Journalism Needs Government Help
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
I have to say I strongly disagree. Subsidized press will just encourage more conflicts of interest in coverage of politics, will waste taxpayer money, and is unlikely to result in better journalism.
About newspapers losing money, I suspect the main reason for this, and the reason nobody mentions is that newspapers and media companies in general borrowed through the nose to buy out other papers to reduce competition. It is the interest payments for all that borrowing that is causing most problems in the top papers.
Otherwise a paper that gets large viewer ship online should not have any problems funding news gathering.
But nevertheless, it is disturbing to see this in the WSJ. That means it is seriously being pushed. I hope Obama does not support it, there will be no profit for him in it, the right wing papers will use this to once again call him a socialist while still pocketing their subsidy.
Each country has millions of sources of private-sector income, but only one government. There's the occasional potential for conflict of interest when a news outlet has to report on the doings of its own parent company, but news stories about news companies are quite rare and news stories about the Government happen every day.
Another example would be newspapers which rely upon real estate advertisements for a large portion of their revenue; you won't see an article that's critical of the real estate industry in these papers.
Why on earth would right-wing papers get a subsidy? Or, more accurately, why would papers that disagree with whomever controls the pursestrings at the moment get a subsidy? You don't even have to cut off a paper the payer doesn't like, just reduce their payout.
And why wouldn't Obama support it? Why wouldn't any President support it? Taking possession of the fourth branch of government is supposed to not be at all tempting to him? Are you still laboring under the delusion that he's something other than a politician or something? But, hey, even if you still think that's true, Bush III (hopefully only figuratively, but hey, who knows, Jeb's name keeps getting tossed about) or President Palin is only two or six years away from the Presidency, you know. You think they're going to resist this?
That's why this is so dangerous; he who pays the piper calls the tunes, and the tune calling need not be anything so crass as "Play X again"... it can be subtle nodding and gently manipulated suggestions from plants in the crowd. There is absolutely, positively no such thing as a free press sponsored by public funds directed by the government. Yes, I include all current press sponsored by public funds as well.
(Edit: If it makes you feel better, pretend I didn't say that Obama isn't more than a politician. I'm sorry I'm too cynical to believe in the myth; just pat me on the head and move on.)
Care to cite any references? What about the BBC and (Australian) ABC? Both have been huge thorns in the side of their respective governments over the years. In the case of the ABC, they definitely lean towards a liberal editorial view and this was maintained throughout 12 years of the previous conservative government's rule.
Contrary to jerf's assertions, however, it seems to work both ways: It provides news that is often carefully balanced and 'factual' and there are also formats that pursue a political agenda and publish inconvinient stuff.
I don't think jerf was making an empirical claim - a "free press" dependent upon political financing and governance is a contradiction in terms.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. If you think you've found a place where there's an exception, you haven't correctly identified the payer.
Because America is still a democracy and he would be voted out in the next elections and the guy who promises to end the subsidy would be voted in if the people do not want the newspapers to be subsidies.
A-and I'm not sure there's much the President can do to avoid right wing papers calling him a socialist, subsidy or not, but at least under this scheme a paper's right wing (or left wing) editorial board could then plausibly claim that their opinions reflected a considered take on the news, and that they were paid only (mostly?) by the blind subsidy rather than by some corrupting influence like a right wing (or left wing) political machine.
Wikipedia actually has a really great breakdown of the funding.
If the U.S. government wants to have a government-run newspaper corp, then fine. Have it wholly funded by newspaper sales, then I have no problem. But as soon as general tax revenue is used to fund it, then forget it.
As to your point about the source of funding... Given that most written news is moving online, would you support a tax on internet service to support written journalism?
For profit news may be in trouble, but journalism will be okay. Most people don't want informative journalism from foreign bureaus...they want confirmation of their biases from Fox News or MSNBC.
The liberal bias of PBS is a matter of what topics they emphasize and which facts they select. One small example of many - Frontline has done several documentaries about atrocities committed by American soldiers. But it has never done a documentary about how ultra-strict (by any standard, of any war, ever) rules of engagement have caused the death of soldiers. I could come up with dozens of similar examples. The only way to realize the extent of PBS's left-wing bias, is to actually read intelligent right wing sources, like Powerline, View from the Right, or Unqualified Reservations. Otherwise you'll never know the stories and facts that you are missing.
Personally I've always felt publicly financed media is just a bad idea. The WSJ is just looking for a way to survive, and is willing to throw their supposed libertarian/free-market principles under a bus to do so. Can't blame them given that there's been public funding for liberally-slanted news for decades.
Only a small fraction of NPR's and PBS's funding come from government, and most of that doesn't even come from the government directly, but from another nonprofit, the CPB, which in turn receive federal grants.
Whatever government influence is present in the existing public broadcasters is negligible and is entirely diluted by the influence of civil society in general.
