Your reply was serious enough, and directed to my post, so I've decided to reply.
What you seem to be proposing is a distributed network of individual sources filtered together in different formats, depending on the distributor, in a manner that becomes mutually beneficial for the distributors, the individual sources, and ostensibly the viewers/readers/listeners. The flaw I find with this is that this is not much different than how news is currently assembled: agencies filled with numerous individual reporters who write material that is bought up by either network affiliates or local newspapers / radio / television on a case-by-case basis and presented to the public.
Yes, but with a few key differences. First, no advertising is allowed, so censoring due to economic pressure from advertisers is non-existent (well, that's an exaggeration. There would probably be some pressure via threatened lawsuits). If you see the documentary "The Corporation", and then try to imagine a similar scenario wherein solid reporting on Bovine Growth Hormone is suppressed, you will have a lot of problems doing so.
Secondly, there is increased de-centralization, so I expect it to be harder to corrupt the system subtly via the placing, by well-funded entities with vested interests, of covert censors*. In an evironment like JREF, this concern is likely to be automatically treated with disbelief and scorn, but I certainly don't agree. Even if I were wrong, and there was 0 chance that big business, think tanks, intelligence agencies, and God knows who else might want to influence the news covertly, migrating to a structure that would make such a potential source of corruption more difficult can't hurt. If I take a vaccine for dengue fever, but never encounter a dengue fever pathogen, I will not regret my vaccination (unless there's mercury in it...)
There is another key difference, which addresses one of the key irritants with "the media" that got me thinking of this proposal. And that is, that subscribers can "vote with their hands" by directing micro-payments towards the covering of any topic of their choosing. You can't do that now, except indirectly via an irate letter to the editor. As far as I can tell, such letter merely provide venting, and if they've ever sparked the birth of investigative reporting, well, that's news to me.
Perhaps the most striking example of this are the stunning pronouncements that emanated from madcowprod.com. They are either extremely significant, and Hopsicker deserves a medal,
OR they are sheer fiction, and Hopsicker deserves to be vilified. The question arises "Which is it?" and the answer is "I don't know". In a science such as physics, multiple experiments by independent researchers is the norm for
verification. In the case of Hopsicker's claims, there is neither verification (AFAIK) nor falsification, hence neither the "conspiracy theorist" nor the "debunker" should feel at all confident in passing judgement on Hopsicker's work.
The Associated Press, Reuters, BBC World News, National Public Radio-- they all do this stuff, and more than half of what you would read in your daily newspaper is likely to come from these sources.
Yes, but how good do they do it? Wherever you have centralization, you have the potential for censorship (again, in the broad sense I define below.) And, unfortunately, in a world where lies are plentiful and never-ending, can even "good" factual reporting, which involves quoting official sources, be trusted when the official sources are lying their tails off? This lying would be made much more obvious if new stories were placed in proper context with contradictory facts and quotes.
Fortunately, rather than just speaking to this subject abstractly, there is a partial, and fair, example of what I had in mind. I am speaking of therealnews.com, which is still being born, but will exist via subscription, and will give a more accurate picture of our world than what we have now. They will certainly not accomplish this by over reliance on news-wires, as you have mentioned.
However, if they were to create their own news-wire service, why should that not eventually be a source for other media vehicles, should they indeed come to be trusted beyond Reuters, et. al.?
The affiliate advertising network model, on the other hand, is one often espoused by the "alternative" news agencies and some AM radio. This model, not unlike the previously mentioned model, relies on a large number of independent sources producing content that are then collected as per the agency's reporting objectives, often heavily linking the source material to produce the mutually beneficial 'affiliate' revenue flow. Two very notorious examples of this would be Rush Limbaugh, who constantly self-references and references only preferential information sources, and Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet network, in which every single broadcast that is freely available lets the listener or viewer know that more information (though 'more' is typically synonymous with 'more of the same' in this case) is available if the viewer / listener goes to their website,
No, not what I had in mind. In it's pure form, advertising is forbidden completely, though practical constraints may dictate otherwise.
At the end of the day, though, in a free society, you should be able to pick whatever filters and sources pleases you, and if you really believe that Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones are the cat's meow of objectivity, truth, and fairness, there's not much I can do about it. Any more than I can do much about people restricting themselves to these individuals right now.
However, I think that
gentle exposure to facts contradicting one's world view can eventually make one aware as to the limitations of whatever ideological (and non-ideological) blinders are being worn by whatever sources of news and commentary that one has put one's trust in. This is discussed somewhat in Faulty Towers of Belief: Part I. Demolishing the Iconic Psychological Barriers to 9/11 Truth.
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/FaultyTowersofBeliefPart_I.pdf Though I wish the author hadn't used the word "demolish", and it's focus is 911, in point of fact it has relevance far beyond 911.
There is a tough constraint to trying to overcome inherent biases, in that human beings are inherently subjective, and this is also true of ostensibly hyper-rational types. I don't want to get into this - it's too big a subject. Suffice it to say that my proposal is meant to ameliorate the current mess we have now, and can't totally overcome frailties of the human psyche that, in large part, may well derive from biological factors. Total solutions are the domain of complete idealists, and I am not a member of such a group. For more info, you might start your reading with the chapter in E.O. Wilson's "On Human Nature" dealing with religion.
So, if alternatives developed enough, I would hope that numerous sources of news and commentary of the quality that I
hope 'The REAL News' will manifest should eventually allow large numbers of citizens to inquisitively approach the real world beyond whatever ideological predispositions they may have.
The problem with both over-arching models and pretty much any new model that may spring from it is that all of them attempt to remove the need for critical thinking from the equation by intending to supply what that model believes is what would be most pertinent information that would otherwise require critical thinking skills to get at in the first place.
No, you are taking a very pessimistic viewpoint. It is not so cut-and-dried as this. By analogy, consider the case of a consumer and financial advisor. If the consumer seeks a financial advisor, they should find one that they both can trust (otherwise, why even bother with them, at all?) but also one that they can question, and, upon questioning, be provided with answers that make sense to them. It'd be nice to have such complete trust in a financial advisor - both as to their character and their competence - that the consumer feels that no questions ever need be asked.
However, I think anybody who assumes that even a domain expert with an impeccable character cannot make mistakes is being rather foolish. To err is human, and that's just the way it is. And collections of humans, within organizations such as government and news agencies, are also prone to err.
So, nobody is claiming that critical thinking is be dispensed with. On the contrary, subscribers should be able to easily "vote with their feet", not just "vote with their hands". Whether they feel betrayed by a filtering agent, or whether they simply conclude that they are incompetent or biased (perhaps unconsciously), they can and should fire them and get another that they can trust.
* a "censor", as I am using the term, can mean not just somebody engaged in outright and total suppression of a story, but also somebody who leaves out key elements or, perhaps, merely de-emphasizes key elements of a story. It can also mean somebody who de-emphasizes a story by not publishing an appropriate amount of followup stories - i.e., not giving the story "legs".
In a nutshell, it means somebody who will slant their presentation of the news so as to satisfy an agenda.
