Among those who care about serious journalism, some are counting on an economic comeback that will bring sufficient media advertising back to newspapers and Web sites to support quality reporting; others bet on the evolution of pay walls and a public that will change course and learn to buy news content; still others put their money on other kinds of news innovation, in which new kinds of outlets find ways to sustain themselves once the philanthropists are tapped out or move on.
But what if none of these things work? What is left?
Robert W. McChesney is one of those who argue that what is left is public policy and public funding that recognizes and sustains reporting as a public good. McChesney teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the co-author, with John Nichols, of The Death and Life of American Journalism: the Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.
Today, he will present an argument and strategy for a media policy in a speech to the Federal Trade Commission, at an FTC workshop on media policy. Here’s a preview of the speech:
Rejuvenating American Journalism: Some Tentative Policy Proposals
Presentation to: Workshop on Journalism, Federal Trade Commission, Washington, D.C., March 10, 2010
I wish first to thank FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, and Susan DeSanti from his staff, for inviting me to participate in this workshop, and all of you for attending. I must also thank my co-author, the journalist John Nichols, who is not here with us today but whose thinking permeates the ideas herein. All of the evidence to support the arguments that follows, unless specifically indicated, comes from our new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism.
Our book, which was published in January, was written as this country was in the midst of a sea change in how the crisis in journalism is understood. A year ago, as scores of newspapers closed and those that remained were cut to the bone, the response was almost like shell shock. Newspapers were emphasized because that was and is the primary source of original news, but the crisis extended to all newsrooms. Observers hoped that with the passage of time and a combination of Yankee ingenuity, revolutionary technologies, and an economic recovery, the commercial news media would rebound, and make a successful transition to a digital future. The theory was that we could have a lucrative private news media that would satisfactorily serve our needs for a Fourth Estate. Even the most optimistic scenarios for successful commercial news on the Internet required one or two more decades to pass before the platform would provide anything near a satisfactory level of journalism.
It is now clear that the evidence to support that position does not exist. The notion that commercial media can establish “paywalls” on the Internet and recoup their expenses there is questionable. Certainly some news media will be able to do this with a modicum of success, but only a few, and probably specialized media at that. The argument that the Internet will spawn a new generation of commercially viable citizen news media that will fill the void, too, has little credible evidence to support it. Again, some new digital ventures will make it, but they will replace only a smattering of the enormous losses in newsrooms we are experiencing. The evidence is in that the volunteer labor that fuels the blogosphere is in no position to generate original news stories in any significant quantity or quality.
The awareness of the implausibility of a commercial solution was made more daunting by a growing recognition of how our news media has been unraveling in this era while we were waiting for the Internet and entrepreneurs to solve our problems. There will be quite a bit of something called “news” in the coming years, but there will not be very much of what we once called journalism. The source of that news will be public relations, with political and economic elites framing and guiding the debates, be they local or national. Today, the ratio of public relations people to working journalists is close to 4-to-1; only 30 years ago, it was just over 1-to-1. In just three or four years, at present rates, the ratio of people paid to surreptitiously shape the news for their corporate and government clients to that of working journalists covering the news will be as high as 6-to-1 or 7-to-1. If we do nothing we are likely to enter a golden age of even more mindless sensationalism and spin and propaganda masquerading as “news.” It is awfully hard to see how we make a graceful transition, or even an ungraceful one, from that living hell to the promised land of high-quality ubiquitous commercial Internet journalism one or two or three decades from now.
The cold reality is that we will have private news media supported by advertising in the coming generations, but such media will only do a portion of what they once did, probably a small portion. While government policies can strive to increase the amount of successful commercial news media that will exist, there is going to be an upper limit to how much the market will generate. And what the market will support will likely be news aimed at the more affluent sector of the population, those that can afford subscription prices or appeal to those advertisers who remain. Left alone, such developments could accentuate and reify the information inequality that Thomas Jefferson emphatically argued was antithetical to a genuine free press in a self-governing society.
The list of other nations which essentially license and politically subsidize journalistic organization, cited by McChesney, are not exactly marked by tough reporting of their own governments. Countries like Japan or France are consensus societies, a cultural matter that Americans who disdain their own systems in favor of tourist fantasies, seem not to grasp. The United States really is 'exceptional', which is why it has Constitutional guarantees lacking in a Britain or a Germany - guarantees of freedom of the press to any citizen who owns one. In the Internet age, we all own one.
