I can see that you took note of my commentary on word choice, but you seem to be discounting the idea of charity on the part of whoever runs this hypothetical indie media outlet (see lemmy itself) even as you accept the idea of the audience engaging in charity. Of course, there are scams like PragerU that run at a loss as propaganda outlets, but we can see that they do this by being bankrolled by billionaires.

The idea of a service being “illegitimate” when it is not trying to sell things is bizarre, since your argument seems to lead to the conclusion that “it is outside of the economic framework I have put forward” without explaining the basis for the hypothetical scam.

I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.

I propose no such thing! Quite to the contrary, what I am saying is that you are not scrutinizing the question enough. Specifically, the biases that all corporate media has towards promoting the idea of the near-monopoly on “legitimate journalism” held by corporate media and friendly state media, as well as promoting the institutional powers and corporate backers upon which they ground their business. I likewise think people shouldn’t rush to accept state-funded media as being “independent” when they have largely demonstrated a deep-seated bias towards promoting the interests of their state sponsors. This is not a coincidence!

People that are invested in getting stories that are against the interests of the country they are in must first recognize that it’s an uphill battle more complicated than the consumer lifestyle bullshit offered by the sources that – thanks to their capital giving them immense brand awareness – make themselves “easy to come by”.

While it’s undeniably true that subscription-based services spend a lot of resources on keeping people subscribed, they will have a very hard time accomplishing that goal without providing what their customers want in exchange for that. That doesn’t guarantee even slightly that what their customers want will be accurate information, as you demonstrated amply with your Alex Jones, Crowder, and Breitbart examples.

Tell me, does anyone who follows a news source not profess that they want “accurate information”? From CNN to Epoch Times to Breitbart to Yahoo News (funny how underrepresented the left is in major western news sources, by the way), does anyone say “Oh, I don’t care if it is accurate.” No, of course not! And yet, it should go without saying that people clearly have a bit more going on than that for a source like Breitbart to have success. Of course, once we establish some people are acting against their professed desire for accuracy and are happily being fed bullshit, this also brings oneself into question.

So if it’s not merely what they say they want, what do people actually want?

Let me take a slight detour: What is ideology? A set of beliefs regarding both values and empirical facts, I think everyone can agree on that. What is the basis for the adoption of ideology? This is much more contentious, but I think the most foundational element of this has only one good answer: Ideology is a survival strategy.

Ideology is a huge topic, theoretically infinitely huge, between the immense weight of the historical record, the epistemically infinite possibilities for the future, and the stipulatively infinite number of different values someone can choose, and the endless ways these can relate to each other in various forms of inference. People don’t have time for that, and yet in their desire for meaning and connection (along with being directly instructed to) there is pressure from an early age to develop an ideology, so they use what they virtually always do: heuristics, preconceptions in the form of perceived correlations generalized so as to be all-encompassing to their subject matter. This makes it much easier to develop at least a rough ideological framework, but it does not help determine which simplified ideological tenets they ascribe to. This, again, can be explained as a survival strategy: People become enculturated to groups that they are attracted to, and they fall into such groups for material reasons, whether perceived opportunity for gain, promise of security, or being spurned by other groups, all with an immense bias towards locality.

In short, ideology is functionally a way to relate to society on the basis of what is the most profitable or convenient. Capital-T “Truth” is only relevant insofar as it directly impacts one’s own living conditions, and even then it might take up an antagonistic role (see antivaxxers).

So, returning to the original topic of media consumption, I would like to advance the thesis that people want media that comports with their ideology, which means media that they find convenient or profitable for navigating their day-to-day lives. Whether the media advances ideas that are capital-T “True” is not relevant if it is functionally very distant from someone’s life in either geography, chronology, or social grouping.

But if they are going to be around regardless of what anyone else wants, then they are both much freer to provide accurate information and much freer to completely ignore what would, in a more personal setting, be regarded as important social cues that they are being unhelpful. You can’t “vote with your feet” if they tie you down and chop off your legs!

I don’t follow the second part, but I think I’ve demonstrated that the media being “free” to provide accurate information doesn’t mean very much to the information that they will provide. They can do great research, but their vested interest is mainly what amounts to pandering to the ideology of their target demographics.

