I’m going to propose a vision of what the ideal news landscape would look like. For this article, I’m going to focus heavily on TV news channels, while ignoring the internet and app-based news sources. This is because televised news has a ton of expensive infrastructure and government regulation surrounding it, relative to internet-based news sources. My suggestions will likely involve a lot of ending government regulation, though I won’t really go into details as to how (Supreme Court decisions, effective lobbying, et cetera). The intent of this article is merely to present an ideal future. Those who have called my past articles on gambling or margin trading dystopic should just start sharpening their pitchforks now.
Much like I wrote about in my How to Fix Banking article, the biggest improvement we can make in our modern journalistic discourse is to simply drop all of our current pretenses. By that, I mean we allow news stations to blatantly adopt and market ideology in their outreach. One example could be something like Fox News: The Official Republican News Station or CNN: The Official Democrat News Outlet. Essentially, that’s what these stations have become, so there isn’t much of a benefit to maintaining the façade anymore of being impartial. News networks would even be allowed to blatantly state their refusal to cover a certain topic if it defies their narrative without the cloak-and-dagger explanations we get now (the rare times we do get any accountability). The only strict requirement would be to state the sources used to generate the stories, and refusal to do so will constitute the article being treated as source-less. Furthermore, stories built solely on anonymous sources will be treated the same as source-less stories.
Of course, there would be room for other news stations as well that wish to broadcast; networks such as One America Network can pitch itself to the radicalized Right as OAN: Updates from the Far-Right and the Huffington Post may do the same for the radicalized Left. Networks might even pop up on the moderate-left and the moderate-right to serve those audiences; I’d love to see a RINO/DINO news networks; they could even have a Rhino and T-Rex (respectively) for logos! These moderate stations would inherently have much stricter quality control over their content because their audience could easily get radicalized and move to another channel; essentially market forces would keep them even-keeled. Admittedly, I don’t have any idea of what a truly independent/ non-partisan news station would look like, as unbiased news doesn’t exist. Therefore, the onus will be on the undecided voter/non-voter to try a bunch of news channels and form their seedling identity from there. There will be just as much onus on the moderate channels to win the undecided/non-voter market as well; growth is king in the eyes of the shareholders!
In this hypothetical world, a politician may opt to only speak to the news station that favors their party, ditto for CEO’s of companies that have a radicalized customer base. Given the radicalization of the news channels involved, the channels will not need to balance out political ads. This means that channels catering to a radicalized audience may serve only their candidate’s ads while airing none of the opposition’s ads. Moderate stations will naturally be more inclined to air a more balanced showing of campaign ads. With the pretenses of neutrality gone, obvious partisan hit pieces can become the norm, and all false pretenses of diligently vetting sources can finally be dropped. This is because the consumer knew what they came for, as discussed earlier. Thus, the news stations on the further ends of the political spectrum can be as laxed as they wish with quality control because they have an inherently captive audience (what are the viewers going to do, de-radicalize?).
Crucially, PBS will have a role to play in this as well. PBS, under my hypothetical scenario, would broadcast 24/7. However, they would serve as scorekeepers. Note how I said scorekeepers and not referees; it will not be the role of PBS to decide what is newsworthy or accurate-the American public will do that. Instead, PBS will be an aggregator of stories presented by the major broadcast stations, presenting highlights of each channel’s stories along with their source count. Given that state controlled media rarely goes well, PBS would be barred from actually reporting news; they are to aggregate and only to aggregate. PBS would also be barred from judging and providing interpretation to the viewer, though providing a gap analysis to the viewer on what isn’t being talked about by the main news stations would be allowed. Therefore, Americans can still get a holistic picture if they so desire (though personally, I prefer the radicalized). PBS can even automate much of this process, thus reducing/eliminating the need to hire on-air pundits (eww.. pundits) and pass the savings along to the taxpayer.
Much like news stories, the advertisers shown on the news channels range from tame to completely unhinged, depending entirely upon the palate of the hosting channel. For example, Alex Jones and similar personalities would be free to pitch their dubious supplements and gadgets to viewers on the radicalized-right news networks. However, the more moderate channels closer to the center of the political radicalization spectrum would shy away from broadcasting extremists and their products for fear of losing their audience base. Again, the free market would decide.
Essentially, instead of having some sort of whimsical fantasy regarding culturally reuniting Americans to some yesteryear that never happened, my solution is to simply embrace the divide. After all, we humans love news that confirms our world views, so we should just account for that, rather than pointlessly fight against it, when we aim to improve society.
As for local news; local news channels owned by national networks will have similar functions as their parent networks, along with the local PBS station. However, since the majority of Americans get the weather news from apps rather than local TV channels, the local news station can scrap weather segments altogether. Similarly, we would need far less sports coverage, assuming the local professional sports team has a bunch of ring-less losers on their roster. Since nearly everyone has a GPS-enabled device with them nowadays that includes real-time traffic updates, the traffic segment of local TV news can be scrapped too. Some of the freed up local news time can go towards crime coverage with the caveat that each statement issued by police/prosecutors start with a mandatory prefix of The government claims. The rest of the local freed up airtime can go towards local politics and advances in science and technology.
Tonight at 10; New Hampshire Man causes turmoil over thought-provoking article…
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