Oh I’m sorry, after re-reading it looks like you actually said we should fight for better journalism by skipping breakfast, or selling our plasma, and giving the money we save to the conglomerates providing our local news. Totally makes sense.
If you think journalists aren’t living the same way, you’re out of your mind. They need to be able to take care of themselves, too, to do their jobs.
But cool, I guess the answer is fuck all journalism then, because you can’t be fucked to care about how it’s funded. You’re expecting it to just be handed to you by people who do it for the love of it, and then wonder why that doesn’t happen, when you yourself understand exactly why it can’t and you just explained it.
What a fucking shitty crank. You don’t get what you want, so you want to tear down the whole thing, which is conveniently what you’ve accused me of. Do you do a lot of projection like this?
I don’t exactly see you considering solutions, just a lot of bitching.
Because you’re obviously struggling, what I’m saying that objective & effective journalism is vital to informed decision-making in a democracy, and we’re not getting it because journalism in the US is run as a business¸ which imo will always end with media focusing exclusively on whatever makes them the most money, irrespective of the truth. If we want real journalism we need to view it, and fund it, as a public service. The problem is systemic, and our news media will continue to fail us until the system is rectified.
I don’t disagree, but you’re skipping a lot of steps of how we fucking get there, man. You’re not going to start the revolution tomorrow by being an asshole on the internet. You’ll just get a lot of people quoting Lebowski at you: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”
Sorry I’m busy living in the world as it currently exists instead of expending all my energy on lofty ideas that sadly most Americans are too toothlessly uneducated in understanding, yet supporting. I’d rather work on building coalitions, talking about how we can change things, and working within the system as it exists at the moment because we don’t have a lot of other choices.
But sure, be angry that you can’t magically snap your fingers to make it better overnight, that really helps us get there. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater type stupidity.
It’s not like non-profit journalistic outfits don’t exist, but they need funding. NPR used to be Publicly funded, but last I checked, the public funding dried the fuck up, because people don’t call to pledge money in telethons anymore, and surprise, now they’re corporate funded instead.
Where do you think the money comes from to fund public news? It comes from the public, either in donations, or in the case of something like the BBC, taxes and fees like a TV license. Either way, you’d be “selling plasma” to afford it. You don’t suddenly get to opt out of funding it because you’re too poor when its taxes.