Hello from drizzly Oxford!
I have just two new things to share — a piece I wrote last week for the Washington Post, and another for New Socialist.
While I’m cloistered away at grad school I am still trying to maintain the glimmer of a life beyond my thesis research. So hopefully you're comfortable with this being a somewhat patchy project.
📻 We need a PBS for the Internet age // The Washington Post
This piece went up last week, and is an issue that’s at the core of both my current graduate research and what I plan to work on afterward. I’d love thoughts and feedback, critiques too! It’s a somewhat wide open space, policy wise. As I argue in the piece — a healthy public sphere needs a healthy public media. We’ve built the equivalent for television and radio. Now it’s time to do it for the Internet.
I also want to underline a point I raise in the article but wasn’t the core focus: Facebook and Google’s recent announcements to invest a combined $600 million in local news (via grant programs in which they make all the decisions) also means that American journalism will now be subsidized by big tech at a level on par with public funding (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget is only about $445 million, and total state funding is about $235 million… NEA and NEH grants to public media are essentially pennies). Not ideal! However, to drive this home even further, this is a part of the piece that got cut to squeeze down the word count:
U.S. Public media funding is anemic in comparison to other western nations. According to a 2016 report commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the U.S. spends roughly $3 per capita on public media with public funds, the average for 18 Western nations in the report is $86. Norway spends about $180 per capita each year on its public broadcasters; the U.K., $114. The CPB has a budget of $445 million, compared to the BBC’s $4.9 Billion, Germany’s two major public service broadcasters’ shared $9 billion, or even Canada’s $1.2 billion parliamentary appropriation to serve a population roughly one tenth the size of America’s.
Also, highly recommend checking out Free Press’ recent “Beyond Fixing Facebook” white paper (thanks to Tim Karr for pointing it out!)
🎡 Once more for those at the top: fake news is a symptom // New Socialist
This is a longer piece that, truth be told, grew out of one of those classic car arguments with my boyfriend about Silicon Valley’s attitude of technological determinism toward the societal problems it creates. We’ll probably argue about it again, which is good cuz I’ll have more to write.
The excellent Wendy Liu edited this piece, I highly recommend her newsletter, and her Tribune piece Abolish Silicon Valley.
That’s all!
Erik