Trying to restore some objectivity/balance to journalism

Objective journalism -- particularly investigative reporting -- is labor-intensive, which means costly overhead. That means you either have to have deep pockets pushing an ideological view, or a broad-base of paying subscribers who trusted your objectivity and balance. When journalism was print-based, the big name publications strove for reputations based on objectivity and balance to build the largest circulations that brought in the advertising dollars that could fund the overhead of reporters dedicated to single subject areas, and even single stories. Early broadcast journalism did the same, until the FCC essentially eliminated the Fairness and Equal Time doctrines and news became another form of entertainment. The internet, especially social media, then gutted journalism totally by essentially picking and choosing items from the print media to fuel conflict, generating large volumes of clicks to bring in the advertising revenue with no concern for the accuracy of the content or their long-term reputations since they were only conveyors of other people's work. People who were now out of work because the newspapers were losing both subscribers and advertisers in droves, and having to cut overhead which largely was the staff.

Legislation before Congress currently hopes to balance this out. Interestingly enough, similar legislation already passed in Australia, Canada, and Europe.

[quote]The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bipartisan bill currently making its way through Congress, will help newspapers better fulfill their mission of providing news and information to the public, holding the powerful to account and ensuring government serves the people.

The bill would allow news organizations to band together to negotiate with Big Tech companies for fair compensation for use of news content in search and on social media.

Similar laws have been passed in Australia, Canada and Europe.

In the United States, this has the potential of bringing billions of dollars back into newsrooms across the country, enabling the strengthening of local reporting and access to reliable, professionally produced information in communities across the country.[/quote]
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/23/editorial-support-jcpa-to-save-local-journalism/

windinhishair · 61-69, M

I've been fighting to keep up with objective news since the early 1960s. I read the local newspaper daily from 1963 to 2018, sometimes two or three of them, until the news petered away to almost nothing and the cost skyrocketed. In the pre-internet days, I routinely listened to the news on shortwave radio. The BBC, The Voice of America, and Radio Moscow were all sources, and usually by hearing three separate viewpoints I could get a fairly good idea of what was happening. The nightly news used to be a full hour with stories that would last five minutes or so. Now you are lucky if you can get a few sound bites. What has been cut out is context and complexity. Local newsrooms have had budgets and staff slashed, and very little local news is discussed in depth any more. I recall having to listen to a national news feed from New York City on our local radio station during a massive blackout about 15 years ago, instead of news about where to get water, ice, food, etc, because no one was left to report a major news event. It takes a lot of work to find out details on news events now, and that takes time. Few people can spend the time to do so. I hope the situation improves in time, because we are far worse as a society the way things are now.