On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 09:44:38PM +1000, Alex Hutton wrote:
It really depends upon what there is demand for. If consumers demand a high standard of journalism and are willing to pay for it then that is what will be supplied.
Consider that you as an individual could commission a journalist (or better yet, an investigator) to investigate into a particular matter that you might be interested in, then you could release the findings yourself and perhaps charge a small fee for it in order to recoup your costs.
you've really bought into the American Libertarian fantasy-land, haven't you? sorry, but the real world doesn't work anything like how they pretend it does. To start with, their foundational article of faith, the "free market" that they bleat on and on about does not exist, never has existed, and never can exist - it's a theoretical ideal that assumes a perfectly frictionless market with perfectly *rational* actors (both buyers and sellers) who *always* act in their own best interest, and that there are no systemic factors that inhibit competition. It's a thought-experiment, not a description (or even a prescription) of the real world. markets aren't like that, and people aren't like that. American-style Libertarianism is a perfect example of people not acting in their own best interest - suckered into championing the causes (no regulations, monopoly grants, privatisation of everything, the philosophies that "greed is good" and "there is no such thing as society", and more) of their enemies - large corporations - in the name of "Freedom!" in truth, a US Libertarian society would be as awful to live in as a Stalinist or Maoist State Capitalist society, with the added horror of third-world poverty for the bulk of the population (the "99%" in current popular terminology). craig ps: please read up on real libertarianism, as defined in the rest of the world, and before american anarcho-capitalists hijacked the term. here's a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #40: not enough memory, go get system upgrade