There are 2 institutions that allowed me to do this; the public broadcaster itself, and the web search tool that allowed me to find it, and to find a relevant article on their website. Without knowing that either existed before I started my search.

In the late 1990s I got involved with independent media with an assumption that only the second of those really mattered. That public broadcasters were creatures of the state, no better than corporate media at reporting the truth. I was wrong.

(2/?)

As demonstrated by the current war on public broadcasters by corporatist governments around the world - including here in Aotearoa - they are *not* in service to the powers that be. They do have institutional biases (like the anti-Palestinian bias of the BBC), which we need to identify, criticise and ideally fix. But their very existence serves as an increasingly important way of confirming reality at a distance.

(3/?)

EDIT: typos

However, public broadcasters are only helpful if we can find their work when we need it. Which is where the need for public service online search tools comes in. Web search in particular, because thanks to the digital convergence indymediatistas anticipated in the late 1990s, everything online is represented somewhere on the web.

For now, we only have the web search equivalent of corporate media, and many of those are enshittifying rapidly. This is a problem we urgently need to solve.

(4/?)

The closest things we have to the web search equivalent of a public broadcaster are Wikipedia and Archive.org. These institutions offer a model for how a public interest web search engine might be created and maintained. Lots of people are building bespoke search engines for the small web;

https://the.socialmusic.network/t/marginalia-search-engine/167/2

These are important experimental steps in the right direction. How can we support and build on these efforts?

(5/5)

@strypey

And this is currently happening :(

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-runs-on-people-it-shouldnt-run-over-people-48823f4238bb