Bilal Baydoun
Views here my own. Director of Democratic Institutions @rooseveltinstitute.org and @Rooseveltforward.org. #FirstGen Go Blue.
- In whatever democracy reform package/effort emerges out of this, we cannot give short shrift to public media as vital democratic infrastructure. It has to be front and center.
- Democracy Dies in Darkness. That’s why we love this new UV Lamp! (sponsored)
- Any newspapers that pose a threat to their billionaire owners are going to get the Grover Norquist treatment. They will be made small enough to drown in a bathtub. And the owners will use same pretexts—efficiency, viability, “waste”—to justify this ideological project.
- What we’re witnessing at the Washington Post is the folly of entrusting self-interested billionaires with any democratic institution, especially a free and independent press. We need to a) permanently bury the myth of billionaire saviors and b) build a world-class public media system.
- Yes.
- To be clear this is a joke and not a direct quote from the Bezos Zoom call.
- Journalism is valuable because of its benefits to the polity, not how much it contributes to GDP. Talking about newsrooms only in economic or financial terms is a slick way to obscure that. Viability to what end? Presumably, one would want a newspaper to remain viable so that it can be a newspaper.
- If you cut all the journalists you can just run sponsored content at every desk. Sports Desk by DraftKings. International Desk by Northrop Grumman. Or maybe the reporters can wear ad jackets like NASCAR drivers. That would be great for viability.
- Yes but this wasn't inevitable. The internet destroyed key sources of revenue like classified ads (e.g. Craigslist). But we could insulated journalism from market failure by standing up a robust publicly-funded media system. We still can! Commercialism was always an existential threat to journalism.
- This. The economic justifications we get whenever a newspaper is decimated are always ideological. "Viability" is a euphemism that treats journalistic organizations like profit-maximizing firms and nothing else. Democracy isn't viable without journalism.