McChesney's interests are the politics of the old-line chattering classes, not journalism per se; we get more diverse information now than we ever did in the supposed glory days of the networks, The NY Times, and so forth. Journalism is as much about what is not printed as it is about what is printed. 'Public' journalism subsidized by the government inevitably (if NPR and PBS are guides) becomes dominated, even in spite of the intentions of their proprietors, by voices from the political left - because part of the reason these voices are of 'the Left' is the very hostility to the idea of markets that sometimes leaves them behind. Voices on the right have trouble reconciling their acceptance of political subsidies with their endorsement of markets. And after the left-wing hysteria following the Citizens United ruling from the Supreme Court, it is clear that people on the left judge the degree of protection of speech they endorse by who is doing the speaking, as opposed to the actual content of the speech, which is the more traditional form of censorship.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 10 Mar 2010 at 05:00 PM
The same constraints you mention here "list of other nations which essentially license and politically subsidize journalistic organization, cited by McChesney, are not exactly marked by tough reporting of their own governments" is true of journalistic tradition in America.
Except with journalism in America, it's commercial pressures which dominate. The advertisers subsidize the costs of publication, therefore making the press hesitant to report on their patrons, and the government provides access to information, making the press afraid of the government taking away access.
Human nature is you care about who butters your bread. That's not an argument against adding a public venues to the media ecosystem.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 10 Mar 2010 at 11:10 PM
We get better and tougher journalism out of systems under 'commercial' pressure than 'governmental' pressure. To take western Europe as an example - Berlusconi? Chirac? Schroeder? Kohl? These guys were guilty of considerable corruption, but it was not the press which exposed it. (And the more centralized, less democratic European political systems, in which all decisions are made in the federal legislature, has kept them out of jail.)
I really don't understand why you and others continue to believe 'government' is or potentially is more virtous than private business. In the last century the worst crimes were perpetrated by people lusting for power, not money, and I thought even liberal-minded people might have been cured of the notion that politics brings out the best in people.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 11 Mar 2010 at 12:49 PM
Keep in mind, Mark, that the corrupt Berlusconi rose to power precisely because the Italian government failed to adequately safeguard the public interest aspects of the Italian media system, relinquishing control to private interests - of which Berlusconi was far and away the most dominate. As Prime Minister, he was then able to exert considerable control over the state media. I highly doubt that Prof. McChesney means to suggest that the Italian system is a model of government regulation and subsidy that should be followed in this country. In fact, the Berlusconi example illustrates the merit of McChesney's testimony:
"Berlusconi will be remembered as the man who in the space of just 25 years, built a conglomerate that rose to dominate Italian commercial television, and to become Europe's second largest media empire (after Bertelsmann of Germany) and Italy's third biggest private company, and who used his communicative power and his flair for showmanship to launch a new political party that gathered enough votes to secure his election as Prime Minister in just four months. Overall, his career over the last 25 years stands as an impressive illustration and warning of the power of concentrated media ownership in a lightly regulated marketplace."
http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=berlusconis
#4 Posted by Rich Potter, CJR on Thu 11 Mar 2010 at 08:51 PM
The point about Berlusconi is more complex than that. The countries cited by McChesney are all consensus societies, much less demographically and culturally complicated than the U.S. As the case of Italy illustrates. there is little division between the State and the primary, traditional industries, including media industries. Right now the Italian government is drafting more restrictions on the Internet, for example - a government action not out of line with McChesney's way of thinking, but which benefits Berlusconi's media empire.
Berlusconi's media empire, like his rise to power, whatever you or I think of it in qualitative terms, has been accomplished by giving that damned consumer what he or she wants. The unspoken element in McChesney's analysis, like all left-wing analyses, is the addressing of whether what McChesney proposes would be good for the consumer, or good for regulators of consumer preferences. In the recent Citizens United case, almost no one asked the simple question of whether consumers had the same right to see the 'Hillary' documentary that they have to see a crucifix soaked in urine at a publicly-funded museum; the whole debate was between big bulls arguing over whether one of them had the same speech rights as the other. Governments put in power by voters have legitimacy as interpreters of the public will, but so do markets - possibly with greater accuracy.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 12 Mar 2010 at 12:29 PM
Mark Richard wrote: I really don't understand why you and others continue to believe 'government' is or potentially is more virtous than private business.
padikiller seconds the point of inquiry: Well said and completely ignored, as such well-taken points are handled routinely in CJR-Land..
