A week ago, I was scrolling through Nu.nl, which is one of the most popular sites in the Netherlands for news. Just like other news sites, they have collections of articles which are popular about a certain overarching subject. One of those collections was about the presidential elections in the USA (nu.nl, 2024). The coverage appeared to favour Kamala Harris while portraying Donald Trump in a less favourable light and out of context. Even though I don’t support the Trump campaign, it shouldn’t be the case that a news source is so clearly in favour or against certain political standpoints as it should be objective and let the readers make their standpoints. After digging deeper I found out that Nu.nl is owned by a news company called DPG Media (dpgmediagroup, 2024), which mentioned that their political orientation is leftist (eurotopics, 2024). They also own several other major news sources. Thus having a large influence on the opinions the readers have, especially when news articles are slightly biased but are being masqueraded as objective.
This experience made me question the objectivity of mainstream media and wonder if there’s an alternative that offers unbiased news. That’s when I came across decentralized journalism. By using blockchain technology and peer-to-peer networks, it aims to distribute news without central control, reducing corporate influence and potential biases.
In decentralized journalism, journalists can publish their findings directly to readers, and content is stored across a network, making it resistant to censorship and manipulation. Readers can support journalists through micro-payments, improving transparency and independence from large media conglomerates.
This should be done in a way that journalists publish their findings and the readers can see an overview of these findings to take in multiple perspectives when forming their image of the subject. This is different from traditional news where the findings that are relevant to the story are chosen by potentially biased journalists to assemble an article in line with the perspective of the news outlet.
While challenges like verifying credibility exist, this model offers a promising path toward a more objective media landscape by empowering both journalists and readers.
References
Nu.nl verkiezinngen VS (2024). https://www.nu.nl/verkiezingen-vs
The Netherlands: diversity despite media concentration. (2024). eurotopics.net. https://www.eurotopics.net/en/149418/the-netherlands-diversity-despite-media-concentration
This blog post reminds me of a very personal topic. Me and a couple of my friends, while in our undergrad. days, set out to form a platform, that would focus on decentralized journalism and debates. We set out to fight against the Facebooks of the world through our own means. In those days in was called DeJourn, however, soon we realized, while getting ideas is one thing, going out and building it is quite different. It was a great struggle to find investors, who would appreciate the Idea. Such a capitalist world, my god.
However, the journey was indeed one that taught me a lot.
And as you mentioned, this model offers a promising path toward a more objective media landscape, the concept would require a lot of backing and support by the larger community.
Hi, thank you for commenting!
When did you want to pursue the idea? I think with the tools at hand nowadays it is possible to create it yourself. After learning encryption and web development, I have written a working blockchain algorithm. Then it is only a matter of making it an API using FastAPI for example and connecting it to something like react.