Comments on: A plan to support creative work — 100 government dollars at a time

By: public media funding in comparison « transd[e]uce

public media funding in comparison « transd[e]uce — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:18:27 +0000

[...] charge of deciding which media outlets deserve our public funds should consider Dean Baker’s proposal: Every year each taxpayer would receive an “Artistic Freedom Voucher” (worth, say, [...]

By: Michael Andersen

Michael Andersen — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:19:27 +0000

And thanks for the link, Walter — another suggestion for government funding I’d seen but forgotten.

By: Michael Andersen

Michael Andersen — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:18:01 +0000

Actually, M, I’m a very loyal NPR listener, and I’d claim that my local Fox affiliate “gets on the ground and talks to low- and medium-income folks about what’s going on in their communities and in their lives” every night.

My local NPR affiliate, by contrast, will occasionally report on issues of interest to poor people, but their news segments, at least, are usually from the perspective of governments or agencies, not private citizens.

Is it possible that you’re confusing the poor with the destitute? I’d agree that NPR probably does a better job of reporting on the destitute than Fox, but my local homeless paper does a better job than NPR.

By: M

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:39:24 +0000

Absurd. There would be so much competition for the voucher funding, and so much of it would be “drum solos” and the like – things that are small scale and ultimately irrelevant to the population – that news organizations wouldn’t survive more than a year or two. I’m sorry, but I’m not buying the idea that a majority people would take vouchers at their face value and not just squander them on the first out-there request that comes along. I’m convinced that a lot of them would hand the voucher to any fly-by-night organization or self-defined artist, pat themselves on the back for being “good citizens”, and destroy investigative journalism in the bargain. This is a terrible idea that only the kind of moron who actually believes that – as politicians love to panderingly repeat – “people are smart” would come up with. People like Coldplay, American Idol, and put Dick Cheney in office. USA Today has the nation’s highest circulation. Yeah, people are smart.

Meanwhile, NPR is one of very few news sources that consistently gets on the ground and talks to low- and medium-income folks about what’s going on in their communities and in their lives. Their reporting on working-class America is second to none (with the possible exception of PBS). Anyone who claims otherwise either doesn’t listen to NPR or is making a deliberately false claim.

By: Walter Abbott

Walter Abbott — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:12:33 +0000

Write Now
Why Barack Obama should resurrect the Federal Writers Project and bail out laid-off journalists.

Mark I. Pinsky
December 8, 2008

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/write-now?id=428819dc-f4bf-4db3-a6e8-1b601c8fe273