Dylan Stringer

To guarantee equitable news access for all Americans will require commitment and vision at a national scale—to keep local papers in business, and to provide alternatives when they go out. The Brookings Institution proposes two solutions: First, lawmakers could offer financial support to newspapers and subscribers, by making subscriptions tax-deductible and newsroom revenue tax-exempt. Second, the government could use antitrust law to level the playing field between news and Big Tech. By allowing newspapers to negotiate collectively against Internet platforms, lawmakers can help local news take back its share of the advertising market.

Historically, journalists and the public have been reluctant to involve the government in media funding, for fear of allowing the press to devolve into a propaganda machine. When erstwhile Indiana governor Mike Pence attempted to launch a state-run media outlet, dubbed “Just IN,” it swiftly gained a new moniker: “Pravda on the Plains” (Graham, 2015; LoBianco, 2015). Yet, considering the dire situation of local news, direct federal funding may provide necessary scaffolding—not only to prevent local newsrooms from caving in, but to allow them to reconstruct themselves. The challenge is devising a plan that preserves journalistic independence.

Communications professor Robert McChesney, whose research has delved into the history and political economy of journalism, advocates for federal legislation known as the Local Journalism Initiative, which he characterizes as “a Green New Deal for journalism.” The LJI would provide over $30 billion a year to local news outlets, who could use the funding to fill immediate needs, develop a long-term business model, or convert to nonprofit status. Voters in counties that received LJI money could democratically select which local news outlets received the funding, allowing communities to support the journalism that informs them (Schiffrin, 2021).

Conclusion The future of local news will, almost certainly, look very different from its present or past. In an increasingly online economy, local papers have suffered, and the readers they served have faced the consequences. However, as elected officials consider plans to bolster journalism—the Biden administration’s proposed Build Back Better legislation includes $1.7 billion designed to benefit local news (Tracy, 2021)—and researchers debate the best ways to sustain local papers, there is room for hope.

Individualism, Collectivism, Colors and Kung Fu

Dylan Stringer

One of the oldest arguments in human history concerns the relative importance of self versus society. The desire for personal freedom and expression has always been contrasted with the benefits of conformity and common unity, creating a rift between cultures of different viewpoints. In the United States, for example, individual rights are considered paramount and are even codified in our constitution. China, however, is a much more collectivist society, in which the good of all is prized over any one person’s liberty. While this form of community creates a stronger sense of nationalism and loyalty in its citizens, it inevitably leads to problems for many Chinese people. The main issue is that individualism is a major part of human nature. At the very same time, in all of us, there is a natural need both to satisfy our personal desires and dreams, as well as to form groups and share a collective identity. When we combine these two ideas, it is possible to understand how humans cannot align themselves with just one of these philosophies, but instead need to find a balance between the two. In recent culture, this is nowhere more perfectly expressed than in the twin films of Hero and House of Flying Daggers by Zhang Yimou. While known primarily for their expressive use of color and artistic kung fu, they form a Yin-Yang pair of opposites that together shed light on this philosophical conundrum. Since the release of these films at the beginning of the new millennium, the battle between the state and personal expression in China has become even more intense. In a way, the films have gained emotional power because of current events, so it helps to understand the political context. Over the last two decades, the Chinese government has engaged in multiple strategies to strengthen collective society and stamp out individualism, while certain citizens have rebelled and become internationally famous. Thanks to the internet and social media, the rest of the world has access to a lot of information about recent events, and can witness this fiery debate at the heart of Chinese culture. One major way for the government in Beijing to monitor and control the everyday actions of people has been the development of the controversial policy known as the Social Credit System. The origins of this system can be found in the credit scores assigned to people by banks in many countries of the world, according to which a person may have a higher or lower rating depending on their financial behavior. The difference is that in China, the system has been expanded beyond financial

