After a question was closed I had a feeling I was not good in explaining its relevance to this Q&A site, but I might be wrong.
So my actual question was why open source/open tech activities driven by citizen communities relevant to economy are not very often highlighted in the mass media supported by the state in democratic countries.
But a comment given by one of the moderators (as I believe it was a moderator) gave me an idea for a more deeper question. Still I do not know if it would be on topic therefore the meta post.
One step back, what is "mass media supported by the state in democratic countries"? That, imagine a democratic state chooses to own some mass media to leverage a way of providing information to the population supporting its values. In a democratic state so, these values might be diversity of (non-ultra-marginal) opinions, hard facts important to larger circles, milestone cultural/economic events etc. AND provide platform for public discussions - correct me if this loose definition is wrong.
Also to define open community:
- open source software community
- open technology community, i.e. loosely different MINT specialists
Regarding news from the open community as potential news topic, I see two main categories:
- type 1: news relevant indeed to a very small circle of specialists like "new Linux kernel released" or "what is most popular programming language this year"
- type 2: news potentially relevant (which is in context of this question): "in state X, schools use open source software, what does that mean?" or "let's discuss how much percentage GDP is invested across the globe on research and development of supercomputers/artificial intelligence", or "today we report about smart city hackathon aiming to solve traffic issues", or "how farmers leverage regional economy through an open source e-commerce platform"
So I think there is a large variety of type 2 news which are almost non-existent in state mass media for example in Germany but at least some of them underpin changes relevant to larger population. Also the story about government using Linux in Munich and then changing back to commercial product is related to a lot of political debates and different attitudes.
So the question could be then like the following - a bit lengthy but my best effort to be self-explaining and politics topic related:
"How comes that citizens-driven open innovation and events, either politic debates about it seem to be under-represented in mass-media in relation to their partial relevance, in relation to the objectives of mass media in a democratic states, as compared to other news, [also if there is no PR budget]"?
Of course a good answer to this question as I think would be not an opinion:
"I think most people do not care about society implications of type 2 news anyway" or "who cares about objectives of democratic state, behind any news - also in state media - is/has to be a lobby and PR budget" (which might be true, but remains an opinion if not provable by sources and hard facts)
but something like - for example -
"Let's compare two typical democratic countries using state mass media. The goal of mass media in these states has in common that/differences like .. Therefore related to "type 2 news" it means.. Looking to statistics../this recent research"
or
"you have to do more research on your own keywords to look for/typical reads in this context are.."
What I've found so far regarding Germany about ARD (which gets large portion of money sourced from a special state mass media budget, coming from tax (total EUR 8b in 2018):
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.
So would you say you can see a relevance to the politics topic? Or how is it still missing? In the question, I search to understand the declared politics of the democratic state on mass media and what I believe to observe.