I'd like to see one of these statists point out one single government program that is run well.
For example, despite all the liberal grousing about the health insurance industry's profits, the simple fact of the matter is that Medicare dumps 10.6% of its budget into fraudulent claims while the average profit margin in the health insurance industry is a whopping 4.4%..
#6 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Fri 12 Mar 2010 at 05:09 PM
Australia followed the US in the early 80's and 90's by allowing our media to amalgamate and then network services while relaxing local news content laws, wiping out manyl radio, print & TV journalism jobs across the country & also ending high quality local news in many cities and towns. We need to lobby our governments to reintroduce previous standards which required all media to provide at least 80% local news content and not infotainment relayed from metropolitan/interstate media centres.
#7 Posted by Mark Dawson, CJR on Mon 22 Mar 2010 at 04:54 AM
To Mark Dawson, I have a real problem with a political entity imposing rules on producers without input from the consumers - because those political activists deem the existing content not local enough, or 'infotainment'. If those awful corporations could make a buck investing in local content, they would do it. It's those darned consumers who prefer 'American Idol' and so forth. Why should you or the government tell them what they should and shouldn't watch?
#8 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 22 Mar 2010 at 05:08 PM
Because there should be a venue for relevant news and local content, even if there's only a few to watch it because
a) that's how distinctive programing develops. For instance, Canadian content is allowed to develop an audience on Canadian channels despite being dominated by American idol commercial crap.
b) why should audiences who lack a certain critical size be subject to the "tyranny of majority" who want to watch vacuous American idol commercial crap?
c) since the internet, the information in a broadcast has become more persistent than it would have been before. Therefore, even though a show may have been blown out of the water in ratings by American idol commercial crap, the program may find more viewers on the internet and become successful despite an unfortunate time slot.
Executives are often short sighted, non-creative, money focused, monkeys in suits. They have no sense of value apart from the monetary. Consumers need more than sweets in their media diet and there's no harm in making companies provide something a little more wholesome than American idol commercial crap.
It may only be "Kids in the hall" but at least it beats American idol, according to a survey of 30 Helens.
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 23 Mar 2010 at 01:53 PM
To Thimbles, the government interventionists always end up giving away the motive for their desire for more political control of media content - i.e., they don't like the content chosen by those unwashed masses, as opposed to their self-consciously evolved selves.
Artists back in the day didn't whine because they weren't subsidized by the government to offset the effects of the Philistines. T. S. Eliot managed to be a great poet while working as a bank clerk. In television, the programming loved by the Philistines is now widely regarded, with the perspective of time, as often quite brilliant, such as the comedy of 'I Love Lucy' and and Sid Caesar, while more avant-garde cultural fare has been forgotten as trendy relics of their age put out by people posing as alienated.
We are not a docile country like Canada. Canada has restrictions on free speech - not only politically incorrect speech, for which Maclean's magazine was hauled up before one of those creepy 'humans rights' commissions a few years ago, but also on the reporting of criminal proceedings - that you yourself, I suspect, would find stifling. Maybe that's a reason why so many Canadian artists end up working and living in the barbarically unregulated U.S. - one reason, along with a desire to reach the market of those 'dumbbells' who watch 'American Idol'.
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 23 Mar 2010 at 03:29 PM
First, Canada is not a docile country. The environmental movement is very heavy in Canada, they care passionately about their health care, people are usually yelling about either taxes or cuts in social services depending on the day of the week, and when the Federal government has a slight corruption scandal by American standards they throw it out. For a docile country, they have a lot of protests (in the cold even).
