That's a fantasy. The people who provide the money always call the tune, even if it's the government, even if it's donations.
A more effective system is one that does not attempt to deny human nature, but takes advantage of it.
Just as traditional news outlets are reluctant to upset their advertisers. Donor-funded local newspapers are hesitant to upset big local donors. The BBC is awesome at covering non-clickbaity stories that would never get the time of day from a profit-oriented news outlet, but has always gone easy on whoever is currently in power in the U.K.
At the end of the day, quality investigative journalism costs money, that money has to come from somewhere, and it's best if that money comes from many places rather than one. Allocating more money toward publicly funded and donor-funded news in the U.S. would help to counter to the monstrous infotainment media empires that advertisers have built.
Also, have you read or listened to public news recently? It feels like reading a textbook or eating raw vegetables: refreshingly dull. We need more of it.
The narrowing and shifting of the Overton window is precisely due to donor funded journalism. It is just a reflection of the underlying shift in power in the society and economy as a whole.
Public news being dull is actually really bad. It means that there is no real debate. You are being fed what to think.
Tech has gained power and now exerts influence. Education has gained power. Healthcare has gained power.
These days I am more wise to the ways of the world, and it seems clear that had PBS’s intrusion into the free market not driven out private investment in educational television, I could have instead been exposed to superior, corporate-sponsored values. Alas.
I am indeed sorry you didn't get to enjoy Bugs Bunny, Wile E Coyote, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and other corporate sponsored values. You've been deprived.
I'm just pointing out the fallacy of the belief that it's the profit motive that leads to corruption. Even a casual review of history will amply show that government funded news is not independent journalism nor unbiased journalism.
*Not that the CPB is actually owned by the public, but the principle is closely related.
Ask anyone on the half of the country who doesn't vote blue, or necessarily get along with the latest developments in gender identity, of NPR gives their worldview any coverage whatsoever that isn't bashing and negative.
Niche, eh? Have you checked the listener numbers? Yes, Carlson's show on Fox beats all NPR shows, but NPR's prime time shows are consistently among the most consumed daily media events in the USA. Shows like "All Things Considered" generally (but not always) beat out supposedly "trend-forming" cable TV shows.
As for "notoriously biased", that's typically a weasel phrase that means something like "People are saying that NPR is biased". So what do you mean by "notoriously"?
I grew up in a country where the idea of "objective journalism" was regarded as idiotic, and all journalism was accepted to have a POV. By those standards, NPR stands out as one the least clearly biased and most intelligent radio journalism examples around.
What I would consider more important complaints about NPR are the fecklessness of essentially all of its interviews, in which there is an absolute refusal to hold an interviewee's feet to the fire, regardless of who they are or what they have written, said, done or represent. Like most of the US media, they throw mostly softball questions at thos with power, and on the odd occasion that they ask something a bit more pointed, refusal to answer (or just utter evasion) is met by ... moving on the next question.
I care about these general characteristics of NPR journalism far more than I do any particular handling of a particular issue.
NPR is "notorious" because it carries itself with an air of impartiality, while definitely being partial.
Where CNN and Fox are openly biased and understood to be so, NPR and its fans tend to argue that it isn't - but 99% of people making that claim vote blue, and disproportionately towards the Bernie end of blue.
If you had grown up in a country where, as I mentioned, "unbiased journalism" was assumed to be a lie from the start, I think you'd read whether or not NPR "carries itself with an air of impartiality" quite differently.
Most of the actual leftists that I know find NPR to be biased in quite the opposite direction than you seem to. They are irritated by its relentlessly pro-business positions, its endless interviews with conservative politicians, even discredited ones, and its almost complete failure to feature actual left-ish ideas other then when a specific politician (e.g. Sanders or AOC) makes a speech about something related.
I mentioned up-thread that I believe that NPR's bias is not really towards particular political or even social positions, but towards a genial defense of "things more or less as they are". They are a supremely "don't rock the boat (too much)" media outlet, and as a result rarely feature voices and ideas from the edges of the current Overton Window, let alone beyond it.
Not only do you imagine that CNN isn't seen as left (except by the only pillar of right-ness you've named, Fox) - but you know plenty of people who are left of CNN, which is already left of the median voter.
That you think NPR is a status quo defender - when their coverage of anything that touches on culture topics is extremely and consistently progressive - reaffirms that.
Please understand it's fine to be left-wing, but you will see the world as controlled by nefarious powers and agendas if you don't recognise that you are.
For example -they couldn't make a July 4th post without immediately turning it into a People's History seminar with a lecture about women's and indigenous rights.
But when was the last time I heard NPR interview an actual bona fide leftist? I don't think I've ever heard this on any of the flagship shows. Democracy Now, out of WNYC does, but that's not an NPR production. There's an almost complete absence of left politics on NPR (as on American media in general), whereas "due consideration" to equivalent positions on the right appear to be part of journalism's civic duty.
So yeah, they don't exact coddle red-leaning politics and people, but they do seek them out and try to let them have a voice amidst the stories that suggest that they are probably wrong.
