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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1892258
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I saw this quote earlier today and responded to it there, but I'll also comment here.
If the press is not free, it means the government owns it. This means that they'll use it to manipulate narratives and take control. This is bad because the government is exclusively self-interested and evil. It will not hesitate to perform the worst acts imaginable to secure wealth and power.
The best model for the press (at least, that I can think of) is a free market press. One where people freely and continuously choose which press they'd like to support and the more support a news company receives, the more people it can deliver news to.
Yes, there's a risk that the press is bought and bribed, but it's a guarantee with a government controlled press (in that case, the government is the one to buy the press).
Without government involvement, people can hear both sides of the story and the possibility for new, unbiased journalists exists.
What you are saying is not true. Under socialism, the government is made out of representatives democratically elected by workers who care about the interest of workers. Also, socialism is a system which main goal is to benefit people, so every person in power has that goal. Therefore, news will be more transparent because their point is to show the truth to people instead of just being manipulated information paid off by the wealthy which is the case right now. What you called “both sides” is the same side paying off the two political parties that it owns to write slightly different content.
A dictatorship of the proletariat would be interested in news that help the people and not that help the bourgeoisie.
Who “buys and bribes” the press under the government? The government, of course, but in the name of what? A certain class. Under the bourgeoisie, the press serves the bourgeois state regardless of direct ownership, this is what Lenin is attempting to demonstrate. How do you refute this? You don’t, just as Lenin said you cannot. Instead you say that having direct government ownership is worse. Why? Because “government is evil and market relations are good as a rule”. How is this demonstrated? By you asserting it?
Probably not worth bothering with this one, they seem like an ancap lol
Like, they literally post in a "capitalist questions and discussions" community to make posts praising free market capitalism and complaining about the evils of government intervention (any government intervention)
I want to specialize in converting libs though since we are short on people for the revolution 😅
I'm seriously perplexed what these people think they'll accomplish by trying to bait here.
'Let the people elected to power decide what the masses get to see, they're not self interested'
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha
Even if they were all evil, the bourgeoisie are much worse as we can see today
It's a little more complicated to argue that the free market is good for the consumer (though it can be done), but it's pretty easy to argue that government is self-interested and power-hungry.
Firstly, history. Nearly every government ever has been populated with people concerned with their own power. Even since the popularization of democracy, governments were still incredibly corrupt and did not operate out of a love for the people. All democracy really does to alleviate a government's self-interest is make charisma more important during election cycles, which doesn't do anything to shift the government's interests.
The people in the government are the same type of people as CEOs and people who run multi-billion companies. Whether they're put in power by military force, by elections, or by people willingly giving them money for a good or service in return, they are all people who are 100% acting in their own self-interest collecting as much wealth and power as possible. The only thing that elections do is make it so that sometimes, some government officials have to appear to be good (or appear not as bad as their opponent).
That's way easier if the press is under the government's control though. Now, the government could imprison anyone who doesn't talk about how nice the president is to puppies for at least an hour. Or, less drastically, they could revoke your press license if you say that the things the president is saying is wrong (and then fine or imprison you if you deliver news without a license).
In a free press though, even if all the major news sources are owned by the same people (which is a good point and probably to some extent true, though I don't know to what extent), there's nothing stopping new people from popping up and delivering what they believe to be honest, unbiased news. That won't be the only type of person who pops up, and it'll be exploited a lot, but the possibility of a good news source exists now.
I don't hate to break it to you that
will never work with
uh, why? It seems like a free market economy is exactly where a free market press would work. Companies might buy news companies, but thanks to no government interaction, other news companies can pop up, make money because they deliver a service people want, and then grow.
And existing monopolies won't give a fuck about it, yeah.
They might not like it but it's what happens anyway. I don't have many examples off the top of my head, but I do know of at least one YouTuber who gives updates on geopolitics.
But, what actually happens in reality is, this...
Why would any top company allow others to challenge their market share? Why does the trend under capitalism (where economic power stands above political power, and governments) tend towards increasing monopolization / fewer companies, in every industry?
I love me some tautological nothings!
Tautological means that it’s a true statement in every possible case, but the government being evil isn’t.
This is moreso how I meant it.
"This is bad... because [they're] evil."
Ah, I see the tautology now lol
Read Parenti - Inventing reality. You need to badly.
but it is worth mentioning that both the USSR back in the day, and China now ha[d][ve] state-owned press, and they also allow[ed] anyone to publish their own press. The USSR was also known to allow its state-owned journalists to publish critiques of the government, and present information in ways that didn't always suit the state. Socialist press was and is far more free than "free" market press.
All of the major news organizations in the West get large portions of their funding from their governments. Some of them also get their funding from the funders of politicians. The vast majority of "independent" journalists will quote those organizations in their publications, meaning "independent" journalism in the West is nothing more than an extension of mainstream media. The only ones who break from this norm are publications that attempt to oppose MSM's reporting.
Six corporations own 90% of news media in the United States. They're NBCUniversal (COMCAST), Disney, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), VIACOM, News Corporation, and AT&T. All of these companies have rich executives who've been known to fund not just individual politicians, but both heads of the American party (I.E. both the Republican and the Democratic parties). Our government is owned by corporations, and those corporations also own our information.
Meanwhile, if you were to go to China and rummage through their news media, you'd see that their media is much more honest about where it comes from, and it's far easier to find the true truth. Sure, sometimes the state-owned media won't publish the full truth, but there are always a few actually independent journalists who're covering the same story, who will publish other views of the situation. That's heaps better than what we have here.