I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.
I propose no such thing! Quite to the contrary, what I am saying is that you are not scrutinizing the question enough. Specifically, the biases that all corporate media has towards promoting the idea of the near-monopoly on “legitimate journalism” held by corporate media and friendly state media, as well as promoting the institutional powers and corporate backers upon which they ground their business. I likewise think people shouldn’t rush to accept state-funded media as being “independent” when they have largely demonstrated a deep-seated bias towards promoting the interests of their state sponsors. This is not a coincidence!
People that are invested in getting stories that are against the interests of the country they are in must first recognize that it’s an uphill battle more complicated than the consumer lifestyle bullshit offered by the sources that – thanks to their capital giving them immense brand awareness – make themselves “easy to come by”.
While it’s undeniably true that subscription-based services spend a lot of resources on keeping people subscribed, they will have a very hard time accomplishing that goal without providing what their customers want in exchange for that. That doesn’t guarantee even slightly that what their customers want will be accurate information, as you demonstrated amply with your Alex Jones, Crowder, and Breitbart examples.
Tell me, does anyone who follows a news source not profess that they want “accurate information”? From CNN to Epoch Times to Breitbart to Yahoo News (funny how underrepresented the left is in major western news sources, by the way), does anyone say “Oh, I don’t care if it is accurate.” No, of course not! And yet, it should go without saying that people clearly have a bit more going on than that for a source like Breitbart to have success. Of course, once we establish some people are acting against their professed desire for accuracy and are happily being fed bullshit, this also brings oneself into question.
So if it’s not merely what they say they want, what do people actually want?
Let me take a slight detour: What is ideology? A set of beliefs regarding both values and empirical facts, I think everyone can agree on that. What is the basis for the adoption of ideology? This is much more contentious, but I think the most foundational element of this has only one good answer: Ideology is a survival strategy.
Ideology is a huge topic, theoretically infinitely huge, between the immense weight of the historical record, the epistemically infinite possibilities for the future, and the stipulatively infinite number of different values someone can choose, and the endless ways these can relate to each other in various forms of inference. People don’t have time for that, and yet in their desire for meaning and connection (along with being directly instructed to) there is pressure from an early age to develop an ideology, so they use what they virtually always do: heuristics, preconceptions in the form of perceived correlations generalized so as to be all-encompassing to their subject matter. This makes it much easier to develop at least a rough ideological framework, but it does not help determine which simplified ideological tenets they ascribe to. This, again, can be explained as a survival strategy: People become enculturated to groups that they are attracted to, and they fall into such groups for material reasons, whether perceived opportunity for gain, promise of security, or being spurned by other groups, all with an immense bias towards locality.
In short, ideology is functionally a way to relate to society on the basis of what is the most profitable or convenient. Capital-T “Truth” is only relevant insofar as it directly impacts one’s own living conditions, and even then it might take up an antagonistic role (see antivaxxers).
So, returning to the original topic of media consumption, I would like to advance the thesis that people want media that comports with their ideology, which means media that they find convenient or profitable for navigating their day-to-day lives. Whether the media advances ideas that are capital-T “True” is not relevant if it is functionally very distant from someone’s life in either geography, chronology, or social grouping.
But if they are going to be around regardless of what anyone else wants, then they are both much freer to provide accurate information and much freer to completely ignore what would, in a more personal setting, be regarded as important social cues that they are being unhelpful. You can’t “vote with your feet” if they tie you down and chop off your legs!
I don’t follow the second part, but I think I’ve demonstrated that the media being “free” to provide accurate information doesn’t mean very much to the information that they will provide. They can do great research, but their vested interest is mainly what amounts to pandering to the ideology of their target demographics.
Sure, but a lot of manipulative people of all walks of life use those tactics, frankly because they often work. Another common tactic is to say “you need to be open minded” and “listen to all viewpoints”, but then when confronted with a viewpoint that differs significantly from theirs, they start lobbing insults and shaming people for disagreeing. Unfortunately, I often see that behavior from people who describe themselves as “leftists”, but who a lot of other self-described “leftists” would probably insult and dismiss themselves as “tankies”.
I don’t see how this is relevant other than finding a way to bring Tankie Discourse^tm^ into this, which I think we can really do without for the time being unless you’d like to use it to construct a more relevant argument.