"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical". 

-Thomas Jefferson, Chapter 2, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, (1779).

“The freedom is a freedom from governmental action; it is not a right to require others to provide a means of communication.”

- Justice Hayne, McClure v Australian Electoral Commission - [1999] HCA 3.1

Why “Pravda”?

Pravda was, and still in fact is, a Russian broadsheet newspaper since its founding in 1912 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was the official, and most influential newspaper of the USSR during most of the twentieth century reaching at one stage a circulation of eleven million. At the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 it was sold off to a private party but by 1996 the Communist party of the Russian Federation had acquired the hard copy version while the online Pravda.ru remained privately owned. Pravda is Russian for truth.

Other government newspapers still in existence which also only print “the truth” are:

• Nhân Dân of Vietnam
• Pasaxon of Laos
• Rodong Sinmun of North Korea
• Granma of Cuba
• People’s Daily of China

Historically, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins or circulars have been used by the citizenry as a check upon the excesses of government. It is a good to live in a time and place where the government fears the press, but as a corollary, where the people fear the government is not.  The power the government has over the people is ultimate. That it should also be in the position to influence the staffing and/or financing of a media organ is a power, in propagating their “truth”, to further influence the political narrative, and as such is a risk which has no upside

Etymology

On this site Pravda shall be the term used to describe all forms of non-privately owned media, whether it be state media, public broadcasting, or public service broadcasting, or whatever the term, where government, or government funded bodies, has some effect on operations such that it could influence programming. Private media includes rapacious, profit driven, international media conglomerates as well as small, non-profit print or electronic broadcasters privately funded and staffed by volunteers.

American PBS television broadcaster makes a sincere effort eliciting private funding to the degree it covers approximately half its costs, but that still leaves the other half to be funded, indirectly, by governments at their whim.

As of April 2023, Elon Musk has had the American radio network, National Public Radio, a broadcaster which was established by an act of congress and receives annual grants from the government funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, labeled “state-affiliated media”, much to the disgust of NPR CEO John Lansing, who described the decision as “unacceptable”*.

Publisher: Philip Lillingston      
philip@whypravda.org
12th November 2024

* ‘Broadcaster NPR halts tweets’,The Sunday Herald Sun, 9th April, 2023.

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