Two footnote links to yesterday’s post about the slowly rising tide of opinion – particularly in America – that government should be intervening to support journalism, given that the business model which has kept private-sector journalism has broken down in many places.
I’ve made clear my doubts about this, but the point here is that the climate of thinking may be shifting. Two straws in the wind.
1) There’s an American-oriented survey of these arguments from Victor Pickard of New York University (see second item in the publications list here). Pickard is co-editor with Robert McChesney of a new collection of essays arguing that there may be a “fleeting opportunity” in the US to re-open the debate about whether the public authorities should come to the rescue of ailing news media. I suspect he’s whistling in the wind, but we’ll see.
2) One of Africa’s leading investigative journalists, Anas Aremayaw Anas, devotes an essay on africanews.com to the issues raised by the support he has had from the authorities in Ghana, where he works. I don’t know his work (and his piece is empty of links to his work) and it’s not clear how much of the support he enjoyed was financial. (Can any reader help me here?) But the kernel of his argument is that private-sector media have diluted and weakened the ability of journalists in Africa to reveal corruption and misgovernment in African societies which sorely need such information.
It would be impossible to argue from my perch here in Britain, where the tax-funded BBC enjoys high levels if use and trust, that subsidised journalism is all bad and to be avoided at all costs. But there are two issues which the advocates of thinking-the-unthinkable about subsidy are avoiding.
- The key is the mix. Many societies have evolved media systems which combine highly regulated journalism (usually broadcasting) with less-regulated or unregulated news (usually print or online). This tries to have the best of both worlds and often succeeds. So the question that matters is: exactly how much subsidised media might you want in your system?
- My second worry is related. Journalism is looking for new business models which work in new conditions. Offers of subsidy will weaken and undermine that search by making it less important.
Tags: africanews.com, Anas Aremayaw Anas, BBC, New York University, Victor Pickard
Separation of Church and State, Separation of Press and State. To have a press which is within governmental control is a step to fascism. I do however support an independent Public Broadcast Service which provides funding public radio and tv, much like the BBC. I don’t know much about Voice of America, but I think it was propaganda in part, or the Armed Services Networks.
As an American attorney I note with consternation the control of large corporations over media (including content) and the role of advertising and ownership in manipulating people. When Will Rogers (or whoever) said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, he wasn’t writing in an era of Fox News: the cartoon-like news source for many Americans which targets voters with IQs under 120. Now simple framing of untruths has resulted in the Rove/Koch phenomenon – the Tea Party which is made up of many who are undereducated, know nothing about history nor have any interest in the economics.
The losers here are the underserved, the youth and poor who are losing out on community services, education, clean air and water standards, the environment, consumer product standards. Ethics seems to have been left behind as well.
Just as government needs to stay out of our bedrooms, it need to stay out of our press.
George, thanks for this post. I’ve seen McChesney speak recently, too, and it’s helped me get my own views in order on what he said. I’m not sure I’m as convinced by any of your comebacks as I am by his diagnosis and prescription, though. One by one (including the problems in the post you made yesterday)…
1)Who decides what deserves subsidy? In answer to a question of mine, McChesney said that he favoured paying the subsidy to consumers of journalism, rather than to producers: giving every citizen, say, $200 annually to spend on the media of their choice. Quite apart from the objections that this isn’t really the ideal moment to persuade the US government to start new expenditure programmes on that scale and that monitoring the spending might be a hassle, this simply shifts the dilemma to different shoulders. Who decides what’s journalism?
I’m not quite sure what you mean by this – his answer was essentially “let the people decide”. While it spectacularly sidesteps the detail this strikes me as an interesting “in principle” prospect that goes some way towards safeguarding editorial independence. I’m sure you’re right that this would be a hassle to administer, but isn’t hassle worth living with if the alternative is a complete lack of journalism (no papers in many US cities) and its slow death by cuts elsewhere (set out convincingly in M’s book).
