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Robert McChesney and John Nichols feel that Americans have a patriotic duty to support newsgathering with our tax dollars. They've laid out their case in a new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (Nation Books, 2010), and they're barnstorming the country to promote their ideas for government mechanisms to support the fourth estate. The duo commands enough respect to draw crowds and high-profile interviews, but what is the likelihood that they'll foment substantial policy or legislative change? Maybe I'm just too jaded to see it.
McChesney, a celebrated scholar, and Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation, are veteran agitators for media reform. In addition to their writings, they are co-founders of Freepress.net. Their latest book began as an article for The Nation. Few would argue with the central claim of both the article and the book -- that the accelerating demise of news organizations is a threat to democracy. It's their solution that's causing some argument - that government should take a range of measures to make independent journalism sustainable.
The authors rightly point out that the public interest journalism that let's voters in on politicians' back-room deals, helps us understand complicated legislative proposals, or just tells us what the heck is going on under our noses isn't likely to turn a profit. However, they maintain that it's a vital public good, and public goods deserve public funding. Historically, they add, it's not a completely unprecedented idea:
The government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses, monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased news media revenues.
Here are some of the solutions McChesney and Nichols recommend:
- Free postage for periodicals that get less than one-fifth of their income from ads
- A tax credit for newspaper purchasers
- More government funding for public media
They've got people thinking. Writing for Mother Jones, Nikki Gloudeman said given the dire state of the industry, "pretty much any proposal is worth a listen," but "good luck selling [their ideas] in today's financial and political climate." Chris Kiseel at Publicola is skeptical: "I just think using government funds to sustain a clearly dying medium—namely, newspapers—is probably a waste of money." Mary Carey went to hear McChesney and Nichols' speak at Amherst:
"A typical reaction to McChesney's and Nichols' argument is that government subsidies will inevitably lead to "Pol Pot, death camps and gulags." But, in fact, before the emergence of advertiser-subsidized news, the Post Office underwrote the news by distributing it for free. If the federal government similarly funded journalism now the way it did in the 1840's, it would amount to $30 billion a year."
If you are in New York City on the evening of Feb. 3, you can hear McChesney and Nichols debate their ideas with New York University journalism professor Pamela Newkirk and David Carr of the New York Times.
Here are interviews that McChesney and Nichols gave to PBS' Now and the KQED forum:
Would you want your tax dollars to be used to support journalism?
