Public Broadcasting and Education
Systems that influence or control media and education significantly shape governing structures and their long-term function.
Both intentional and emergent features of education and media influence groups. Underpaying teachers while requiring that teachers hold advanced degrees will produce a left-leaning education system whereas mandating that all teachers must be veterans may produce right-leaning schools.
Governing structures must decide whether to centrally control the flow of information, thereby making it susceptible to party politics, or allow for privatized information flow, which runs the risk of becoming sensationalized or producing cults and extremist subfactions. Recently the United States has been gripped by this question: How do we fight the sensationalism of wacky news stories without making partisan bureaucrats the arbiters of truth?
Were we to design a government department to fix this market failure, we would create a totally new branch of government made up of lifetime appointments (perhaps even from birth) who are supported by a lifetime stipend—similar to a more extreme version of the Supreme Court. The shielded nature of this department’s leadership would minimize the impact of partisanship in the selection of these individuals who would design the systems used to identify and disseminate truth. They might even create their own systems designed to nudge the population toward a slightly more educated and moderate state by “taxing” 20% of media companies’ commercial time.
Any system designed to address biased information on a human-led, top-down basis is almost certainly destined to fail. The way we handle this within our own educational system involves using prediction markets (we correlate answers on traditional multiple-choice tests to a student’s performance in prediction markets to determine which questions best measure a student’s functional knowledge of the subject, which eliminates the risk that we accidentally test for ideological alignment). For more info on systems for tackling bias, see the above chapter Systems for Fixing Bias on page 311.