The Inevitability of Public Funding for U.S. News Media

Cardiff.
Day two of the Future of Journalism conference starts with a keynote from Robert McChesney. He begins by acknowledging yesterday’s keynote, but also notes that he has a somewhat different view on matters; pointing to The Guardian as a special case, endowed by a trust, and publicly funded media in Britain in general, he notes that there aren’t all that many such news organisations left – and these and new initiatives may not be enough in their own right to sustain the future of journalism. More and other approaches are needed.

The world is filled with young people who want to be journalists, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so. There’s no lack of talent or enthusiasm, but a lack of resources and institutions that enable this – this is a political problem first and foremost; the labour market for journalists in the U.S. is now the worst it has ever been – worse even than in the Great Depression –, and this will not change unless major changes are made. And things may get even worse in the coming years.

So, what is the situation in the U.S.? Professional journalism there, even in its glory days, had deep flaws, and these have grown more pronounced with the increasing commercial pressure on the profession. That great journalists still emerge from this environment is all the more remarkable. This also means we shouldn’t romanticise the past; the system is flawed and didn’t do a good job creating a new generation of media users as well as producers.

At the start of the 20th century, there was a drive to protect monopoly (or oligopoly) power in the newspaper markets in the major cities in the U.S.; the solution was to disconnect media owners from the editorial content, and to generate a strong professional education and identity for journalists. This had its merits: generating professional ideals like the quest for truth and accuracy, but deep flaws also evolved.

The first of these is that journalism relied on people in power – sources – to set up debate in the news media. If journalists raised issues which were not countenanced by those in power, those journalists were seen to be unprofessional. Certain themes – U.S. power overseas, and U.S. militarism, for example – were effectively silenced. The more certainty there was about specific issues (Vietnam, Iraq, …) the more likely it was that they were based on lies. The reason we needed professional journalism, Lippman said, was that government sources will lie to you – but journalism has failed to address this challenge.

Similarly, U.S. president James Madison argued for a free press mainly because he saw that ancient empires (Rome, Greece) fell down due to their militarism; he foresaw this tendency for the U.S., and suggested that this would need to be addressed by enshrining a strong free press in the constitution – to safeguard democracy and a free society against militaristic elements. An independent press system monitors the government especially in the context of foreign and military policy – the citizenry depends on such scrutiny, as it provides the only source of independent information on government activity.

In journalism, there was recently been a strong growth in business news, but most of such news is utterly pathetic; it glorifies certain companies and business leaders, but fails to provide any critical coverage. It completely missed the great economic scandals of the last 15 years – the tech and housing bubbles, for example – and indeed heroised the major business leaders who were ostensibly responsible for these crises.

Labour reporting, by contrast, has virtually disappeared in the U.S.; there has been a massive, unprecedented growth in social inequality in the U.S., but it is barely covered in the news media at all, even though it is the problem of the present day. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson also strongly argued for the free press system, and saw this as counteracting such inequality, by providing information equally to the rich and the poor and thereby ensuring  their ability to participate equally in the democratic process – but this equality is failing in the U.S., and this is also reflected in electoral participation: some 80% of the wealthiest Americans now vote in presidential elections, but only some 20% of the poorest do. They don’t, because they feel unable to affect political decisions, or indeed because they feel they can only affect it negatively. Journalism should be about bringing people from all strata in society into political participation, but it has failed to do so.

During the first half of the 1900s, there was an enormous fight about the nature of professional journalism – whether it should be adversarial towards everyone in power, representing those without such power (an adversarial and democratic perspective), or whether it should allow the people in power to set the terms of the debate and report accurately what they say. The latter perspective won, needless to say: statements of the powerful are taken at face value, and rarely critiqued.

Even if all the new digital ventures take off, this still won’t make much of a difference to the current problems, Robert says. It won’t make up for the loss of newsrooms and professional journalists which we’ve seen. Journalism is a public good, much like education, and requires public funding; if such funding was removed from education, for example, only the rich would be able to afford quality education, and the same is true for journalism.

This fact has been hidden from Americans by the funding of journalism through advertising, but that commercial coupling has now been removed; advertisers have moved on to cheaper and more effective options, and journalism is left naked shrivelling in the wind, Robert says. This has revealed the need for public funding for journalism once again. And advertising funding was never unproblematic anyway, of course, as it came with commercial pressures to modify journalistic reporting in some ways. Today, the same applies online: if you get journalistic information online, you’re not the customer, you’re the product, Robert says, and this, too, shapes journalistic coverage.

