I do not understand how this fits into any conventional political worldview. Why should the public taxpayer dollars fund a journalism outfit that then follows its own agenda rather than the one set forth by the democratically elected government? How is this democratic?
From 1972 to 1988, anti-socialist Republicans won four elections by landslide margins (8, 10, 18, and 23 points). The coverage of NPR during that time was quite sympathetic toward socialism, and certainly didn't reflect the ideology of the electorate. (My dad, who is a soft-on-socialism Democrat, called it "Radio Moscow"). How does it make sense for taxpayers to pay government journalists who have a fundamentally different view of the world?
Imagine the opposite: Obama's America being forced to pay for journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian fundamentalism. How would that be democratic?
Because the people want it? You are treating democracy as a kind of populist authoritarianism where unwelcome viewpoints are suppressed. Generally We the People value (or at least used to value) free and fair discussion.
NPR
Mostly irrelevant in this discussion. The large majority of NPR's funding has always come from member stations and "listeners like you".
Imagine the opposite: Obama's America being forced to pay for journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian fundamentalism.
What is there to imagine? Obama's America did in fact pay journalists to do just that. Public media is generally supposed to present a diversity of viewpoints, and leaving out religion would be doing the public a disservice in that regard.
You are treating democracy as a kind of populist authoritarianism where unwelcome viewpoints are suppressed.
Let’s not play word games. It’s not “populist authoritarianism” to say that, in a democratic society, taxpayers shouldn’t have to bankroll journalists who don’t share their world views.
Shutting down journalists just because they're not ideologically aligned seems a bit antidemocratic to me - it's important for the fourth estate to be an independent watchdog over other institutions.
What you're suggesting is something close to Orbanism or Putinism, where the media apparatus is completely captured by the ruling party. That is not an appealing proposition to me.
A democracy generally will have a plurality of views. But when it comes to voting on what will receive public funding, that's based on having a majority.
it's important for the fourth estate to be an independent watchdog over other institutions.
That's not democratic. That's giving a single profession the power to check a government elected by the majority.
But when it comes to voting on what will receive public funding, that's based on having a majority.
Why? That's the reasoning Orban used to purge the media and strengthen his corrupt regime. Private journalism already is beholden to private employers, e. g. Oligarchs like Bezos buying the post. There needs to be an independent counterweight, not what you're asking for - which would be state propaganda.
That's giving a single profession the power to check a government elected by the majority.
Yes, that is the purpose of the fourth estate in a democracy, just like the third branch of government, which is also supposed to be impartial in their judgements and not be swayed by electoral concerns.
> But when it comes to voting on what will receive public funding, that's based on having a majority.
Why?
Because the public getting to decide how to spend their own tax dollars is the bare minimum standard for calling something a democracy. Dictating that the public must spend tax dollars on things they do not support is completely unlike constitutional protections on minorities.
Yes, that is the purpose of the fourth estate in a democracy
What country has a "fourth estate" in its constitution? And who decided that journalists are it?
Because the public getting to decide how to spend their own tax dollars is the bare minimum standard for calling something a democracy. Dictating that the public must spend tax dollars on things they do not support is completely unlike constitutional protections on minorities
This is a strong assertion that serves more as a declaration of ideology than an argument.
What country has a "fourth estate" in its constitution? And who decided that journalists are it?
I'm not really interested in the particular, as mentioned above. The point is how systems behave in the real world, with real world actors, with real world feedback loops and incentive structures, not counter-productive excursions into legalisms.
The failure modes I describe are real and actually happened. I'm not terribly interested in litigating the ideological framework that produced them - ye shall know them by their fruits and all that.
The American version of democracy has a great many protections for minorities, whether they be intellectual, religious, or ethnic. The notion that the majority should pummel the minority into submission is perhaps a version of democracy, but not one compatible with American tradition.
This is why Obama, Biden, and other politicians who support democracy had no problem funding a free and fair press while populist authoritarians have sought to dismantle it.
That's not "democracy," that's constitutionalism, which is inherently anti-majoritarian. But constitutionalism means protection for minority viewpoints, not an obligation for taxpayers to publicly fund media they disagree with.
That's not "democracy," that's constitutionalism, which is inherently anti-majoritarian
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims. IMO majoritarianism is the failure mode of democracy - mob rule. We saw this happen in Hungary, where Orban used his majority to cement sixteen years of one-party dictatorship and only by a miracle got deposed this year.
