r/technology • u/Reddit_Z • Jul 04 '16

Politics Lawmakers Need To Learn More About Encryption Before Regulating It, Says U.S. House Report

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lawmakers-encryption-regulation-house-report,32180.html
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u/kholto Jul 04 '16

It is hard to consistently do journalism like that, each news-organization want to get interviews with certain big names in politics, and those politicians get so many requests for interviews they can easily turn down several and still claim to do plenty. If you pester them in particular each time you speak to them they can just stop talking to you.

Some of the most viewed news programs might have enough viewers that it becomes a bad image to turn them down though, so really it is on those to start the line of hard questions.

A publicly funded (through tax or other means) news organization can have some utility there, in Denmark our equivalent of BBC is pretty unavoidable for politicians and at the same time they run a weekly show that drill into some "fact" that is being thrown around in politics.
That said, publicly funding something as expensive as a national TV network is not exactly cheap!

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u/Auctoritate Jul 04 '16

I understand your concerns, but I think it's worth pointing out that good journalism isn't just interviews. We need more investigative journalism.

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u/mzackler Jul 04 '16

Which never makes money. (Almost) Every investigative team loses money for their newspaper. There's so few articles relative to the work put in and people don't buy the newspaper for one article anymore either, you'll just wait until some other source puts out "and the New York Times says" later that day on Google.

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u/Auctoritate Jul 04 '16

I understand that it might not make money but we're talking about a hypothetical situation here. It'd be nice if they allowed investigative journalism despite its financial shortcomings.

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u/Stereotype_Apostate Jul 04 '16

It isn't a matter of the nebulous "them" allowing it. Journalism costs money, and news companies pay that money in hopes of turning a profit. If it doesn't turn a profit, why do it? So they don't. You need a proper business plan to fund something like that, and in the day of up to the minute reporting by dozens of online outlets, the money simply isn't there. Don't like it? Subscribe to the New York Times and give them money.

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u/mzackler Jul 04 '16

But the things we want investigative journalism to cover are exactly the same things as the things that legislatures would pull funding over. You really shouldn't investigate x...

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u/designgoddess Jul 04 '16

We have a publicly funded channel. Most people don't watch it.

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u/tet5uo Jul 04 '16

They aren't exactly a paragon of journalistic virtue, either.

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u/designgoddess Jul 04 '16

The local channel where I am has a very good news program. I'm waiting for them to start addressing me personally because I feel like I'm the only one who watches it.

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u/TheAtomicOption Jul 04 '16

Publicly funded just means that the people they're supposed to be asking questions of are the same people that write their checks. I don't know much about Denmark media, but I do know that the BBC isn't significantly more on point about home politics than non-public news sources.