transactions: points can be awarded or deducted on the basis of people’s good or bad behavior as citizens. Each person is given a starting amount of points, and points are given or taken away as a reward or punishment after a person does something in the public domain. A donation to charity, for example, will raise a person’s score. In contrast, even something as insignificant as being caught cheating in a game will lower their score. Having a bad score can ruin people’s lives, leading to an inability to buy train tickets, to buy certain items, or to leave the country. Such a suppression of freedom pressures people to think collectively and be conscious of the good of their community, city, or country, but it also enables those in power to severely punish anyone who disagrees with them. Such rigidity of social control and suppression of any form of dissent has led to a generation of prominent citizen leaders criticizing the government. Leaders come in many forms, and in China, artists are some of the most powerful. One such artist that is challenging current norms is Ai Weiwei, someone with a deep knowledge of the struggle of the individual against the state. When he was a baby, his father, who was a poet, was declared an enemy of the revolution, and the whole family was forced to live in exile. They did not return to Beijing until Ai was nineteen years old. A few years later, he moved to the United States, and eventually became a world-famous artist. On his return to Beijing, he remained critical of China, but was nevertheless part of the team that designed the Beijing National Stadium (the “Bird’s Nest”) for the 2008 Summer Olympics. He soon regretted this, and disowned the work. Ai Weiwei is much more famous for works concerned with individual artistic expression, such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Sunflower Seeds, and Surveillance Camera that rebuke the communist agenda. Shortly after the Beijing Olympics, Ai Weiwei became a true enemy of the state with his work Remembering. In the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, thousands of schoolchildren died because of cheap school construction, but the government hid both the death toll and the true cause from the public. Ai wanted to do something about it. He and his team knocked on all of the houses they could find in the area, and learned that at least five thousand, two hundred nineteen kids had died. At his next show in Munich, Ai covered the front of the museum in backpacks, spelling out a sentence he had received from a mother of a victim: “All I want is to let the world remember that she had been living happily for seven years”. Such displays of individual expression do not escape the notice of the Chinese government. Since that time, the government has hounded Ai. He was arrested several times, the police harassed the mother of his young child, and his studio was demolished by the government. In 2015, he managed to leave China, and since that time he has lived in exile, in Germany, the UK, and Portugal.

The struggle between the Chinese state and Ai Weiwei is happening in the real world, but one of the greatest explorations of conflict between self and society can be seen in the films Hero and House of Flying Daggers by Zhang Yimou. These two works can be seen as mirror images, the first suggesting that the good of all is more important than any person, and the second implying that, in fact, sometimes it is worth sacrificing all social ties for the sake of individual happiness. The story of Hero is set during the Warring States Period in China, in which seven regions are trying to keep their independence as the Qin state threatens to conquer them all. The movie begins when a nameless assassin, under the guise of a local Qin prefect, is meeting the Emperor. He presents the weapons of three assassins he claims to have killed: Sky, Broken Sword, and Falling Snow. After each tale, he is allowed closer and closer to the emperor, which will allow him to fulfill his true mission: to kill Emperor Qin. The Emperor doubts his stories, and realizes that Nameless has been working together with the other assassins in order to kill him. Nameless is impressed by the emperor, and reveals the true narrative. In the end, the assassin chooses not to kill the emperor. Nameless eventually chooses to value the good of society over the importance of the individual, and allows himself to be killed in the service of a unified China. It might seem strange that Yimou Zhang made The House of Flying Daggers immediately after Hero, because the story is so different. This film is set about a thousand years later, during the Tang Dynasty, and concerns a pair of doomed lovers. They begin as enemies: Jin is a police officer working for the government and Xiao Mei is a blind girl working for a deadly resistance group called the House of Flying Daggers. After Xiao Mei is arrested, another officer, Leo, conspires with Jin to free the girl, so she will lead them to the resistance headquarters. However, as Jin accompanies her, fighting off various enemies, they fall in love. In the end, they are each forced to choose between loyalty to their factions and loyalty to each other. They come to feel that they are just pawns on a chessboard, and they need to save themselves by running away together. They both realize that nothing is more important than the love they feel, and they are willing to sacrifice everything for each other. The two films are only successful in highlighting these philosophical questions because they are beautifully crafted and achieve the status of cinematic art. They are internationally known not only for their emotional drama but also for their excellent cinematography and balletic kung fu. One similarity between them is Zhang Yimou’s artistic use of color. For example, in Hero, the entire color scheme changes to one dominant color for each distinct storyline. The theme is black for the main story, red for Nameless’s original explanation, blue for Qin’s reasoning, green for flashbacks, and white for the true story that is revealed in the end. In