distortions, so complex matters are given proper treatment. I also note that the American FCC introduced a similar law in 1949, and it was revoked in the 80's by Reagan (and FOX was launched in the ensuing environment by a canny Australian).
• The producers are privately-owned independent contractors, who are given watermark recognition for any content they produce for a masthead. Since there is little advertising revenue on any masthead's content (especially television), producers make money through vouchers from their audience. Their watermarks can only appear on publicly-funded mastheads so that Australian taxpayer's money is not siphoned off to private mastheads, and our original problem is repeated. Media companies like Crikey would submit content to the mastheads, but can also receive vouchers for their own content if they wish to submit to the media standards body. Hence producers can publish their own content, but unlike the mastheads, they receive no central funding.
• The journalists are the bulwark of the system, representing the 1/5, ensuring that the complexity they see is faithfully reported by their masthead, via their board representatives. While a few journalists will try to betray the truth for cheap clicks and views, the majority of their colleagues will outvote them.

In this proposal, each of five or six publicly-funded Australian mastheads has a centralised management structure overseen by a board with three constituencies. So that diversity and innovation is promoted, it contracts media production from smaller, privately owned media producers who, aside from a financial advance, have their watermark promoted on all content. Producers are then paid via media vouchers given to each citizen to spend (say, $500pp/py), from which they can repay their advance. Independent oversight by regulators watch the mastheads so that the frailties and vulnerabilities of people's psyche is not used for commercial advantage, while undermining our democracy.