I take your point on convincing any government to commit to expenditure in a recession, let alone a besieged one having to battle crazy tea party ideologues who see any public subsidy as beyond the pale. But again, the alternative seems very bleak.
2) Is it really a good idea to prop up business models – print and perhaps terrestrial television – that are failing?
But isn’t that his point? That the role journalism plays in a healthy democracy is too important for us to abandon because of a failing business model. To watch public interest news die because the market (quite rationally) no longer sees fit to support it with advertising revenue seems like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
3) While McChesney admires European countries and their support for journalism, he hasn’t quite grasped that the bulk of this support is for public service broadcasting and very little is for print. The situation in six European countries is well laid out in this recent report by Rasmus Nielsen and Geert Linnebank.
Bit patronising? He seems to have grasped that quite clearly. He makes the argument for supporting newspapers with public money in the US because they dominate the news mediascape so much. He also argues for increasing subsidy to broadcasting, but newspapers are so important to him largely because they produce so much of US news. If they were to be taken out of the mix, or reduced to tiny online operations with a fraction of the staffing and resources previously supplied by newspapers, then US citizens would only be getting a fraction of the news they used to, and US elites (locally and nationally) would only be getting a fraction of the scrutiny they used to. The platform is less important than the social role played by journalism as a public good. The fact that some European states subsidise news across platforms seems to strengthen the general argument he makes that state intervention doesn’t automatically equal a loss independence, rather than weaken it.
4) The key is the mix. Many societies have evolved media systems which combine highly regulated journalism (usually broadcasting) with less-regulated or unregulated news (usually print or online). This tries to have the best of both worlds and often succeeds. So the question that matters is: exactly how much subsidised media might you want in your system?
But the problem is that in the US at least there never really was much of a mix, and plurality and competition is decreasing at an alarming rate. Sure, where it works it works because of the advertising subsidy, but as this cash migrates elsewhere maintaining a good mix becomes less and less of an option. Also, different forms of publicly subsidised news could be regulated differently – it’s not like a public local newspaper would have to regulated with the BBC model.
Obviously, in the UK context we’re not anywhere near the stage of crisis that we see in the US, but we shouldn’t be complacent either. We do have an increasing number of large-ish towns with no real local news because the market has retreated from them. And media consolidation trends mean that many of those which still do have papers are being slowly starved of resources. It’s not inconceivable that we’ll be in a situation (perhaps within a decade or two) where the BBC is the only news provider for large areas of the non-metropolitan UK. That’s got to be a worry. Where’s the mix then? The question that matters in that situation becomes how do we get back a semblance of media plurality when well-funded public interest news is not profitable enough for the private sector to produce.
5) My second worry is related. Journalism is looking for new business models which work in new conditions. Offers of subsidy will weaken and undermine that search by making it less important.
My worry about this argument is dealt with by McChesney quite well, I think. None of even the most successful experiments in alternative business models so far mooted look like being able to reproduce the scale and reach of the journalism provided to society by the market during the heyday of the advertising subsidy. And even if one is eventually found the field may be completely decimated by then, and society will have had to put up with a largely un-scrutinised political and business elite for a good long while. Is that a price worth paying for the satisfaction of being able to say “we didn’t interfere with the market”?
There must be ways of limiting this knock-on effect on the search for other models. What if public subsidy were limited to areas where the commercial players had withdrawn, for example? There are currently unemployed trained journalists and enthusiastic amateurs covering many a news hole in UK towns that are screaming out for the resources to make what they do possible long term. Public money (used in the right way) could enable these players to work together to produce news for under-served communities. What that “right way” might be is far from clear, obviously, but it strikes me that it deserves some thought and debate, because the alternative is no news at all for many people. If the advertising model is so important, public subsidy could even be used to enable hybrid funding models for news outlets in areas with no local news, perhaps by paying for shared advertising sales teams to sell hyper-local ads. I guess my worry is that by seeking to protect the market at all costs, we may lose sight of that fact the market no longer protects many of us.