[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I find this somewhat amusing. Just how much diversity do you think is "accepted" even by today's major publishing houses? While i'm impressed by the fact that both Neal Stephenson and the guy who wrote the DaVinci Code are printed, I find the emphasis you all put on "scary government" a bit silly.
It is easily possible to set up a system where you have input from non-govt in govt-sponsored organs (see the Fed for a popular example), but that aside, isn't the whole bloody point of the "Web 2.0" religion that there are far fewer content controls, and that all you'd have to do is prove you're being read in order to be eligible for funding?
The question of the role played in all this by the Government seems more or less beside the point, other than as a tax collector. All they'd have to do is collect the cash, and send it to an NGO that redistributes it.

I have a reasonably good idea how much diversity the major publishing houses accept. I don't for one moment believe this will increase if a country's Govt became respsonsible for ensuring "acceptable diversity", rather I would expect it to decrease.

Far more "content control" happens due to self-censorship, in the "we're protecting you from all the fluff written" variety, or the variety exemplified by the behavior displayed by the US news media, if you compare the stuff they printed before and after Katrina happened, when it became acceptable again to criticize a president, and the media weren't scared they would stop being read and so go out of business if they wrote anything bad about the Savior, G.W. [this is very closely related to the "voting with purses" variety of content control] or just as voting-with-purses (resulting in that da vinci code writer guy making money) than through Shady Government putting out contracts on heterodox writers.

Ahh, now it's a little different in the UK - most of the papers here will lay into our PM if there's any reason to (reason in this context depends on the paper's particular bias - what a paper with a left wing bias might find acceptable one with a right wing one might criticise. And so on.). And the US president, and the leaders of other countries. They may not do so as much as I'd personally like, and they may have too much by way of "celebrity fluff" than I'd like, but they still have one or two teeth left.

If people still call their governments 'democratic' even while suspecting or knowing they're doing that sort of thing I think the word has sort of become meaningless anyway, and the same goes for when you really consider it "conceivable" that they would.

There is nothing in that paragraph that I disagree with. Of all the things I call the current UK Government, democratic is not one of them - the best I can manage is that they were democratically elected to power - but when the majority don't seem bothered enough to vote, even that might be debatable.

Still, all that goes on "legitimately", "now", and, most importantly, opaquely, through things like "market forces" (you know, that famous invisible hand that makes everything right in the world), so there really is nothing to worry about.

The thing with market forces is that all it can do is make it harder for you to get what you want to read - the author has other options available to them. They can't make it illegal.

I suppose there isn't, no.. but accepting the status quo as the "best alternative" to "government controlling everything" seems a bit defeatist to me as well.
There are many faults with the current models, and many improvements that can be made, and I suspect there are decent enough ways to set them up without stifling "Creativity," that vaunted and elusive drive/charactertrait.

I know that was in response to Patricia, but "better than", which is my stance, is not the same as "best alternative". I agree there are improvements to the current system that could be made. I don't think putting the Govt (yours or mine) is the way to go.

(Apologies if this seems a bit disjointed, btw, I'm writing it in gaps at work...)