That’s, at best, a libertarian aspiration when applied broadly, so it’s not one that is shared by many people. I don’t know that I’d say it’s objectively wrong, but history has shown that it’s not what people want (heh!).
You’re on firmer ground if we restrict the discussion to news consumption.
Don’t answer, Kimstu. It’s a trap!! 
But the point is, as all the linked articles covering this story have addressed, that such outlets are nearly or entirely the only remaining source of in-depth local news on events and policies that affect communities.
Are you referring to this article?
Whatever your views on the ethics of prison labor wage rates or equating them with “slave labor”, ISTM that this is a fairly important piece of reporting on the relationship of municipal expenditure to local prison systems. In the classic tradition of muckraking journalism, it summarizes and analyzes a lot of information that isn’t readily available about an issue that’s largely invisible to public perception.
ISTM that instead of being obsolete, the “lack of choice” issue is still absolutely crucial in this situation. What amount of “choice” currently exists for similarly in-depth reporting on local news issues?
You have gone off on the tangent that these news outlets are dispensable because they’re “liberal”. But what I want to know is whether the sort of information research and in-depth reportage that they provided to their communities is being covered at all, now that they’re gone.
No, as it turns out, but your particular misconception was in fact different from what I initially guessed it was. You are arguing that ignorance of news on subjects like local prison labor, sexual abuse of prisoners, electoral backroom deals on charter schools, the silent “sunsetting” of a provision reducing city personal income tax rates for many residents, and so on, is preferable to learning about such news from reporting that may have a “liberal bias”. You imagine that the cessation of such reporting represents some kind of a victory for “consumer choice”.
Isn’t that pretty much orthodox economic thinking these days? Rational actors have their place when you’re unable to do any better, but once you are, then their usefulness diminishes.
OK, that was probably my “laziness”. We kind of keep jumping between “general market ideas” and “issue surrounding a free press”. My comments were related to the latter. I do agree that “panels of experts” have a place in our society, even if I probably wouldn’t agree with you on their scope. But when it comes to the news, what then shall we do?
Agreed!
Yes, of course. I was using “your” in the sense of “the criteria you are using”. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. But, more importantly, I don’t see how this applies to a web based news outlet. People are increasingly less willing to pay anything for web based content, so when a product is essentially free, we’re not even talking about a market in the first place. Or, the market place is who gets the best paying advertisers for their site. In that case, though, we’re not talking about “stoopid, uninformed consumerses (little Gollum joke there)”, but people who need to be experts in their industry and I’m not seeing the market failure there. If I’m missing it, please help me out.
Uh-huh, sure. This is why consumers still buy “paregoric” syrup for teething babies that has hefty doses of opium in it. Or if they don’t, they should absolutely be able to. The fundamental right of consumers to choose to give opium to their teething babies must be protected at all costs.
:rolleyes: Come on D’Anconia, you can’t be serious about this. You can’t possibly be so naive as to imagine that just because you can walk down the drugstore aisle and make up your own mind about, say, which of several heavily regulated and advisory-accompanied packages of anti-fungal foot cream you prefer to buy, without a jackbooted government agent standing over you shouting “You must buy this one and not that one!”, therefore the government “doesn’t have any say in consumer choice”.
Of fucking course the government has a hell of a huge amount of say in what choices consumers may make. Under what Martian rock have you been living that you can even begin to imagine it doesn’t?
What exactly do you mean by “a planned economy”? Given how bizarrely and unrealistically you seem to interpret basic economic concepts like governmental involvement in consumer choice, I really can’t venture to guess what a term like “planned economy” might mean to you.
Yeah, a trap baited with half a dead cockroach and a chewed-up 1986 Chevy Cavalier owner’s manual. Fortunately, I managed to resist its allure.
A “panel of experts” might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read on the board. Who appoints them? Who are they answerable to? Why should they have any say in the first place?
This isn’t (yet) a nanny state.
You sure you wouldn’t like Mary Poppins to come to your place and be stern with you?
It’s called a regulatory agency. They’re appointed by our elected officials, and we often disagree about what the scope of their powers should be, but let’s just say one thing they do is make sure your next-door neighbor doesn’t roof his house with thatch bales that have been soaked in gasoline.
