I see the gp post about pirating news as a very good point, while having no veleity to pay the New York Times, and being ok with not reading it in general.
But I also pay for my national (public) news outlet, and their articles are available to anyone anywhere in the world. I don't know how it should work, but I wish we could get to a system where the burden to keep news outlet alive is split thinly enough to have open but viable publications around the world.
Basically the same way weather stations collaborate all other the world and we pay for our local stations while getting acccess to all the forecast everywhere.
The government (thus the people, in a so called sharing of public burden)!
For example in Hungary there is an official news agency ran by the government, with (cumbersome) free access for everybody. Of course this does provide somewhat biased presentation of some facts, but on many topics it provides unbiased access to news for any citizen.
This is actually pretty common in Europe, often funded by mandatory fees (for some reason not branded as taxes) certain appliance owners need to pay (UK TV license, German Rundfunkbeitrag). For this fee people get access to news and cultural programmes for free via different media (radio, TV, internet).
I agree with your general point but Hungary is probably the worst example you could have chosen from any EU country! The Orbán government is famously using it to spread propaganda and fake information in unprecedented levels.
The level of control governments exert on public broadcasting networks is widely different. Since Meloni, the RAI in Italy is facing similar issues, but Hungary is still the canonic example of government misinformation and propaganda.
That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having. The topic was whether people should have free access to news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of that news.
People have free access to public roads all around the world, and the quality wildly differs in that as well. Also the quality of for-profit news services does differ wildly, you might have an opinion about that of fox news, for example, but that is also off topic in this discussion.
No it isn't an orthogonal discussion. The reason Orban wants people to have free access to his propaganda is because it directly serves his purpose. To finance it directly from sales of the media would defeat the purpose. Coupled with Orban's attack on free media it completes the picture.
> That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having. The topic was whether people should have free access to news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of that news.
On the contrary, the quality of the news is very important to the discussion. There is no point in making trash freely available to the public, after all.
The topic is a bit more nuanced, and far wider than "not fitting my favourite narrative on some topics, so it is generally and objectively trash".
think about this: I will get mostly objective and useful reports of the flood approaching my home near the river regardless the narrative/interpretation they might have on some other topics, or the biased reporting on the merits of the government in handling the situation at the dams.
For me I'm not here to debate on the political policies of some governments, just gave a few examples of ways to fund public access to news. This discussion is over from my part.
I would argue the people of Hungary would be better off without hatred against asylum seekers and minorities, political opponents, lies and misinformation.
People doing it in their free time because they care a lot about the subject (nowadays with things like Twitter its quite possible for an independent obsessive to write a good piece on, for instance, the Ukraine War by mostly referring to open sources and public announcements by governments and corporations)
Every news source has biases. Under the paywall business model, the people who share the biases of their favored news outlets pay for them, and in exchange, they get to ensconce themselves inside a bubble free of dissenting viewpoints. This also reinforces the bias of the news outlet; if they don’t toe the line, they will lose subscribers.
Instead of paying news outlets to provide ourselves with filtered feeds of content that match our own biases, we could instead pay news outlets to produce competing streams of explicit propaganda to be freely disseminated. The overall bias and quality of the news would be largely unchanged, even if the biases were more obvious; in fact, it may even improve.
Who pays?