This is something that I have wondered about for a long time, especially with the impending collapse of the old newspapers. The talk of “new media” and the internet as this “great equalizer” has left me wondering about the future of investigative journalism, a field which, it seems to me, has been dormant for a long time, even before the cutbacks outlined above.

The cost of “access,” in particular, makes me question whether independent blogger-journalists/twitter-ers can fill such an important need.

Some comments have noted the problem with gov’t-funded media–namely, that it would make journalists less likely to investigate government. If we accept that claim–that media outlets are reluctant to investigate their backers/funders–then the status quo, with advertisers funding news organizations, is equally unacceptable.

The low-discretion part of the idea is probably the most important one: of course, if the subsidy was allocated in proportion to how well the journalist had defended the government’s position, then I would be as saddened as anyone. However, if the metrics and/or standards for the funding were precise and difficult to alter, and the allocation was public, then that kind of favoritism would be extremely difficult to effect.

It’s true that this would undermine journalistic independence from government in exchange for potentially increasing journalistic independence from corporations (the current paymasters). Pro-paycheck-giver bias will inevitably calm some potential anti-government sentiment, and what’s more, breed entitlement in this new generation of journalists. But hopefully a Journalists’ Lobby would prove less destructive than the, say, the Pharmaceutical Lobby.

Thus the effect will not be cleaner government, but more corrupt government: Swedes have government subsidized journalism. In arguing with Swedes on the internet, I often find that not only do they have entirely deluded and insane beliefs about the US, for example the belief that slave markets are still being conducted, that the seriously ill are allowed to die in the streets, that millions of children are starving, but that they also have beliefs about Sweden that are similarly deluded in the reverse direction – for example that Sweden has no drug war because it has no drug problem, that Sweden is free from racial or religious tensions, that Sweden never employed state sponsored sterilization to eliminate inferior races, and so on and so forth.

Because the “free market” doesn’t work.

What if nothing works better then the market? Then it’s not the case of a market failure – or shouldn’t be considered such. If “market failure” is defined so that you can “identify” it without first demonstrating that something would work better, then it’s a joke concept. It’s not at all clear that a government subsidy would work better. All I see here is some fairly weak speculation that it might.

Regarding the rest: (mine, Mine, MINE!… stamps foot) LOL. Ever heard of the sixteenth amendment. And I don’t care what some long dead people thinks, the land belongs to the living.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_Proper_Clause

Furthermore, not everyone lives in the United States, and even if Congress can’t do it, a state government certainly could.

Oh, and what makes that money yours to begin with, anyway? There’s more to life than property rights, you know. Or do you?

Rather, I was referring to calling the BBC’s existence “authoritarianism”, which borders on the territory of “not even wrong” and strongly discourages me from responding to his other arguments due to moderately strong evidence of systemic irrationality.

What confuses me, in the end, is the inexplicable degree of right-leaning partisan bias (not the obvious libertarianism, but blind US-right-wing kneejerk responses) in some comments on this site, as evidenced by the handful of crackpots that came out when Robin posted on CO2-driven global warming a while back.