But governments can also have an important role to play. Clearly, state-run and funded media is not the way to go: it is

But all too often, it’s on a trivial matter — the kind of things which come and go regularly to lots of fanfare but with little consequence. Maybe the President tweeted, parroting a line from Fox and Friends, and CNN picked it up and argued about it for 5 minutes before moving on.,That’s why we see, with so many state-owned media corporations, that while they are better at reporting the news than private organisations, they rarely go beyond the very surface-level information. The BBC, for example, toes the line pretty well compared to others, but is still constantly dogged by accusations of bias and threats to limit state funding. Indeed, as I write this, the government is pressing ahead with plans to end the “license fee” — the mechanism by which the BBC is funded — and replace it with a subscription-based model.,There’s every reason to believe that the demand for a different kind of news is going to keep rising throughout the 2020s, as our world becomes more interconnected and hundreds of millions more people are lifted into the global middle class. This demand is ready to exploit for already-established alternative news organisations, as well as completely new, perhaps fantastically innovative and resourceful organisations. But we might observe that this alternative industry growth is probably restricted to those with easy access to tech, with fewer hours to work, and with more money. The challenge will be trying to make this kind of news more widespread, and it’s not clear that this is a challenge which alternative organisations can easily meet.,You might think that state-owned media is at least a good partial solution to this problem. And certainly, there is room for new government-led or government-subsidised news corporations which have a more intelligent and informative brand of news as their aim. The problem is not that these corporations couldn’t theoretically come about; the problem is that they have very little wiggle room because of the unique pressures on state-owned media organisations.,It’s a challenge to which self-employed journalists, exploiting social media, could well rise to, though. We all know about dis- and misinformation, how it has spread on social media, and how social media exacerbates polarisation through echo chambers. But the flip-side of these content platforms is that they make it easier for authoritative, intelligent communicators to forge a career in an industry that would’ve either corporatised them or chewed them up and spat them out just a decade or so ago.,Social media and open platforms for content have already allowed thousands of great journalists to go it alone and make enough money to sustain themselves and fund their work. This site is a great example, but the truth is that no one company will ever have a monopoly on self-employed journalists because audiences which shift from platform to platform and follow those they trust wherever they go. The profit motives are not eliminated this way. But it does allow good journalists and reporters to have a different option, and a way of making money without the need for everything they do to go through the corporate filter.,This kind of stuff — angry, simplified debates, and irrelevant non-news — does not serve any purpose other than being good material to clip up onto YouTube channels and social media platforms and generating clicks and watch time. It has no benefit for the consumer whatsoever, only for the pockets of the companies.,These two shifts coincide somewhat: Vox would not be as successful without YouTube, for example. But they are distinct, and both provide an insight into the future of market-driven news.,The news at the moment is pretty horrible at anything other than surface-level reporting and clickbait. But we are seeing shifting dynamics in the industry, and there may be a way forward even within the profit-driven world.,Let’s look first at the non-government stuff, because it’s a lot less wonk-ish. Over the last decade, two big shifts have taken place in the media industry. New media organisations, dedicated to exploiting the growing demand for news, have been established, with Vox and Tortoise standing as two fairly good examples. At the same time, the rise of social media has allowed more and more journalists and commentators to become freelance or self-employed, creating content of all forms directly for their audience, not for corporate executives.,So while, broadly, the news being gloomy is good for us, the news as it stands is a bad product: good for the companies, bad for us. We need a kind of news which is still a warning, but more informative, analytical, and intelligent. The only problem is that this is a pretty difficult thing to bring about. If the news is a product of profit motives, then we’re not going to fundamentally change it without overthrowing capitalism. Whatever your views on that (personally I’m pretty against the idea), that’s not happening any time soon. Of course, there is a growing market for and range of better forms of news: Tortoise Media, a UK-based organisation based on “slow news”, is a good example. But the industry isn’t about to undergo the kind of radical shifts we might want it to.,So far, we’ve seen how profit-driven news sort of worked, but mostly failed, and how state-owned media has worked a bit better, but is unable to dig underneath stories to provide better news. But both the market and the government could still have an important role to play in changing news for the better.,So, on the one hand, you’ve got private organisations, most of which are driven by profit motives to exploit the clickbait model and people’s fear to generate revenue, with only a few firms being able to build a profitable model of intelligent news. And on the other hand, you’ve got state-owned media which is too simplistic, shackled by its funding mechanism and toeing an increasingly thin line on bias and neutrality. You’d be forgiven for giving up on the news at this point. But this isn’t the full story.,The week Rodriguez-Gerada created the painting was incredibly windy and it was hard to get the paint he was spraying on the pavement to land properly. Even finding enough paint was difficult, and his team bought out four Home Depots. But these technical aspects weren’t foremost on his mind, instead, he was thinking about Dr. Decoo’s eyes.,State-owned media companies always, without fail, upset left-wingers and right-wingers, who constantly accuse them of bias — usually mistaking neutrality for bias. They rely on limiting those accusations and the consistent support of the broad centre-ground majority of the country. So if a state-owned media company were to start digging deeper into stories, going beyond simply reporting what has happened and what has been said about it, they’d quickly run into hot water, opening themselves up to claims — even if entirely false — of bias and side-taking.