How and When Are News Media Subsidies Justified by Governments

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session is on media regulation and starts with Timothy Koskie, with a paper on news media regulation. He notes that we are in a time of permacrisis, and this is also being presented to us by contemporary news coverage; can these real or imagined catastrophes also provide us with an impulse for us to rethink news media regulation?

Specifically, should we rethink our approach to news media subsidies? The US started its first news media subsidy experiment as early as 1792, as part of building the new country; such state support is designed to foster the production, distribution, and consumption of original and high-quality media content to keep people informed, foster public debate, and hold power to account. But what does ‘support’ mean, here – direct payments, indirect tax relief, subsidy for labour costs, equipment, travel, training, subscriptions, even mortgages?

Alternatively, of course the government could just make media itself, as it does with public service media. Media subsidies instead introduce greater separation between government and media, ideally but not always) ensuring the media’s independence; and subsidies acknowledge that the news market itself is not working by itself.

How do such subsidy schemes in Australia and elsewhere enable us to examine how the news is valued, then? There are many different approaches to subsidising the news media, and the present project explored 46 subsidy schemes in seven democratic nations (Australia, Belgium, Canada, South Korea, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK), ranging in size from $300,000 to $3b for news media companies, and focussing especially on subsidies that acknowledged a crisis point for media funding in their documentation.

Three broad areas emerged from this: digital translation and the collapse of business models in the news market (in Belgium, South Korea, Norway, and the UK); regional strife and the growth of news deserts (in Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand); and pandemics and the urgency of news (in Australia, Norway, and the UK). In each of these cases, there was a strong emphasis on economic unsustainability in the new market: digital transition has collapsed business models; regional news lacks sufficient financial support; and/or COVID-19 is preventing production and distribution.

Subsidies responding to such market failure emphasised the nature of news as vital for democracy (enabling effective citizenship); as vital for information (especially in regions under threat); and as vital for communities (building social knowledge and connection). Solutions offered were to pay journalists, buy equipment, fund projects, offset advertising losses, have the government pay for ad placements, hire new cadets, and provide freely syndicated local public interest reporting.

Few of these subsidies have had a funding duration of more than three years, however; they didn’t provide much substantial funding; and they were limited to a small number of eligible publishers. Perhaps they are starting-points for further policy-development, however: perhaps the crises they respond to at least open up discussions about what we value and what should be better supported by governments in news media systems.