It depends on the habit of attend­ing to and look­ing into pub­lic trans­ac­tions, and on the degree of inform­a­tion and solid judg­ment respect­ing them that exists in the com­munity, whether the con­duct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards oth­ers, shall be selfish, cor­rupt and tyr­an­nical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.
John Stu­art Mill

Every­one has a pur­pose in life. Per­haps yours is watch­ing tele­vi­sion.
David Let­ter­man

The pub­lic doesn’t deserve tele­vi­sion journ­al­ism as cur­rently man­dated by Brit­ish pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, because Britain’s polit­ical sys­tem provides no incent­ive for an informed pub­lic, and because the idea of an informed pub­lic is one of con­tem­por­ary polit­ics’ neces­sary myths. There’s actu­ally little evid­ence that broad­cast news is the unique medium by which the pub­lic can be mor­ally trans­formed, but plenty of evid­ence for a long tra­di­tion of social cri­ti­cism that sees the dom­in­ant inform­a­tion tech­no­logy as an agent of rad­ical change.

So where did the idea come from that the pub­lic deserved the news from tele­vi­sion? The answer that used to spring to people’s lips was a single name, John Reith. Reith developed the argu­ment that a short­age of wave­band made broad­cast­ing a pub­lic good, to be held in com­mon. It was a monopolist’s argu­ment with an aus­tere coat­ing of pater­nal­ism, and went by the name of ‘spec­trum scarcity.’ Just as imper­i­al­ism fol­lowed empire, the jus­ti­fic­a­tion came after the polit­ical fact of mono­poly. Con­tinue read­ing →