Congress isn't forbidden from exercising editorial control (can Congress forbid itself from doing anything except via constitutional amendment?). They forbade the executive branch from doing so whilst simultaneously imposing rules on what the CPB may fund.
This looks like a thorny legal tangle indeed. It would appear incoherent lawmaking to insist that no "officer of the United States" can "exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors" whilst simultaneously legislating that it may not "contribute to or otherwise support any political party."
Who is meant to enforce that rule exactly, if nobody who works for the US government is allowed to exercise any supervision or control? A literal reading would say that even the DoJ may not prosecute any infraction of the political neutrality rule, thus violating the principle that nobody is above the law.
Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to.
There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.
Good lord. So now there's no objective truth, yes? Just which media is trusted by whom? So the government no longer has the remit to report, and to insure reportage of objective truth? My point is that while BBC may only be trusted by 45% of the population, that doesn't matter: They are doing their best to report objectively. So is PBS and NPR. You can make whatever accusations you want about trust, or bias, but can you point to a news article where PBS or NPR was objectively false? I can turn on Fox news and instantly hear lies at any moment, or at best, failure to report facts. Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening! Welcome to 1984. Orwell was a few decades off.
There is such a thing as objective truth. Note that NPR's former head doesn't believe that [1]. Anyway, most people in Britain disagree that the BBC does its best to report it.
Here's a simple reality check: how does the BBC describe right wing politicians? Dame Andrea Jenkyns DBE is a former Tory MP, government minister and campaigner for Brexit. She has a degree in economics, spent 20 years in Parliament and she just won mayorship of Greater Lincolnshire. This is the headline the BBC went with:
"Reform UK's Andrea Jenkyns is the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, marking a return to politics for the former Gregg's worker and Miss UK finalist"
She's 50 but the BBC's audience hears about what she did as a teenage girl. It's not an isolated incident. Nobody serious tries to argue the BBC is neutral, fair or objective anymore. Reform is the highest polling party in Britain, it's awful to make all those voters pay money to an organization that openly hates them.
> Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening!
In the US the 'press' / media is supposed to be a quasi 4th branch of government (society by the people, for the people).
Such organizations are important for the voting public to remain informed and thus elect with an informed choice.
... It would also not surprise me if ~25-35% of the US population 'did not trust PBS / NPR' because they didn't like what they heard and thus preferred to disbelieve the sources.
Unfortunately, the media is put in a position of desperate survival mode with the advent of the attention economy. Which has unsurprisingly lead to the "reality-TV-ification" of TV news, and the lazy "here's-what-is-happening-according-to-twitter-journalism" of print media.
Cable news networks - which had to fill whole days with news, sort of started that trend.
It wasn't always quite that bad, it used to be the same stuff repeated for people in venues like lounges at airports or restaurants that wanted to cater to business crowds.
Then around 2001 there was that terrorist attack on the US ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks ). Networks did 24/7 'news' coverage; ever more of a spectacle as time dragged on. In recollection their need for attention, to excite and draw in eyeballs, probably helped with the implicit goal of 'terrorism' to instill terror.
Rather than behaving as rational adults, digesting a negative event, reflecting on what could be done differently ( do not negotiate with terrorists, do not remain passive sheep on an airplane, and FFS lock the cockpit doors ); everyone 'blinked' and caved. Freedoms and liberty were traded for news as entertainment, security theater, and excuses to enter wars 'on terrorism' with unclear goals and objectives.
The 'Internet' probably didn't help in offering a cheaper and supposedly 'better targeted' venue for ads. Other than informative ads (X exists, it can do Y), I find the entertainment focus to be intellectual junk food and noise against the signal. It would probably be a public good if that were heavily regulated.
What profound moral problem are you talking about? If you take your point even further, you could argue there’s a moral problem with forcing people who are distrusting of or despise the government to pay taxes at all, but it’s generally agreed that the health of a country in part does depend on revenues generated by taxes (since you need money to pay for things that benefit many people, like roads, public transit, etc.).
Yeah, the morality of taxation and the role of the state is a deep topic that has been debated for thousands of years.
Nearly everyone accepts that taxation is justified for some cases where you can't really avoid benefiting from the expenditure, the textbook example being public goods like defense (you can't opt-out of benefiting from the defeat of an invading army) or a lighthouse (you can't stop a sailor who didn't pay from seeing it).
