[chillacy]

Lee Kwan Yew gave an excellent speech on this topic, applied to how journalism works in the US (where it acts as a distributed force for accountability) vs Singapore, where he talks about how Singapore has found other ways to achieve accountability and how outsourcing accountability to the press comes with its own trade offs (the press has its own interests; they are usually for-profit players). He made a very compelling point that countries will arrive at different systems very naturally as a result of different initial starting conditions, that all systems have trade offs, etc. Then in the end the journalists proceed to ask him the most thoughtless questions imaginable which I recall reduced to “but how will you be free without a free press”.

It’s on YouTube somewhere.