Sure, but a lot of manipulative people of all walks of life use those tactics, frankly because they often work. Another common tactic is to say “you need to be open minded” and “listen to all viewpoints”, but then when confronted with a viewpoint that differs significantly from theirs, they start lobbing insults and shaming people for disagreeing. Unfortunately, I often see that behavior from people who describe themselves as “leftists”, but who a lot of other self-described “leftists” would probably insult and dismiss themselves as “tankies”.

I don’t see how this is relevant other than finding a way to bring Tankie Discourse^tm into this, which I think we can really do without for the time being unless you’d like to use it to construct a more relevant argument.

I look forward to what else you have to say.

Complete aside, Citations Needed is a cool podcast that is free

I’m unfamiliar with two of those, but I know BBC and NPR quite well. I’d be careful with believing that state media is “independent” just because it’s written down somewhere that it is. Whatever they might say, it’s still the government providing a great deal of their funding, and that same government can raise or lower the money they get.

The BBC is notoriously slanted to the right, but I think gets its reputation laundered somewhat by American Democrats because the American center if much further to the right than Britain’s. When you see how the Tories have attacked them so viciously for having a “left bias” (which is bullshit), it seems reasonable to guess that part of this drift is self-preservation of the organization at the cost of its usefulness to people other than Tories.

NPR toes the Dem line slavishly, inviting to some extent attacks from the right (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does) but rarely even acknowledging that there is a left beyond them (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does).

The idea that paid is better than free is just a joke of a position and I think you can quite easily deconstruct it yourself. Pick some free news source that’s broadly inoffensive, like the free episodes of some shitty podcast or something. However lacking you and I might find it, are we really going to say that it’s worse than whatever Exclusive Content can be raked up from paying subscriptions to Crowder or Molyneux or Alex Jones or some other reactionary cultist? Are we really saying that the paid version of Breitbart is a much better source than some lib shithead’s Twitter feed? Do you even know what yellow journalism is or that tabloids sell by subscription?

Get away for a second from words like “quality” that are epistemically messy and consider the market incentives: What any subscription service wants is for people to subscribe and then stay subscribed. This is what they invest their money in and anything else is either wholly secondary or based on a different revenue stream (like ad revenue, sponsorship, or grants).

Does this forbid them from putting out “high-quality” news? No, not necessarily, but it seems that the “quality” of the news is secondary to whatever keeps the subscription paid month to month. Alex Jones displays an excellent example of one of the most salient investments for these businesses: Fostering dependency. Through his conspiracism, he promotes the idea that listening to his program and only his program allows the viewer to be largely free of whatever “satanic vampire brainwashing” he warns them about. Andrew Tate does the same thing, he just calls it the “Matrix”. However, this is only one approach, and there are many other ways to get your audience to believe that yours is either the only service or one of a narrow range of services worth having, and all the self-flattering that goes on in liberal journalism should tip you off that the neoliberal press behaves almost like a guild, hostile to independent journalists and relatively friendly to those who have the same agenda or the same corporate masters. One can look at any of those bullshit “bias” charts and see how they equate centrism with being “free of bias,” which is simply absurd on its face.

Since they are optimizing for subscription and retention, one of their biggest threats is damage to their reputation. If a paper is operating out of the US and mostly to US customers, this has an effect that people don’t address often enough: The most dangerous thing to these papers short of the government or rioters shutting down their offices are other major powers in US-consumed media attacking them in a way that discredits them to their own target demographic. Bigger newspapers tend to be very siloed in terms of their audiences, so it’s not a huge deal if Fox attacks the NYT or CNN attacks the Sun – usually – but by its very nature this means there is only a very limited extent to which they can oppose the US government before the government becomes serious about retaliating, and thereby enlists all of the other major media outlets in retaliating. Trump flirted with this but never fully committed because the attacks on him specifically were literally part of his appeal to his own base, and these attacks never questioned the broader structures of power represented by the WH itself or the two-party system.

Oh yeah, and there’s the adjacent matter of “Access Journalism.” You know what makes the news a lot? Big and powerful institutions. If you want to do interviews with people who are either being reported on by other outlets or have information pertinent to a story being reported by other outlets, you better have a track record of being friendly in your coverage, or you’ll be denied the interview!

Overwhelmingly, being a big media company making its money on subscriptions does create a bias, not towards “higher” or “lower” quality, but towards being friendly to the structures of power that the company is based in and reporting on!