Should America have state-funded journalism?
The more desperate their need for money, the more pressure they’ll be under to sell access to their most valued assets. The salon-scheme was a very bad idea for this newspaper, but it wasn’t a crazy strategy if you don’t think of newspapers as occupying a special role in American life. In fact, the worst thing about the proposal was how perfectly rational it was. Newspapers can, of course, protect against such blatant violations of their ethical codes. But the greater the pressure, the more likely those codes get cut up on the margins. And how much of its code will a newspaper protect if the alternative is closing down? How much of its code should it protect if the alternative is closing down? And those, eventually, will be the options faced by many outlets.
The question, then, is whether we want newspapers (and magazines, and so forth) so agonizingly vulnerable to these pressures. The news, after all, is not a market good. Among other things, it is not profitable to sell it. But we think society needs it. Cross-subsidization from advertising and classifieds worked so long as they worked. Those days are over.
Thankfully, society has developed models for funding things we deem important but don’t entirely trust to the private market. We have public universities and public centers for disease research and public firefighting departments and a public military and public roads. Why should news be different?
You can argue that it must be oppositional to government, of course, and so government funding is a conflict of interest. But many European countries have solved that problem by developing automatic funding structures free of government influence. Meanwhile, it’s not as if NPR or the BBC seem particularly concerned about criticizing their respective governments (nor, for that matter, do professors at public universities seem particularly cowed). And those funding mechanisms can, at the least, be transparent, predictable, and partial, which would be better than newspapers quietly trying a thousand things, many of them far from the public eye.
Matt Welch in Reason:
Follow that link on “solved,” and you get an October 2007 Ezra Klein piece in the American Prospect, whose only evidence for that claim is A) a paraphrase from a 2007 Columbia Journalism Review column by a recent journalism school grad trumpeting Sweden’s newspaper subsidies as “encouraging reportorial competition,” B) a quote from a UC San Diego communications professor saying that Swedish subsidies “don’t lead journalists to be timid,” and Klein’s own claim that the BBC produces with its $7 billion subsidy “credible, adversarial journalism that need not compete on grounds of sensationalism.”
I will let actual Swedish taxpayer and current BBC subscriber Michael C. Moynihan address the truthiness of those specifics (read some of his thoughts on the subject here), but from my experience covering media policy in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, and (more pertinently to the discussion) having been married to a longtime contributor to (and defender of) the French and Swiss national public radio systems, I can say that any notion of those five countries having come anywhere close to “solving” the conflict-of-interest problem is laughable. With every new election in France comes new, more politically aligned heads of public broadcasting. The current French president in particular is notorious for applying successful pressure on his media mogul pals for more flattering coverage. And wherever you see a dominant, subsidy-fueled national television network, you will also see a long history of suppressed competition, followed by an all-too-brief recent era of overstaffed broadcasters scrambling after an audience that finally has some other choices.Most relevantly of all to a discussion about news organizations’ profitability and quality, the largely unsubsidized U.S. newspaper industry has long been the envy of its European cousins, precisely on grounds of profitability, quality, and quantity, both of staffing and output. It is interesting that that model is now under threat, but it is not cause to spend my tax money propping up incumbent billionaires and otherwise aping a European system that on balance has produced inferior results.
But to Klein, who insists upon holding forth on subjects with which he seems unfamiliar, the BBC is immune from market pressure simply because it receives most of its money from the government (it makes money from BBC America, DVD sales, a film company, etc). But it competes rather aggressively with, for instance, Channel 4, home to brilliant programs like Shameless, Peep Show, Dispatches, and Phoenix Nights. As BBC executives are well aware, if it’s all Bill Oddie looking at birds or Simon Schama discoursing on Caravaggio, the plebs in Milton Keynes might just wonder why they pay the $231 licence fee for something they don’t want.
Mark Hemingway at The Corner
So in short: The solution to concern about the Washington Post jumping into bed with the federal government is to encourage the federal government to jump into bed with the Washington Post. Surely, that will take care of conflict of interest concerns . . .
Freddy Gray in TAC
UPDATE: Ezra responds
UPDATE #2: Ezra and Will Wilkinson at Bloggingheads
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