State media in democratic countries and open technologies

Question

In democratic countries, one of a given State news media's tasks is to inform citizens about important events in manner which is as adequate and objective as possible. Also important economy and technology events should be part of the news.

By my observations, there are publicly important events regarding open technology which are seldom mentioned outside of media targeted to a highly specialized circle.

Let's take Germany for example.

So, companies offering products based on open technology are almost never mentioned, so you never hear about what is happening in schools regarding the introduction of digital technology and its broad impact on proper education. Recently I've occasionally learned about an open supply chain platform, based on open source software, launching in dozens of countries. No word in the media. Smart city hackathons? No mentions.

That is, specialized media tends to overhype trends, and mass media gives me sometimes the impression civic/open tech is not important.

Why is that so?

Regarding Germany, in terms of State media's task, you can find the following for example:

What I've found so far regarding Germany:

On behalf of society, ARD produces a freely accessible and diverse range of programs for everyone in Germany with content in information, education, advice and entertainment. In order to reach as many people as possible every day, our offers are aimed at different age and target groups.

Answer 1

German public broadcasting services have a complex mission, which includes children's entertainment without advertising, politics without advertising, culture that nobody would ever sponsor, and much more. Information about specialist science and technology topics has a very low priority among those.

And whenever journalists talk about something which you really know, you get the impression that they're dumbing things down for their audience and getting half of it wrong in the process. That's because in your own "expert filter bubble" the basics don't have to be explained and more and the differences and improvements which get you really excited are lost to the non-expert audience.

Topics are also selected to appeal to a reasonably large non-expert audience. So you get plenty of wildlife and historical documentations on specialist channels like phoenix and ZDFinfo, and little about tech policy debates.

Answer 2

The typical modern news editor tends to be a schooled proceduraly focused specialist in Journalism, a discipline with its own textbooks, teachers and traditions mostly focused on holding an audience, preventing needless lawsuits and prosecutions, and the seemingly impossible difficulties of producing relevant and accurate reporting given the constraints of a limited budget, really minimal deadlines, and a surplus of manipulative public officials and public figures.

These procedural quandaries keep editors so busy that there's little time left to broaden their scope. Occasionally an editor might attempt to fill such gaps in scope by hiring some purported specialist to popularize technical matters of public interest, but here a modern editor as often as not is poorly qualified to decide who to hire so that the selection process favors a candidate's salesmanship before their expertise, and an editor may unintentionally select somebody who's either dull and easily misled, or is an outright shill or charlatan; it might be years, (or decades), before any editor figures that out.

The problem of journalistic scope with respect to open technology is worsened because:

• Wealthy commercial interests are often direct sponsors of a given State's media, i.e. a newspaper carrying Microsoft advertisements, et al.

• A given State's publicly funded media is administered by bureaucrats appointed by elected officials whose campaigns rely on sponsorship by commercial interests. For example, over the last 20 years the City of Munich has vacillated between opposing political factions one favoring open/free software, and one backed by Microsoft.

• The commercial interests themselves may own a portfolio of media outlets.

Wealthy commercial sponsors, whether direct or indirect, tend to frown upon editors employing a technical popularizer interested in free or open tech whenever some commercial tech alternative exists. Even a competent popularizer might foresee such sponsorship conflicts, and cynically tailor their reporting to favor commercial interests and their own career.