And post-communism most people accept that taxation is not justified for many other cases, for example, using tax money to gift the president a private golf club would not be moral (he can buy golfing time with his salary or prior wealth). The benefit only accrues to the user in that case, and they can easily pay for it themselves.
In the past you could argue that state media was more like a lighthouse, because signals were broadcast from towers unencrypted and there was no way to restrict reception to people who paid. So, pass a tax and make everyone pay if they own any kind of receiving device at all.
But technological progress has changed everything. It's now easy to restrict broadcasts to only people who paid for them. TV/radio is no longer like a lighthouse, it's now more like a magazine and therefore it's immoral to tax fund them because they're not public goods anymore. You wouldn't be happy to find the government had forcibly subscribed you to the Wall Street Journal, right? You'd point out that people who want to read it can just buy a copy themselves. Same thing for TV/radio.
Maybe your argument makes sense in the US, but in many countries (like here in Germany) there do exist TV and radio that are publicly funded, trusted, and good, so yes I’m more than okay that I have to pay monthly, and in your words, “forcibly subscribed” to the ARD and ZDF. I think having trustworthy news that is accessible to everyone is extremely useful and important so even if I didn’t use them myself I’m glad to pay so that others can.
The argument makes sense everywhere. There exist in Germany TV and radio that maybe you trust and think are good, and maybe you enjoy forcing other people pay for them against their will. But there are many people who would profoundly disagree with you on that in Germany: ask any AfD voter.
Again, to see this, just consider how you'd feel if FOX News launched a German version and you were forced to pay for that against your will. Would you find that moral? Don't try and claim subjective quality judgements make a difference; obviously plenty of people think FOX News is high quality, that's why they watch it.
I really dislike this line of argument that goes like "everything is the same as everything else so why don't you oppose this?".
Okay, but Fox News is obviously fundamentally different because it's a private entertainment program. That's why it's bought out and influenced by the ultra-wealthy. It's a propaganda program for capitalists. You can't just say that's "the same" as a neutrally-funded public program.
You can't "sell", so to speak, public services. That's why republican generally oppose it - they can't give a slice to their cronies so they don't want it. The problem with things like SS, which the right has attacked and attempted to dismantle the second it was written into law, isn't that it's "unfair", it's that it's not private. If you actually look at the proposals for dismantling SS, they all involve privatizing it, aka stealing it and handing out slices to their cronies.
Things like PBS and NPR getting public funds and being allowed to exist is a problem to the right because it means it can't be bought and controlled like Huff Post or Fox can.
FOX isn't a private entertainment programme, it's a channel that's focused exclusively on news and current affairs. State media is the one that includes drama, comedy etc. If your argument is based on that distinction you'll have to rethink it. If it's just left wing good, right wing bad, then you've made my argument for me!
This is some very low effort gymnastics. Please reread the comment instead of whatever this sycophant reply was.
Nobody actually thinks Fox is high quality. That's not why they watch it. They just perceive other news to be just as bad, and it's cathartic to hear their own lies screamed back at them.
> If it's just left wing good, right wing bad, then you've made my argument for me!
No, that's not my argument.
My argument is that public and private media have different incentive structures so you can't just compare them like that.
And, in addition, the right hates anything public. Of course they want to dismantle public media, because that's what they do. They want to dismantle public schools too, and social security. Because then they, and their friends, can get their slice. The problem with public programs is that rich can't buy them.
And this isn't an unfair characterization of the right, this is their explicit goals. Again, with SS, the second it was made into law it was under attack by the right. They'll lie to you and say "it's insolvent! It doesn't work! We need to privatize it... if me and my cronies control it, then it would be much better!" But of course, what happens is they sell it off, you don't get your retirement, and the money gets stolen. They know that, that's why they want to do it.
> FOX isn't a private entertainment programme, it's a channel that's focused exclusively on news and current affairs.
See, this makes me think you're trolling. Come on now.
Your lighthouse parable is still highly relevant for public broadcasters when you consider that modern public broadcasting heavily subsidize expensive original reporting that for-profit newspapers are free to and happy to republish.
A core reason for having a robust public broadcasting system is that it lifts the quality of the entire information ecosystem.
Saying this as a Norwegian. I happily pay around 200/300 dollars a year for it out of my taxes.