The free speech laws are a bit annoying but at the same time they're a part of the Canadian identity which has become passionately multicultural. This is a relatively recent transformation since, up to WWII, race baiting politics were frequent and ugly and lead to violence against the minorities which, in the case of the Japanese, was government sponsored. The ban on criminal trials is also annoying but the rationale is to preserve the integrity of the trial from media spectacle. I get both sides and maybe I would prefer more free speech than less, but the rational person does get to express their view points on immigration and security without ever seeing a censor (there's a conservative party in Canada too, and they got to have something to talk about).
Canadian artists work and live in the US because they have ten times the market and they used to have twice the dollar.
TS Elliot's expenses were the price of pens and paper when he was a bank clerk, some of which were unintentionally subsidized by the bank when TS eliot took pens and paper home from work.
TV content and papers don't work like that.
Some of the best programming on the air in the last decade has come from non-traditional, non-commercial sources who are willing to experiment to find an audience, HBO for instance with it's direct viewer subscription model. The problem with such content is that it is more expensive to produce.
Before the direct subscription model, the only way sophisticated content could get produced was through public resources. Many quality documentary programs still are. I don't think a media system deprived of sophisticated and educational programming is superior to the more profitable ones that dumb down the audience and get them to pay from their idol votes. Some of the sophisticated content is worth a subsidy or two, especially when the viewers themselves are the ones subsidizing it, as in the case of PBS and HBO.
But note, no one is claiming control to the exclusion of American Idol. They're just advocating options. I don't see why activists are so upset by government interventions which increase consumer choice, not decrease it.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 23 Mar 2010 at 09:25 PM
What I don't think Americans realize when they see their television network system is exactly how much money it costs to make a single television show. The high-fidelity cameras we have grown accustomed to cost thousands of dollars. Then, spaces for sets need to be rented out, which is another tens of thousands of dollars. Actors, writers, producers, and staff need to be hired, which can jump the cost to millions of dollars (substitute with journalists if talking about news programs). And this is just one show. Media companies produce MULTITUDES of shows, and the advertising revenue they bring in is enormous.
To expect normal citizens who are dissatisfied with media and news to produce their own content in order to compete is ludicrous. There is no way a group of private citizens could ever produce quality television content unless 1. They were rich enough to take in the risk and costs of producing television content (and in the US only private corporations have that kind of power) or 2. Public-owned media facilities allowed private citizens to produce content to broadcast over the airwaves (and in the US our public media facilities are a joke). Even if you believe in the spirit of the free market, you must at least see that the current media system makes it hard for ANY entrepreneur to viably compete with the big media companies. (Lets not forget that the big media companies also didn't "work their way up." When television was new, the best broadcasting facilities were licensed out to already existing radio broadcasters, under the philosophy that their existing capital would best pioneer television. News Corp's FOX only really succeeded because it was able to buy media facilities after the Deregulation craze of the 1980s.)
McChesney is completely correct in his assessment of the media. While he is a socialist (though not an anarcho-syndicalist of the Chomsky kind) his insights into how media structures work is spot on, and no one should use McChesney's politics as a way to discredit his analysis. His criticisms should be taken very seriously, as proper journalism is the key to proper democracy.
#12 Posted by DVB, CJR on Wed 24 Mar 2010 at 11:54 AM
Thimbles, a thoughtful and penetrating reply! I knew you had it in you!
The lack of government intervention into 'content' on the Internet we are both using has accounted for its diversity. I don't agree that leftists need more subsidy of their particular interests. My own cable package includes IFC and Sundance, which run content as esoteric as you could wish for, including the usual doctrinaire left-wing documentary fare. HBO is also in my package, and its documentary unit seems to be an arm of the Democratic Party, with celebrations like 'For the People: The Election of Barack Obama'. PBS has a long and justified history of running overwhelmingly left-leaning content, down to Ken Burns documentaries and such.
If the issue is local content, I have a civic channel for City Council and other local government product, the Ohio News Network for statewide issues, considerable local focus from my local public television station, and several hours a day of traditional local morning, after-work, and Pictures at Eleven news.
How small - or big - does a potential audience need to be to qualify for 'reserved' programming slots, anyway? McChesney has in the past expressed nostalgia for the good old days when there were only three broadcast networks and a 'Fairness Doctrine' to further distort and smother thinking that was outside the little NY-DC block - thinking that happened to represent a considerable segment of the population. I have not a doubt in the world that intervention by the feds to 'insure' more 'diversity' would end up imposing codes on content which would censor conservative opinions - as is the case in docile Canada.
