1. Professional journalism is measurably in decline, there are simply less and less people doing paid journalism in America at all levels.
2. Professional journalism is also in relative decline, as compared to professions whose primary function is to misinform such as marketing and PR who now far outnumber journalists which was not true a few decades ago. The fewer journalists remaining are more and more reliant on official sources of information for their stories, and do proportionally fewer stories based on original research, unofficial sources and investigation.
3. Newspapers remain key to the news we the public acually digest whether we read online, watch TV, listen to the radio or buy ink-on-dead-trees. Simply no other medium originates as many stories as newsprint, and in the rapid failure of newspapers, other media are not stepping up with equivalent journalistic resources toward primary news gathering, despite the hype about the internet.
4. The US founders understood the vital importantance of journalism in a democracy and beyond giving the press specific protection in the Bill of Rights (which is well known), they also gave it significant public financial support by heavily subsidizing postal rates for delivering newspapers and even use of government printing resources at below market rates. Comparatively these subsidies far exceed what NPR/PBS get today and are comparable to what countries noted for public media support provide. They calculate it would be worth $30 billion a year.
5. They propose a voucher system whereby each citizen gets (say) $200 a year to split among whatever media sources they choose in public support. The idea being to make the media outlets supported independent of partisanship, government intimidation and other concerns around the traditional model of say the BBC or CBC.
I think the most important point it makes as relates to the type of reader likely to read about this here, is that one shouldn't be blasé about internet based media taking over for print. A well funded, informative and profitable private media is not a given any more than public parks, clean oceans or libraries are. The 100 years of newspapers running news rooms as a loss leader to sell advertising and classifieds was happenstance, an historical anomaly not the regular order. That era is ending, so liberals must recognize that and look for effective ways to ensure society continues to have a good supply of information needed to keep a functioning democracy.
For the vast bulk of human history, information about the state of the world has been expensive and only the purview of the rich. Even today, with new information sources like never before available to most people, the rich have maintained an advantage in the accuracy and timeliness of the information they have access to. Sure, we can all go to Google finance, but the rich have Bloomberg machines. We can read corporate results, but the rich have comprehensive market research studies and analysis sold at rates of hundreds or thousands of dollars for access to a proprietary report. I work in information technology and businesses in my field continue to pay Gartner and Forrester that level of premium for their analysis and reporting on technology trends.
What if all that high quality free public information seriously eroded in quality though? It may never decrease in quantity, as there are always new starlets and sex tapes to report on, but as Bob McChesney and John Nichols discuss above, the number of people doing the work of researching, digging and analyzing information for cheap or free public consumption has been declining rapidly. Talkingpointsmemo and Propublica are great, but they are silver linings in a vast dark cloud.
Like any other source of power, conservativism seeks to create (or enjoys the existence of) asymmetry in availability of quality information. This is partly why their elites detest public media so much (the non-elites detest it for different reasons). We have all grown up in a world where it was relatively easy to find out what was going on all over the world. From the advent of the telegraph making possible timely transmission of news stories (ie, literally, the "wire") for mass publication at far flung locations, the last several generations have had far better access to world events than ordinary people (or even elites) of the hundreds of generations before them. The HBO show "Rome" did a fair job portraying this by the occasional scenes of the crier shouting news (content decided by elites) to the always attentive pubic about the doings of the Roman nobles. Most historical portrayals forget to even mention that the omniscience of the viewer watching these events unfold is not shared by ordinary people of the day. We all know (or can look up) what happened with Caesar, Brutus, Cicero and the rest but what did the average Roman citizen, or slave know?
We won't go back quite to that world, as I said the volume of information won't decrease, and we'll continue to have easy access to some sources of information that the Romans would not have but the value in the high priced market research or other proprietary analysis is largely about improving the signal to noise and highlighting what's really important. Connecting the dots. Good journalism does exactly this too, but ensures everyone has access to it rather than a select few. Market research has its place in the market, but democracy without journalism is a hollow shell at best, a complete sham at worst. |
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