Web Excursions 2022-10-26
Do countries with better-funded public media also have healthier democracies? Of course they do
There’s a new book coming out in the U.K. this week called The BBC: A People’s History, by David Hendy.
Cross the pond: While Americans generally like PBS and NPR, I wouldn’t expect them to come up quickly if you asked someone on the street to begin listing national treasures.
The BBC, which turns 100 this year, was more structured, more statist, more controlled — but has remained more central to residents’ lives, more civic-minded, and more beloved.
Those different visions of public service broadcasting have affected how we get our news.
But do they also affect something deeper — civic life, or democracy itself?
That’s the subject of a new paper out in The International Journal of Press/Politics “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries” by Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard, both of Penn.
This study examines whether and how public media systems contribute to the health of democracies in 33 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, the Middle East, Latin America, and South America.
[It] find five models of public media systems around the world, ranging from
“state-administered” systems with low levels of independence (Botswana and Tunisia) to
systems aligning with Hallin and Mancini’s “Democratic Corporatist” model, with strong and secure (multiyear) funding, large audience shares, and strong regulatory protection for their independence. In between, [they] identify three mixed models:
a “Liberal-Pluralist” model,
a “Direct Funding” model, and
a “Commercial–Public” model.
High levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.
the interactions between politics and media are affected not just by individual players or institutions (a Murdoch or a New York Times)
but by the structures of a country’s broader media system —
something influenced by government regulation, political history, technology, geography, and the market, among other things
The most obvious way to measure the importance a country puts on a public broadcaster is how much money, per capita, it spends on it.
Germany spends $142.42 per person on its public media. Norway spends $110.73, Finland $101.29, Denmark $93.16.
Leave Scandinavia for Western Europe and you see the U.K. at $81.30, France at $75.89, and Spain at $58.25.
The Czech Republic’s at $60.08, Estonia $55.70, and Lithuania $32.71.
Australia $35.78, New Zealand $26.86, or Canada $26.51
Asia? Japan spends $53.15, South Korea $14.93. Africa? Botswana’s at $18.38, Cabo Verde $15.22.
And then there’s the United States — which spends $3.16, per person, per year, on public broadcasting
Higher ratios show larger disparities between public media funding per capita and GDP per capita.
Only Taiwan’s GDP–funding ratio (7,089) exceeds the U.S. ratio (6,380).
countries in Latin America and South America have exceptionally large ratios.
Two of these countries — Chile and Colombia — have primarily commercial-funded public media systems.
What share of their media consumption time do people in their countries spend consuming public media?
shares again tending to be higher in Western European countries (e.g., 40 percent in Norway and 35 percent in Sweden)
but also in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., 35.6 percent in Botswana, 38 percent in Cabo Verde, and 38 percent in South Africa).
Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have public media with far lower market shares (e.g., 0.4 percent in Uruguay and 2 percent in Argentina).
North American public media also are outliers (5.1 percent share in Canada and 2 percent share in the U.S.).
the tradeoff, of course, is that market-driven news organizations act differently than public-supported ones.
BBC is unlikely to start pushing ivermectin because it thinks there’s a market opportunity on the far right.
In essence, the more a country’s people see themselves as part of a unified us, the more likely they are to fund more generous social programs.
The more they see their country as a nightmarish mix of blood-sucking immigrants, ethnic others, and people who don’t look or act or sound like you — the less likely they are to want to chip in.
It’s no accident that the American states with the worst racial histories are also the ones that offer the weakest social safety nets.
It’s not surprising that Scandinavian countries — long places of relative unity in terms of race, religion, and language — fund larger welfare states as well as more robust public media.
And it’s also not surprising that, as those countries have grown more diverse, their safety nets are starting to tear.
Public broadcasters are part of a nation’s media-political system — but they’re also a result of it.
1000小食报 #25 一件很小很美的事 | 1000小食报
着手写农历旧年的最后一期小报前，我花了 2.5 小时核算了一下过去半年里，自己在「1000小食」计划里投入的时间，一共是 748 小时（不含本期小报的统计和撰写时间）。
本土饮食传播项目筹备、落地：322 h
撰写编辑每周的 newsletter：240 h - 每周二更新的《1000小食报》自 8.10 发刊起累计更新 24 期，平均每期用时 10 小时。
个体经验采集，访谈与对话：91 h - 包括了与 41 位朋友进行的面对面，线上语音的深度对话。这些对话提供给我的既有宝贵的个体饮食经验和洞察，也对我做饮食传播带来了不同专业视角的启发。
做了 13 次招待朋友的「小家宴」：65 h
准备、进行分享会演讲：19 h - 带着「1000小食」和《1000小食报》参加了「灵感买家俱乐部」的线上分享、「企鹅吃喝指南」编辑部、「稻来传媒」美食纪录片团队内部分享会、竹白通讯创作者分享、开 FUN citywalk
参加播客节目、接受采访：11 h
2100 人 - 《1000小食报》截至 2022 年 1 月 25 日的订阅人数。
235 人 - 在「订阅」之外，还和「1000小食」计划产生了进一步连接的人数
0.5 年度体会
本土饮食需要离开本土，家宴可以离开家。
亲口吃到、亲手去做是饮食传播无法替代的方式。
个体经验是否产生共鸣，在于是否有足够深入的解释。
在价值层面，对《新京报》报道的批评和监督是应该的，报道的专业操作和伦理规范问题绝对值得检讨。但是，我想提醒三点。
第一，对《新京报》报道的批评，不应遮蔽对系统性问题的探讨。
第二，我们要区分“反媒体”的势力和正常的“媒体批评”。
区分的标准很简单：前者主要为了追求流量或其他利益，后者主要为了参与和贡献公共讨论；
前者希望媒体死掉，后者希望媒体正视和改正问题；
前者能提出的方案，就是干掉媒体、污名记者，拥有一个更一元的舆论场，而后者则希望有更多元且健康的声音。
这两天攻击《新京报》的一些营销号和大 V 就可以归入“反媒体”的类别
第三，我们应该思索：《新京报》报道的问题是如何产生的，是因为编辑记者“无良”吗？
一家传统纸媒，为什么将工作重心转到了社交媒体和短视频？在制作短视频的过程中，又为何急于将单方面的说法播出？在社交媒体和短视频牢牢控制着流量的今天，我们真的有土壤去支持理想中的充分的、深入的、慢一步的报道吗？更刻薄一点说，今天在网上大骂《新京报》的一些人，如果真的有一篇深度报道摆在他们面前，他们会读吗？
这并非为《新京报》的编辑记者辩护，他们理应有更高的专业追求，理应反思报道的问题。
但我们都知道：靠个人的意志品质是靠不住的，我们的媒体需要更好的支持条件。
甚至可以说，他们需要一场救赎，因为他们在社交媒体平台的世界里，已经被彻底异化了。
一份报纸的业务讨论和批评做得最好的时期，就是报社资源最多、最兵强马壮的时期。
而当一家媒体疲于奔命、朝不保夕的时候，没有人会有精力去反思业务问题、提高业务水平。
在刘学州的悲剧中，需要多关注平台的角色。
一方面，平台的诸多设计在客观上方便、容纳甚至鼓励了网暴者的行为，促进了网暴文化的形成。
另一方面，和媒体比起来，平台公司的财力雄厚（其实，媒体的衰落和平台的兴盛直接相关），理应处于一个可以更好地批评与反思的位置。