I don't say everyone should subscribe to The New York Times regardless. Cancel! 1/

But "if everyone put their money where their mouths are" is like "if everyone eschewed Cheetos and ate only fresh veggies". It is not, in fact, how consumer choice works. 2/

If you want journalism to actually exist in the world, you have to come up with a better answer for how to finance it than insisting that if consumer choices were driven by deeper forms of virtue than in fact they are, things would work as well as an economics textbook says they should. /fin

The New York Times offers international journalism, but not just. The New York Times is the primary source of in-depth, investigative domestic journalism as well. 1/

Do you think American audiences can replace The New York Times with BBC and Al Jazeera? Both of which have their own, rather terrible biases. Both of which also are funded in order to launder those biases to their audiences. 2/

A very discriminating news consumer can follow all of these interest-laundering organizations and hope that, in doing so, they can tease out the common journalistic signal and wash away the insidious bias. We can't, but we can do our best and it's the best we can do. 3/

But note this doesn't imply boycotting The New York Times. It implies subscribing to it, despite its shittiness, and subscribing to the others too, despite theirs, in order to help support the diverse ecosystem of shit from which some approximation of truth might be fertilized. /fin

I support, qua BBC, public finance of media, but unlike BBC in UK, public finance of a diverse panoply of sources. Consumers won't finance journalism, something else must, I'd rather a diverse range of public sources than (inevitably along with) plutocrats drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...

I mean, I only subscribe to NYT because they keep offering it for a very low price when I go to quit. But The Atlantic. Wired. TechDirt. Texas Tribune. Teen Vogue. can rival the NYT in terms of providing the consumer good of content. But they don't, can't, do the job NYT does. The journalism. 1/

The New York Times maintains significant international bureaus. It maintains a large staff of very skilled, very expert journalists who pursue investigative work over months and years. It has a near monopoly on these capabilities now. It is what is left of what was once the newspaper industry. 2/

Organizations like Propublica do this kind of work, but only domestically, and they don't have nearly the NYT's resources. I like Propublica much, much better than the NYT, because they don't have NYT's shitty editorial biases! 3/

But there is no constellation of Propublicas that can replace or match the New York Times. 4/

The fundamental problem begins where you started! The consumer good of content is easily created, increasingly automatically, and to paying audiences it can be much more engaging and entertaining than actual journalism. 5/

Actual journalism requires, has always required, a business model based on criteria other than consumer choice. 6/

It used to be a prestige loss-leader funded by other things, e.g. classified ads. But unbundling, plus and increasingly competitive media landscape (no 3 network lock), has eliminated that source of funding. 7/

So we have the philanthropic efforts like Propublica. And we have the business model of The New York Times, which is also the business model of The Brookings Institution, and the business model of Harvard. 8/

What The New York Times sells is making the worldview of liberal plutocrats seem sensible and palatable. 9/

Brookings sells the same, just on the academic rather than journalistic terrain. Harvard sells the pedigree of the children of liberal plutocrats. 10/

In all three cases, the business model is bundling and laundering. At Harvard they bundle selection of the very brightest students with selection of legacy admits, and give them indistinguishable degrees. That launders the crap "merit" of the legacies. 11/

NYT and Brookings finance and publish some of the very best work, journalistically and social science-ly, on the planet. They mix into that best work editorial biases that promote the anti-social-democratic worldview of liberal plutocrats. 12/

Those crap biases get bundled with and laundered by the excellent work also produced by the same organizations. It becomes difficult for outside consumers to distinguish excellence itself from the worldview of liberal plutocrats. 13/

That's the business model of these three institutions! It is why they thrive, even while journalism and academia more broadly struggle. 14/

It is beyond the capability of consumer choice to remedy. Sure, consumers could boycott these things and render them worthless. But consumers offer no business model that could support the excellences these organizations do provide, which require some non-consumer-choice-based source of funding. 15/

So in the existing fallen world, if we want the excellence, we have to take them cleverly leavened with the poisons of their backers, and do our best to disentangle the arsenic from the apple sauce. 16/

It's not ideal! But a fix will have to go deeper than voting with our wallets. /fin

i think the answer is US style “open” parties are an (inadequate) attempt to address the lack of choice in a two-party system and PR proponents intend stronger, more “closed” parties when free entry provides that choice. 1/

ideally you’d liberalize party internals at the same time you reform the electoral system, although the transition does merit thinking about. (perhaps the “legacy” parties should remain open membership and primary driven, while new parties organize as they see fit.) /fin

one lesson we might learn is that when a romantic ethonational project inevitably turns rancid, persecutes and murders members of other groups, the right response is not to exalt and reward whatever romantic ethnonational project might take hold among the victims. 1/

romantic ethnonationalism is the problem, not the identity or virtue or lack of virtue of the groups that ethnonational movements construct in both positive and negative space. /fin