Pluralism is how democratic institutions can actually be upheld and protections like free speech can be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims
They are synonyms. That’s why the Founders called America a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy.” “Democracy” is like a color: blue, green, or red. You never find it by itself in the real world. It’s always got something else mixed in: constitutionalism, liberalism, even constitutional monarchy.
And there is a good reason to be precise about using orthogonal terms in orthogonal ways. As Georgetown’s Shadi Hamid explains, conflating “democracy” with “liberalism” and Anglo/European cultural and political norms makes it very hard to understand how democracy actually operates globally: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
More to the point here, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S. We have a constitutional republic with myriad checks on majoritarian rule: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, etc. Thus it’s important to be precise about when you’re saying a particular decision should be turned over to the majority and when you think majoritarian impulses must be checked by anti-majoritarian institutions.
Here, I’m trying to be precise: I think the majority should get its way when deciding who to affirmatively support with taxpayer dollars. I think public spending priorities are at the core of where the people are preeminent. That’s why the House of Representatives in the U.S. and the House of Commons in the U.K. have the Power of the Purse. But the majority should be checked by courts when it comes to shutting down independent speech from private individuals.
I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.
What we have now is a government that tries to shut down all news outlets that are not comprised of journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian nationalism fundamentalism.
How is that any better? How is that democratic and pluralistic?
journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian nationalism fundamentalism
There is no such thing. Only 3-4% of journalists are Republican, and a bunch of those probably didn't even vote for Trump: https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journali.... Even explicitly Christian news sources like Christianity Today and National Catholic Reporter have moved to the left as immigration has become the defining issue of politics around the western world.
I’m not sure why a journalist would comment on their personal beliefs to anyone, but that study shows Democrat journalists as a minority too.
About half of all journalists (51.7 percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.
There is a tradition of journalists being registered independents. But do you think their world view is liberal or conservative? According to consistent Harvard Harris polling, 55% of Americans agree all illegal immigrants should be deported, not just ones who commit additional crimes. Do you think those independent journalists agree with democrats on that or with republicans?
I’d say their personal views don’t really matter, because professional journalism isn’t about agreeing with a political party or about personal opinions.
I think a journalist’s personal political beliefs are as important to their job as a car mechanic’s: very little.
It’s akin to complaining that your family doctor voted for Nixon, like that has anything to do with their medical qualifications.
How is that not “representative?” The 56% number is literally 56% of the polled population, with republicans being higher, democrats being lower, and independents being right on the number. And Harvard-Harris is a top polling outfit.
Do you think 53% of journalists who label themselves independent agree with the 53% of independents in this poll?
Comments
I do not understand how this fits into any conventional political worldview. Why should the public taxpayer dollars fund a journalism outfit that then follows its own agenda rather than the one set forth by the democratically elected government? How is this democratic?
From 1972 to 1988, anti-socialist Republicans won four elections by landslide margins (8, 10, 18, and 23 points). The coverage of NPR during that time was quite sympathetic toward socialism, and certainly didn't reflect the ideology of the electorate. (My dad, who is a soft-on-socialism Democrat, called it "Radio Moscow"). How does it make sense for taxpayers to pay government journalists who have a fundamentally different view of the world?
Imagine the opposite: Obama's America being forced to pay for journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian fundamentalism. How would that be democratic?
Because the people want it? You are treating democracy as a kind of populist authoritarianism where unwelcome viewpoints are suppressed. Generally We the People value (or at least used to value) free and fair discussion.
Mostly irrelevant in this discussion. The large majority of NPR's funding has always come from member stations and "listeners like you".
What is there to imagine? Obama's America did in fact pay journalists to do just that. Public media is generally supposed to present a diversity of viewpoints, and leaving out religion would be doing the public a disservice in that regard.
Let’s not play word games. It’s not “populist authoritarianism” to say that, in a democratic society, taxpayers shouldn’t have to bankroll journalists who don’t share their world views.
Part of democracy is plurality of views.
Shutting down journalists just because they're not ideologically aligned seems a bit antidemocratic to me - it's important for the fourth estate to be an independent watchdog over other institutions.
What you're suggesting is something close to Orbanism or Putinism, where the media apparatus is completely captured by the ruling party. That is not an appealing proposition to me.
A democracy generally will have a plurality of views. But when it comes to voting on what will receive public funding, that's based on having a majority.
That's not democratic. That's giving a single profession the power to check a government elected by the majority.
Why? That's the reasoning Orban used to purge the media and strengthen his corrupt regime. Private journalism already is beholden to private employers, e. g. Oligarchs like Bezos buying the post. There needs to be an independent counterweight, not what you're asking for - which would be state propaganda.
