MEDIAWATCH: Why Google & Facebook should fund journalism in NZ
Platforms under pressure to pay for news
There’s mounting pressure on tech titans Google and Facebook to pay local news media to carry their news online. Google has already done deals with some for its News Showcase, but other big names in news are still trying to get the platforms to pay – and the government’s hinting it could force the issue soon.
Facebook and Google have taken the advertising revenue that kept journalism alive while providing a platform that allows fake news and propaganda to flourish!
Use the people causing the disinformation to pay for the journalism to correct them!
State funded journalism has the reek of bias and that has been a criticism of the current NZ on Air Journalism Fund.
A journalism fund funded by ring fenced tax from the media industry is a solution to counter the mad extremism being grown by social media hate algorithms.
Treasury doesn’t want to ring fence the tax for Journalism, but Grant should step in and tell them otherwise!
Social Media hate algorithms are a threat to our common sense of reality, we need Fourth Estate Journalism that is well funded and healthy, this is a solution that makes the creators of that misinformation pay for the Journalism to inoculate is from their product!
These companies are the new Gods and listen to no single Government. Watch the following in horror.
I’m not looking for socialism here folks, I’m just looking for basic regulated capitalism!
The mind warping monopoly positions of power these Tech companies have established must be challenged, not negotiated with!
If Labour can successfully negotiate a meaningful arrangement that can pump $40m into public fund journalism annually, it will be the first industry they’ve managed to successfully regulate since coming to office!
This matters because the current $50Million Public Interest Journalism Fund over 3 years via NZ on Air has become tainted as a source of Government propaganda as opposed to journalism.
Th matters because someone has to start pushing back against the tech corporations.
This matters because in 2010, 388 individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber alles where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
I for one say fuck Google and Facebook’s interests and profit margins, they can pay for their damage just like Tobacco, Gambling and Booze do and the way the oil companies should!
Their product causes social damage, the least they can do is start paying for that social damage!
Tax them, ring fence that tax for journalism that is managed by a special branch of NZ on Air and start producing Fourth Estate Journalism that matters rather than the identity politics public funding score card it’s become.
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Problem is how do you make them pay?
As you stated big tech are platforms for all information. One great big bulletin board and trying to get our government to make these companies pay to have their bulletin board in our hood is pushing shit up hill unfortunately.
Take Larry Paige and hold him upside down and shake him until money comes out. Legally and with due process.
I think it would be great if media got funding from Google and Facebook.
Maybe it would stop them all reading off the government hymn sheet in unison, for a few dollar more.It been glaring on some topic’s.
Aargh yes Wolly good point about govt not doing anything.
Is it in there interest?
Agreed, we totally need more Big Tech gatekeeping news/media and full of propaganda than we already have. Oh wait.