Yes, people who enjoy state TV like making other people pay for their enjoyment. That's immoral. Certainly, you cannot argue it's moral because you personally believe it's high quality. Lots of people in any country feel the exact opposite: that state TV damages the entire information ecosystem and is outright malign. Under what consistent moral code should they be forced to pay for it?
I don't enjoy making others pay for my entertainment. What a petty way to frame the discussion.
You'll find broad/majority support for state broadcasters in Northern Europe. The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait. Doubly so in small countries with just a few million citizens.
Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society. Some would say paywalling a baseline of local knowledge constricts civic participation and is immoral. But that's a lame value judgement and should rightfully be dismissed.
I already showed that the UK - definitely a country in Northern Europe - doesn't have a majority that finds its state broadcaster trustworthy. We can assume those people who don't find it trustworthy don't support it, or if they do, do so only out of inertia and wouldn't care if it went away either.
> The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait
State media is much more than just news, so are you agreeing at least that all of the non-news production should be defunded?
But, of course it's viable to do for-profit news. There are plenty of successful private news companies out there that aren't niche. You are welcome to define all news you dislike as ragebait but that's clearly not an argument, it's just a "lame value judgement".
> Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society
It's not free and it's not non-commercial. People are paid to produce it via ordinary commercial contracts, and then people are forced to buy it. Nor is it a critical part of society. Society did just fine before state media was a thing. Meanwhile the injustice upon innocent people remains, and the existence of it harms society itself greatly via other paths as well.
People aren't forced to pay for the BBC though. Public funding is through a TV licence rather than tax, with the licence being "required" only if you watch live TV or use the BBC streaming service.
Given the other streaming services available it's very easy to watch TV without it. I've never paid.
Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
Yes, the UK is slowly backing away from enforcing the license fee (they also talk of decriminalization), partly because the immorality of it is clear to everyone and because those who don't care for it are now in the majority.
Nonetheless, there's no reason not to go all the way. There should not be a TV license, let alone one enforced by criminal law. Regular subscription and video scrambling systems are enough and have been for years.
The BBC is very strongly left wing and even its own employees recognize that. Look at the positions they take on a wide range of issues and you'll find they're all Labour positions or to the left of Labour.
I wasn't even talking about enforcement, I neither pay nor fall afoul of the terms.
I can't find any evidence of BBC employees calling it "far left", all I find when searching for that is right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough as well as some more "scientific" analysis that seemed to show it having a right wing bias. Most news bias raters put BBC as centre or centre left (it probably is centre left by US standards).
Looking at the top 3 stories now, two don't have any obvious political slant, Australian elections and arrest of terrorism suspects, whereas the 3rd is about local elections and starts with lots of quotes from Reform UK about how well they're doing. Perfect opportunity for a far left org to insert criticism, downplay, or just not report on them, but seems like pretty straight down the middle reporting.
Don't care about RFK Jr one way or another, but I checked a few claims in the article and every fact check failed. This is the most maliciously written article I've ever seen on Ars Technica :(
Examples:
> Kennedy published a story in Rolling Stone and Salon.com titled "Deadly Immunity," which ... described Offit as "in the pocket" of the pharmaceutical industry and claimed RotaTeq was "laced" with thimerosal.
They don't link to the article but the only place "in the pocket" appears is a direct quote from Offit himself arguing that he is immune to conflicts of interest [1].
> Rolling Stone and Salon amended some of the article's problems, but eventually Salon retracted it and Rolling Stone deleted it.
The wording implies that the article had so many factual errors by RFK Jr it was pulled shortly after publication, but Salon actually deleted it six years later in sync with the release of a new book on public health by a Salon staffer. Nor were any of the errors material to the case the article made, and Salon apologized to RFJ Jr in writing for introducing them as they reduced the word count of his article. None of this section is remotely close to what really appears to have happened.
> Looking back, Offit said he was sandbagged. "He's a liar. He lied about who he was; he lied about what he was doing. He was just wanting to set me up," Offit said.
Nothing in the article "sandbags" Offit in any way. He's treated with kid gloves and only appears twice, both times via direct quotes from himself.
> But Kennedy has frequently used thimerosal as a vaccine bogeyman over the years, claiming it causes harms (there is no evidence for this).
It's literally toxic.