#13 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 24 Mar 2010 at 01:17 PM
Addition: I refer to Canadian docility for the same reasons Thimbles asserts it. Government-imposed 'multicultural' ideology suppresses dissenting voices - on the possible threat to liberal values, for instance, by Islamic fundamentalism. Multi-culturalism means, among other things, that Canada periodically faces the threat of Quebec secession, though the federal government has bent over backwards to appease the Quebecois, from what I have observed. 'Environmentalism' is another of those issues demanding submission from individuals toward authority - a top-down issue, politically, if there ever was one.
Canada was founded by people who sided with Mother England in the Revolutionary War. Nothing wrong with that, but it does suggest that right from the start the neighbor to the south was a little more likely to be skeptical and questioning of authority. Catherine O'Hara spoofed the Canadian cultural tendency toward apology and self-effacement in the Olympic opening ceremonies in Vancouver; the assertiveness of the Canadian OC and the flag-waving of the Canadian audiences were noted back east as being un-Canadian. There is nothing wrong with being a consensus society that seeks to suppress voices deemed to be dissonent/dissident. It's their country. But it also suggests that Canadian attitudes would be as difficult to import to the U.S. as I'm sure U.S. values would be to Canada.
#14 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 25 Mar 2010 at 12:54 PM
You don't know much about Canada, Mark. The Quebec issue is a hot potato which helped spark the conservative party resurgence (there's heavy tension between east and west; coast and central; social conservative, economic conservative, and liberal in Canada and the Quebecois are really social conservatives under a different brand, a french catholic one). Life isn't always easy on the other side of the border with the french confederates in the American South since there's talk of secession and civil war over social upheavals every once in a while.
Environmentalism is as bottom up an issue as there is in Canada, since it's the communities who are trying to preserve the forests and water resources they grew up with from the companies who try to slash and burn everything for raw materials.
Canadians in BC don't live as far from nature as most city populations, therefore they react to the damage of development more.
The Raging Grannies, a world wide protest group now which predates any tea bags, started in BC over the US Nuclear Navy stop offs and the largest protests in Canadian history were spontaneous protest camps to protect the old growth forest in Clayoquot Sound. There are hippie communities all over the gulf islands, particularly on Hornby and Saltspring, where many of the Vietnam draft refugees came to stay.
Canada was also defended by people who torched Washington in 1814. Nothing wrong with that, since it was a war, but it does show that the neighbor to the North had it's own values and identity which it was, and is, passionate about and willing to fight for.
And I suggest that before we lecture one country on their regulations on speech, which are applied in extreme cases such as holocaust denial - though complaints can stir up investigations on more trivial grounds http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL110A.html , that we sort out another country's issues on habeus corpus and other touchy subjects since, on the one hand, a US conservative agitator was warned about Canadian free speech laws, and, on the other hand, a Syrian-Canadian was kidnapped and sent to Syria to be tortured based on no crime but his skin in a new york airport.
You claim Canada is docile, but I know a bit about Canada and that's not quite how it is. But if it is, and it's resulted in a few less innocent people getting tortured, then maybe docility isn't so bad.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 25 Mar 2010 at 04:01 PM
Some of the responses to this article is expected and reflects a deep problem of misinformation. Basically, there but for the grace of government goes corporations. This has been true from Santa Clara v. S. Pacific Railroad to Buckley v. Valeo. Furthermore, if government was truly business-neutral, corporations could not compete very well against proprietorships. Corporations depend on government more than proprietorships for the protection and implementation of long-distance commerce, contracts, capital markets and the benefits of charter. Corporations coevolved with nation states and have been dependent on the latter ever since. A militia can be maintained independently of government better than can a corporation.
If we understand the true nature of the corporation, about as anti-free market a business entity as there can be, some of the protests about public subsidies for non-profit venues ring hollow. Government already does plenty of suckling of corporations, without which we would never have had such media consolidation as has occurred in the first place. Cries against curbing the government induced gravy-train for corporations, and corporate media in particular, are the cries of the entitled and indulged.
#16 Posted by Kirk Sinclair, CJR on Thu 10 Jun 2010 at 07:41 AM