Left-leaning politics? Forget that. You're not hearing that on NPR or pretty much anywhere else in this country. BTW, MSNBC is not even the exception that proves the rule.
It seems that much of our public debate is hobbled by an outstanding lack of consensus regarding what is meant by many political terms: right, left, conservative, progressive, liberal, capitalism, fascism, democracy, socialism, and so on.
I don't mention this as a way to suggest your definition is incorrect but just to point out how difficult it is to have a coherent discussion when basic terms are ill-defined.
They've been deliberately obfuscated by those with power and wealth, particularly in the USA since the Progressive period (roughly 1880-1920), when US capital got scared shitless that actua leftist politics might assume power in this country.
It is absolutely in the interest of existing power and wealth that these political concepts be fuzzy, misunderstood and hard to apply. Political scientists don't have much problem defining them in unambiguous ways, but our political culture is full of attempts to obscure their meaning.
I would agree that there's a legitimate argument about whether or not 1-dimensional axes are a useful way to talk about political ideas. There's a lot of merit in the 2D approach that many libertarians like to use. But that doesn't change the fact that these terms are well quite well defined by those who understand the subject matter, and deliberately obfuscated by those who see problems if people were to really understand the differences and purposes of the ideas described by these terms.
"They've been deliberately obfuscated by those with power and wealth" - how? By whom?
> how? By whom?
Goodness. There are so many books on this. You could start with something obvious like Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent", which is about a somewhat different issue but covers the way that the power structures in the US moved the Overton window in various ways to make leftish politics appear out of the mainstream.
This book does a reasonably good job of covering both how socialism itself shot itself in the foot in the US and how it was shot in the other foot by the existing power structures use of propaganda/media:
https://www.amazon.com/Didnt-Happen-Here-Socialism-Failed/dp...
I'm asserting that if there is no rough agreement on definitions then you can't have a coherent conversation.
You seem to be asserting that there is an effort to actively obscure the meaning of these terms, which doesn't negate my assertion.
It doesn't matter why there is no agreement (deception, lack of education, laziness, etc.) without the agreement you can't really have a coherent discussion.
Your assertion that there are some who are knowingly obfuscating language is worthy of discussion but seems like a different (but related) point. I tend to agree with you regarding muddled language, but I'm not so sure about "those with power and wealth" being the cause.
NPR especially is terrible at presenting real journalism. When it's not "both sides get equal time, even if there's only one fact-based side", it's vanity puff piece interviews and similar content, just like for-profit networks. There is also a very real bias in their political coverage toward mainstream, center-right politicians. These days that'd be "centrist" democrats, mainly, but they didn't get the monicker "Nice Polite Republicans" for no reason....
You can find clear bias through sources such as I.F. Stone (active 1950s -- 1970s), or George Seldes (1930s -- 1960s, lived to 1995). Earlier muckrakers included Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and It Can't Happen Here, 1910s -- 1950s), Ida M. Tarbell (The History of Standard Oil, 1890s -- 1920s), and Lincoln Steffans and Ray Stannard Baker (both late 19th century / early 20th).
There's a phenomenal interview with Stone from 1974 on ... Public Television's ... "Day at Night" programme: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
I've commented numerous times recommending Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short book highlighting the influence of advertising on media. It's short, readable, fact-filled, and available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) largely established the model for the "impartial press" (so called, only partially successful as such) during the bulk of the 20th century. It was based in significant part on Lippmann's own experience with failures of the news media in reporting accurately on the Russian Revolution of 1917--23.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126489/page/n1...
Other authors I'd recommend would be Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (the title itself is a reference to Lippmann's work), Robert W. McChesney's many books on media, Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (cited in the famouse Google "Backrub" paper (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourself to Death, and Edward Jay Espstein, News from Nowhere (https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst).
The last looks at television news as of 1971, including the numerous biases built in to the medium through narrative focus, budget constraints, and technological limitations, as well as the pace and scale of operations. Not all of those still apply, though some do, but it does remain a persuasive argument of how even incidental characteristics can profoundly influence a medium.
For contemporaneous criticisms of television, see Edward J. Murrow's "Lights and Wires in a Box" speech, and Newton Minnow's "Vast Wasteland" speech, from the late 1950s / early 1960s.
https://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_l...
http://www.janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastland.htm
I've compiled a few further references concerning media generally in a "light reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
To be clear, bias need not be conscious or deliberate. There's a great piece by Lippmann on the Russian Revolution that details just how profoundly the press got the story wrong, in large part because they were relying on official sources rather than getting "the street" view (paraphrasing Lippann generously here).
Spin is pretty much always deliberate propaganda. It may not be an outright lie, but the primacy is on persuading or manipulating rather than informing.
From 1960, when many U.S. newspapers were going out of business: “The best thing Congress could do to keep more newspapers going would be to raise the capital-gains tax to the level of the income tax. (Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.)” (p. 706).
[1] https://www.loa.org/books/302-the-sweet-science-and-other-wr...
> and much less discernible spin than current news articles.
It’s much less discernible because you aren’t familiar with any of the topics they are discussing. The best you can do is confirm a particular news article’s biases align with the biases of the current historical record’s biases.