> he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory ... Kennedy is a germ theory denialist and terrain theory embracer
And yet Ars admits (much later) that "Kennedy seems to accept that bacteria and viruses are real" and that terrain theory obviously does have merits. People who have read his book (I haven't) have said Kennedy just wants a better balance between improving people's general health and specifically pathogen-targeted pharmaceuticals.
Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
As for his other beliefs, like HIV not being the cause of AIDS, well that belief comes from renegade scientists in the 90s who alleged that a young Dr Fauci was at the center of a HIV-related conspiracy organized by virologists to give their field new relevance and grant funding, after attempts to connect viruses with the 60s era 'war on cancer' fell through. One of those scientists was himself a virologist, and another was Kary Mullis. Mullis is famous primarily for being the inventor of the PCR test, he even received a Nobel prize for it.
So where RFK Jr gets this stuff is no mystery.
Anyway the article is wrong. It quotes Paul Offit who makes the same claims in his Substack. I haven't read the book but people who have say Offit is selectively quoting Jr, who does believe germs exist; that he uses the terms miasma/terrain theory interchangeably, and that his book argues for a better balance between the notion of strengthening immune systems and targeted pathogen treatments - not that the latter shouldn't exist at all.
> Eh, after COVID it doesn't make sense to talk like that. There actually were grand conspiracies to smother the truth in which the output of scientific research was rendered untrustworthy. The people who tried to sound the alarm were slammed as paranoid lunatics, and then turned out to be correct.
> And one of the people organizing those conspiracies was Fauci. In order to protect ... virologists. We know all this because we can read the emails and Slack logs where the conspiracies were organized.
> Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.
> The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
> Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
> Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
There are forks but they're very limited in how far they can deviate from what Google wants. The Manifest v3 discussions show this. Extension APIs aren't a big part of browsers compared to all the other things they do, and there was clearly demand to keep Manifest v2 alive, so you'd expect at least one or two forkers to differentiate by doing that.
In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with it.
Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it, it's just that building a healthy contributor community is a different thing to uploading some source code. If you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks whose API changes radically depending on what platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner, last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a giant rewrite they were working on in private for months, obliterating all your work at a stroke.
There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-common-denominator internal abstractions or API commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
> The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks
I'm guessing you're specifically referring to Gecko's early over-use of XPCOM, which the Gecko team itself had to clean up in a long process of deCOMtamination [1].
I'm hopeful that if Servo ever gets enough funding to become a serious contender among browser engines (hey, KHTML was once an underdog too), that it might walk a middle path between overuse of COM-ish ABIs and what you described about Chromium. Servo is already decomposed into many smaller Rust crates; this provides a pretty strong compile-time boundary between modules. Yet those modules are all statically linked, and in a release build, that combined program gets the full benefit of LTO. Of course, where trait objects are used, there's still dynamic dispatch via vtables, but the point is that one can get strong modularity without using something COM-ish everywhere.
Incidentally, the first time I built Chromium (or more specifically, CEF) from source in late 2012, I was impressed as I watched hundreds of static libraries being linked into one big binary. Then as I studied the code (though not deeply enough to learn the things you described), I saw that Chromium didn't use anything COM-ish internally (though CEF provided a COM-ish ABI on top). That striking contrast with Gecko's architecture (which I had previously worked with) stuck with me. I wonder how much the heavily reliance on static linking and LTO (meaning whole-program optimization), combined with the complete lack of COMtamination, contributed to Chrome's speed, which was one of its early selling points.
[1]: Mozilla used to have a dedicated wiki page about deCOMtamination, but I can no longer find it.
It has some cartel-like aspects but lacks others, probably because the software industry has a unique structure in which there are nearly no distribution costs.
Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.
Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
I remember that apple, google, ms had some anti-poaching agreements in place, while not directly related it seems that that is also pattern of cartels to have informal agreements that hinders competition.
They all have contracts with Google, work on the same shared specifications and in the case of most browser companies, work on the same shared codebase. That would count as a joining together for the purposes of cartel law.
It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade secret until many years later, I think.
Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature.
Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware.
This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
> The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.
That app didn't fully load the Office apps despite the name, and if you removed it Office 97 still started way faster than its competitors. As it did on Linux.
The rumours were (that I remember) that Microsoft had a secret/invisible way to hook Office into Windows startup. Otherwise, how did it start so much faster than StarOffice, which appeared to have similar functionality.
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