But the idea of public subsidies for journalism is seen as antithetical to the very foundation of the U.S.; it is virtually excluded from discussion, through comparisons with state media in authoritarian regimes. The claims against such public funding are never properly investigated, therefore – but there are obvious differences. Dictators funding public media will end up with state-controlled media, obviously – but democracies funding public media do not need to follow the same lines.

If the U.S. spent just as much per capita on its public media as other democratic countries do – none of them authoritarian regimes with authoritarian media –, this could result in significant improvements. The top five or six most democratic countries, as rated by The Economist, all have strong publicly-funded media systems, for example; and commercial news media in these countries remain strong nonetheless (stronger than those of the U.S.), according to a study by Freedom House.

Increasing press subsidies in democratic nations can lead to a more aggressive press coverage of the government, in fact. But the current rudimentary public service media network in the U.S. won’t cut it; the U.S. needs new forms of publicly subsidised media; it needs competing independent newsrooms in major cities. It also needs more widespread, more diverse journalism education.

Indeed, it used to have such a publicly subsidised media system, in its very early days; not least, for example, during the late 1700s the U.S. postal service was utilised in important ways for the distribution of newspapers, and heavily subsidised for doing so. Madison argued forcefully for the free distribution of newspapers through the postal service, in fact, and hoped to make Thomas Paine the first Postmaster-General of the USA.

If the same percentage of GDP was spent on public media subsidies today as it was then, the U.S. would spend $35b per annum. As a result, in the 1830s, de Tocqueville was astounded by the amount of newspaper organisations in the U.S. (and especially by the variety of small and independent papers). Most working journalists in the U.S. now see such state support as the only option for the future – and the debate must now shift towards not whether, but how to do it while maintaining the press’s independence.

All of this is overlaid by the major economic crisis now unfolding in the U.S. – and all predictions point to things getting much worse still. And the political system is completely off the rails; Robert calls the current state a ‘dollarocracy’. Public opinion in the U.S. hasn’t changed all this much on core issues since the 1970s – but the attitudes of political parties have changed markedly. This is driven primarily by money interests; it is the crisis of our times, and impervious to reform.

The Republican Party is now extreme beyond belief, essentially looking to return to a Dickensian state (but in Dickens’s times, the U.K. was on a path of growth – the U.S. is in decline). Politicians appear to be happy with a journalism-free state, and some on the right are actively campaigning to dismantle the news media even more. As a result, U.S. citizens’ news media diet is appalling.

And working conditions in general, as well as for journalists in particular, are steadily getting worse; journalistic work now takes place in a virtual digital sweatshop. This is a dreadful situation. All three of the biggest political corruption scandals in the U.S. in recent years (DeLay, Abramoff, Cunningham) were uncovered by journalists – but all the journalists uncovering these scandals are now unemployed; the lowly-paid freelancers who have replaced them are unlikely to engage in similar investigative inquiries.

The Pew Center’s longitudinal study of news production in Baltimore examined how many original news stories originated in Baltimore; it found a 30% decline since 2000, and a 70% decline since 1991. Such tendencies are replicated all over the country. This doesn’t mean there’s less news - but there is less journalism. Journalistic work is being replaced by virtually unedited press releases and news statements from government and industry sources; this is also mirrored in the shifting ratio of jobs in public relations to jobs in journalism in the U.S: from 1:1 in 1960 to 2:1 in 1980, to 4:1 today. There may be lots of news in the future, but mainly spin and propaganda – not journalism. More Fox News: thriving on a lack of journalism, and relying on its audiences’ unfamiliarity with the real story.

The U.S. doesn’t have the luxury to take its time to fix this imbalance – given the pressing issues facing the country today, it needs to be addressed now. And as much as you can’t have democracy without journalism, you also can’t have journalism without democracy; the more the democratic system in the U.S. declines, then, the harder it will be to rebuild its journalistic system, too.

But what hope is there of serious change? Still, Robert says, pessimism is self-fulfilling, so we have no choice other than to be optimistic; many other nations are facing similar challenges, too. We cannot think about politics in terms of how it’s worked in the past; in the current situation, everything we know is of less value: we’re entering terra incognita, and new models and approaches are emerging. The popular protests in Wisconsin have shown that people aren’t apathetic, and that grassroots movements can be strong – it’s there that we need to look for the coming future of journalism and democracy.