Spend the Money to Find the Deep State

Policy Team Contributors: Lane, p3ndu1um

Author: IHaveEatenFoliage

Copy Editor: Compre

DGG Political Action’s Policy Team acts as a collaborative think tank, developing and exploring potential policy ideas on issues that matter to our community. Our working group synthesizes input from community members to spark conversation and serve as a springboard for future projects. While we aim to contribute to thoughtful dialogue, the ideas we share do not necessarily represent official positions of DGG Political Action.

The Media Crisis in America

Americans have come to not occupy the same factual reality. Media companies now succeed by catering to an appetite for attractive interpretations and presentations of the world. Expenditures of media companies go towards a compelling production, the most captivating on-air talent or most provocative writers, with little expenditure or priority given to investing in research or investigation.

To adapt to the profound changes in the media landscape, it will require shifts in American culture and government policy. While the mythic “marketplace of ideas” cannot be directed by the state in a free society, the government can play a significant role in building it. From the education provided to our children to the way the government invests in communicating to the public, the marketplace of ideas cannot be separated from responsible politics.

Rebuilding Journalism

What has changed for the press has been their economic centrality. Media was a central hub where significant information with economic value needed to pass through, for example job postings or advertisements. This extraordinary economic leverage allowed the media to operate as a powerful business. As a modern analog, Google is a central information broker in our modern economy. Google has $50 billion to invest in R&D every year to maintain their position as the information broker of central importance. In the past, traditional media companies had significant resources to invest in information gathering to maintain their central importance.

With the decline of journalism in the age of the internet, it has become increasingly apparent that the public service they provided as a byproduct of their economic strength will not be reconstituted elsewhere without policy intervention.

To regain this public good, we should subsidize media that can provide it. To accomplish that:

Public funding should be directed by free public choice, where press that attracts more readership and has more public relevance will receive the most support, not the subject of government appropriation, licensing, or theoretical standard of success. This is also crucial to keep the policy in alignment with freedom of speech and of the press. The government should provide a voucher for citizens to subscribe to a select number of qualifying news services of their choice, providing news to the public that attracts public interest.

The qualification for a news organization to have publicly funded subscriptions should not be viewpoint based but instead based on its business model. The suggested criteria for a qualifying news organization would be that a set percentage of their budget should be spent on journalist expenses, versus on editorial content, production costs, marketing, or going to profit. The exact formula could be evaluated after study of the financials of typical news organizations of various sizes, including startup news organizations.

Through this public support, we can employ journalists to shine a light on all of society. Also, compelling portraits of what is happening in our society can pull some of the attention back from our often substanceless public conversation.

Encouraging a Connected Public Discourse

Another issue in our media landscape has been the paradoxical siloing of our discourse. While making all information more accessible than ever before, the internet has become so large that information that is critical for understanding an issue can be inaccessible except in a tiny corner of the internet. In the past, information was challenging to access. However, when a subject became relevant to the public conversation, the only way to efficiently approach the topic was to connect with those extremely knowledgeable about a subject. Now, information is easily available, but the reliability of what you will encounter has declined precipitously.

While lacking relevant information has always been present in civic discourse, never before has it been as viable to run sophisticated media enterprises off of advertising with the incentive to deprive an audience of relevant facts. While in the past media enterprises existed that pushed narratives and omitted relevant information, these publications could only be maintained by attracting material support from an audience that supported their project. Current media enterprises with advertising business models work in the reverse direction. An advertising based media enterprise can succeed by generating an interest in their audience with their project.

All publicly facing media that benefit from advertising should be required to provide an accessible mechanism to allow a public response which provides relevant information to the audience of that media. The policy would have the following provisions:

There must be an accessible way to provide substantiated commentary to publicly facing media collecting advertising revenue. This may be possible with a simple comment section, or if there is too large a volume of comments for a comment to be accessible, then through a feature like community notes. For radio, television, or print, a mechanism of sending in comments must be provided and any substantive comments must be presented in an upcoming broadcast.

A new civil cause of action should be created to sue media which does not comply with the above requirement and was not defensible as reasonable moderation. Ideally, an agreement can be reached to make the information accessible to the audience of the media company. If a settlement cannot be reached and if ultimately it is determined that a media company is willfully obscuring substantive commentary from their audience, then the media entity could lose the right to collect advertising revenue. If found to not be willful, then the commentary may be required to be published prominently by the media entity and a plan created to satisfy the requirements in the future so that the event is not repeated.

Encouraging a connected public discourse cannot fix our broken media ecosystem by itself, but has the potential to reign in business models of purveying content that is only marketable through evading public scrutiny.

Strict criteria should be put in place to demonstrate that the removal of substantiated commentary cannot be defended on the basis of a moderation rationale and that attempts were made to settle the issue out of court. This tool will not be burdensome to moderation activity or to media companies not taking advertising revenue.

We have to be bold intervening in the media environment

While we must be respectful of our freedom of speech and the press, we must recognize that these liberties can only be preserved in the long term with a healthy media ecosystem.

Any reform proposals that feel comfortable will be inadequate for the problem. The best we can do is act boldly while being respectful of the spirit of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. The above two proposals are designed to build a more robust, factual public conversation. Our liberty relies on a “marketplace of ideas” that is compatible with a free society.