The article is pretty vague as to what it's proposing, but it seems to be suggesting much more direct political funding of the press, and not just broadcasters, but newspapers.
More importantly, the author is suggesting that the government should consider funding the press because without new sources of funding, the established press will become extinct. In other words, he's advocating setting up a system in which the press is dependent upon political funding for its survival. This would be an unprecedented situation, and would generate conflicts of interest unlike anything we have now.
Newspapers started their economic decline well before the Internet. And television, which gave newspapers something called COMPETITION, is the reason.
Now, television is not going to do the job of a great newspaper. But a great newspaper doesn't do the job of a great library. Or a great interconnected electronic mesh of information we all seem to be getting easy access to these days.
Newspapers are nothing special. If people want it, it will be there when then the dust settles.
If newspapers do still provide the highest-quality journalism, despite no longer being the most convenient sources of mundane information, but the end result is that newspapers can no longer sustain their business model, then the value of journalism may be grossly inflated.
If few people actually want newspapers, it's not a significant problem if they go away.
Capitalism says "die", I say "good riddance", because something will rise from the ashes. As long as people want info on (scandal|war|economic|reader's digest|the history of) X, someone will attempt to provide. Heck, they already are, we just need to lose the horrendous setup we currently have to allow the progressive ones to make enough money to continue and improve.
I think this will fail in the way that all welfare-dependent industries must inevitably fail. If the business model is such that it requires significant, ongoing government subsidies then it isn't sustainable. You can prop up the US Auto industry, some agricultural sectors, and even the media for only so long. If the end result is an inferior product, what's the point?
But the USPS is a good example of a point I've been lingering on since making my earlier comment - at what point does something become a basic right (or expectation, to prevent confusion with the Bill of Rights) in our society? Is postage a basic expectation? Is a home town newspaper a basic expectation? And if so, should we expect our taxes to subsidise them as we do with roads or healthcare?
"Since its reorganization into an independent organization, the USPS has become self-sufficient and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. However it is currently borrowing money from the U.S. Treasury to pay its deficits."
"Despite record gross revenue of $60.1 billion, the U.S. Postal Service ended fiscal 1998 on Sept. 30 with a $600 million profit, $100 million more than projected, but leading industry officials were hoping the USPS could at least match, if not better fiscal 1997's $1.2 billion surplus, which was less than the $1.6 billion recorded in 1996 and significantly lower than the $1.8 billion achieved in 1995." http://directmag.com/news/marketing_observers_fear_end/
Corporations borrow money, especially when they run a deficit. Yet unless they're a larger part of some organization or the government, most people would call them self-sufficient--the ability to manage their own financial resources.
Sure the most strict definition of "self-sufficient" is to have absolutely no reliance on any external entity for anything, but by that definition then not a single organization in this country is self-sufficient.
Wrong decade. They lost 3.8 billion last year and expect to lose billions more this year [1]. They claim to have operational independence, but the Senate cuts them a check for losses that the Post Office will never pay back because its current form becomes less relevant and necessary every year. Fedex and UPS can do better package shipping, and electronic could take over for almost all documents now.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11...
I say close it down. Auction the assets off, pay post office workers a year or two's pay for no work to appease them, and give some kind of buyout to people with pension plans. Keeping the Post Office running to preserve jobs is a farce and massive waste of important resources.
Why not take the meager revenues that news organizations are currently earning, deposit them into an endowment and supplement with a huge yearly fund-raising campaign, or a one time large insanely public grant from the federal government. If managed responsibly, something like this could sustain a decently sized news organization for a long time. Especially if we begin to rethink and reorganize how it might be done.
There is one spot-on word in that phrase: INSANE-ly.
However, the suggestions of subsidies that some news organizations are beginning to float really boil down to "we're losing money in todays market, and we don't like it.". Aside from keeping their profit margins, it would be business as usual.
Given how information is dispersed and consumed these days, there are literally thousands of information producers (or at least sources to view that info). In the world of $50 vouchers, there are either thousands of producers competing for pennies if the system is open or a few big producers specified who can receive the vouchers. If it's the former, information producers will probably still be in the sorry state they are today. If it's the latter, I think people might have a problem with the idea of getting their news from an oligarchy of producers.
To keep it nonpolitical, the advertising could be of the form of a full-page daily report laying out the which bills are being considered by which houses, what the Supreme Court is doing, the President's agenda for the day, and other strictly-true government business.
I refute the notion that this is in any way a desirable state of affairs, however. The invention of the modern media institutions has been due to historically anomalous conditions and has largely been deleterious to the quality of news gathering and dissemination. I won't be sad to see these dinosaurs dead and gone, replaced with a cacophony of competing and contrary individual voices serving as mulch for cultivating the capacity for critical thinking and skeptical inquiry of the modern world's minds.