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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from.

The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government.

The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.

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The BBC has a sorta-kinda-taxpayer-funded model and manages to attract criticism from all sides, which is generally taken as a compliment to its neutrality.

Um, no. The criticism from the Left is, "it's not Left enough."

Show us some stories, oh, the Rotherham grooming scandal, for instance, before it became a national story.

Here's one afterward:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863

> Police officers in Rotherham were not equipped to deal with the widespread child sex abuse that plagued the town for more than 15 years, according to a new report.

"not equipped to deal with" ordinary heinous crimes? I thought that was what police were supposed to do.

> After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone.

In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks. C-Span is just limited to its cut from cable subscriptions but even that has made it far less sensationalist. C-Span isn't entertainment, it's pure news.

> In a tax-funded situation, everyone is writing the checks.

To further the analogy, everyone's pooling money in the same bank account, but there's still someone in charge of signing the checks. That someone is as capable of anybody else of holding biases, which has the strong potential to be reflected in the media program that the money is funding.

Personal biases abound in publicly funded news orgs, just as in private. But there are models where editorial independence is maintained .. including in Australia and the UK.

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