But like I said, you’re standing on firmer ground when you confine the discussion to news outlets.
No I mean they don’t want any safety laws no minimum wage and probably wouldn’t mind bringing back child labor as long as it didn’t interfere with the almighty profit
pretty much how big business factory wage slavery worked in the guilded age of course they forget that all of that worked only because of unskilled immigrant labor which wouldn’t work in America .these days
*Gilded *Age. Cheap, gold-plated.
Sorry, can’t help it. Pedantic spasms, a snotty version of Tourette’s.
I prefer “no in-depth local news,” to “in-depth local news with a heavy liberal slant.”
And it does so in an absurd and hysterical way. If my choice is “none” or “absurd and hysterical,” then I’m happy with “none.”
Why should I regard the loss as a worse outcome than their continued presence?
May? May??
No: DOES have a liberal bias. And yes, I argue that biased information is worse than no information.
Is this a purely partisan objection, or would you, on principal, object just as strongly to an “absurd and hysterical” right-leaning local news site?
Well, I’d have to agree that “how big business factory wage slavery worked in the guilded age” pretty accurately reflects the old European guild/master/apprentice system in the trades, except maybe for the “big” part.
Yes.
While it’s undeniable that my sympathies tend to lean rightwards, the right-wing sites that spew absurd and hysterical stuff I regard as almost worse than the lefty sites, because they are ostensibly “my side,” and I am always left thinking, “Um. . . stop ‘helping,’ mmmkay?”
I’d love to see economic pressure shutter absurd and hysterical content across the board. And this includes Fox News to the extent that they hyperventilated about Benghazi and emails, both of which I regarded as manufactured outrage (and said so here).
Can you give an example of a news outlet that you do not consider to be biased in any way?
I just want to see what you consider to be objective journalism. If you think any such thing exists.
Very fair! (I mean, I don’t agree that the article on prison labour, although it clearly had a point of view, was absurd or hysterical. But I guess I’d classify some right-wing journalism differently than you, too.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the reason you specified economic pressure above is because you’d recoil in horror at the idea of a bipartisan panel of experts deciding what constituted absurd and hysterical bias and shutting down media outlets accordingly. (As well you might.) However, leaving it to “economic pressure” seems to have some problems.
It wasn’t entirely economic pressure that shut down Gothamist though, was it? AIUI, it was profitable till July 2017, when it was bought and merged with an unprofitable site. It only failed when the new owner decided he didn’t want to employ a unionised workforce. We can’t tell whether the market has selected against liberal leaning local news, or dilettante and slightly petulant billionaires. Indeed, is it really fair to consider this a decision of the market at all?
Ricketts certainly didn’t seem to see eye-to-eye with his employees politically, and this seems to have had some influence on his decision to close the site. But I doubt he planned this out. However, what if a biased billionaire were to buy a partisan site with the intention of closing it down and taking its filthy propaganda off-air (so to speak). Or alternatively, to buy a failing partisan news site and pump money into it so that it stayed afloat when otherwise it would fail? Is that just another version of the market in action, insofar as the market includes partisan billionaires? I would think it a distortion of market pressure, personally.
One way round this problem might be the creation of a publicly-funded, independently run news organisation which is accountable to the public and has open and transparent editorial guidelines. It’s crazy, but it might just work.
The implicit assumption there, though, is that if it was profitable before having a union, it would be profitable after. So we can’t claim that we know it wasn’t entirely economic pressure.
Absolutely. My point is precisely that we can’t be certain what the fate of Gothamist would have been had Ricketts never bought it, not that we do know and it would have been fine. But that uncertainty isn’t a great platform for declaring that the market has shut down liberal bias.
Oh, OK. I’m kinda not paying attention to the whole “liberal bias” thing as I think it’s not something that is ever rationally debated here, if it can be rationally debated anywhere.
Yes, you’re right. Health and safety regulations are good, and I have no problem with them. On the other hand, “regulating” the news is 100% objectionable.
OK. That’s a reasonable response.