Yes, that is the purpose of the fourth estate in a democracy, just like the third branch of government, which is also supposed to be impartial in their judgements and not be swayed by electoral concerns.
Because the public getting to decide how to spend their own tax dollars is the bare minimum standard for calling something a democracy. Dictating that the public must spend tax dollars on things they do not support is completely unlike constitutional protections on minorities.
What country has a "fourth estate" in its constitution? And who decided that journalists are it?
This is a strong assertion that serves more as a declaration of ideology than an argument.
I'm not really interested in the particular, as mentioned above. The point is how systems behave in the real world, with real world actors, with real world feedback loops and incentive structures, not counter-productive excursions into legalisms.
The failure modes I describe are real and actually happened. I'm not terribly interested in litigating the ideological framework that produced them - ye shall know them by their fruits and all that.
I'd invite you to read my longer comment above if you'd like to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563762
The American version of democracy has a great many protections for minorities, whether they be intellectual, religious, or ethnic. The notion that the majority should pummel the minority into submission is perhaps a version of democracy, but not one compatible with American tradition.
This is why Obama, Biden, and other politicians who support democracy had no problem funding a free and fair press while populist authoritarians have sought to dismantle it.
That's not "democracy," that's constitutionalism, which is inherently anti-majoritarian. But constitutionalism means protection for minority viewpoints, not an obligation for taxpayers to publicly fund media they disagree with.
That was a nice sleight of hand, but democracy and majoritariansm are not synonims. IMO majoritarianism is the failure mode of democracy - mob rule. We saw this happen in Hungary, where Orban used his majority to cement sixteen years of one-party dictatorship and only by a miracle got deposed this year.
Pluralism is how democratic institutions can actually be upheld and protections like free speech can be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
They are synonyms. That’s why the Founders called America a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy.” “Democracy” is like a color: blue, green, or red. You never find it by itself in the real world. It’s always got something else mixed in: constitutionalism, liberalism, even constitutional monarchy.
And there is a good reason to be precise about using orthogonal terms in orthogonal ways. As Georgetown’s Shadi Hamid explains, conflating “democracy” with “liberalism” and Anglo/European cultural and political norms makes it very hard to understand how democracy actually operates globally: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
More to the point here, we don’t have a democracy in the U.S. We have a constitutional republic with myriad checks on majoritarian rule: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, etc. Thus it’s important to be precise about when you’re saying a particular decision should be turned over to the majority and when you think majoritarian impulses must be checked by anti-majoritarian institutions.
Here, I’m trying to be precise: I think the majority should get its way when deciding who to affirmatively support with taxpayer dollars. I think public spending priorities are at the core of where the people are preeminent. That’s why the House of Representatives in the U.S. and the House of Commons in the U.K. have the Power of the Purse. But the majority should be checked by courts when it comes to shutting down independent speech from private individuals.
I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.
What we have now is a government that tries to shut down all news outlets that are not comprised of journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian nationalism fundamentalism.
How is that any better? How is that democratic and pluralistic?
There is no such thing. Only 3-4% of journalists are Republican, and a bunch of those probably didn't even vote for Trump: https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journali.... Even explicitly Christian news sources like Christianity Today and National Catholic Reporter have moved to the left as immigration has become the defining issue of politics around the western world.
I’m not sure why a journalist would comment on their personal beliefs to anyone, but that study shows Democrat journalists as a minority too.
There is a tradition of journalists being registered independents. But do you think their world view is liberal or conservative? According to consistent Harvard Harris polling, 55% of Americans agree all illegal immigrants should be deported, not just ones who commit additional crimes. Do you think those independent journalists agree with democrats on that or with republicans?
I’d say their personal views don’t really matter, because professional journalism isn’t about agreeing with a political party or about personal opinions.
I think a journalist’s personal political beliefs are as important to their job as a car mechanic’s: very little.
It’s akin to complaining that your family doctor voted for Nixon, like that has anything to do with their medical qualifications.
From the latest month of that poll
Overall: 56% Republicans: 77% Independents: 53% Democrats: 37%
Which only polls registered voters not all Americans. So that 55% number isn't exactly as representative as one might believe.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Latest-HarvardHarris-Poll-Shows-Incre...
How is that not “representative?” The 56% number is literally 56% of the polled population, with republicans being higher, democrats being lower, and independents being right on the number. And Harvard-Harris is a top polling outfit.
Do you think 53% of journalists who label themselves independent agree with the 53% of independents in this poll?
Just pointing out there are skews depending on one's general leaning as well as it excludes about 30% of Americans who aren't registered to vote.