Journalism—real, in-depth, investigative, hard-hitting journalism—is expensive. The first thing the major news broadcasters did after being deregulated, was drop their documentary units. This type of journalism is also known as “long-form” journalism, and the Internet is helping to kill it.
Online classifieds like craigslist, and more choices for advertisers, namely search advertising but others, too, are creating a market environment where the Fourth Estate is struggling, especially on the print side, and this is likely to continue.
Experts are calling it a market failure. There’s not enough advertising and subscription revenue to cover the hefty costs of doing real, long-form journalism. And arising from the market failure is the proposal that the government step in.
Before you blow up and shout “Unconstitutional!” let’s revisit the First Amendment:
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of the press.”
It doesn’t really say anything about forbidding a government-funded or government-subsidized press. It basically just forbids the government from interfering with the press. And we already have some of that, if you’ve heard of National Public Radio, for instance.
I’m not advocating, so cool your heels. I’m just exploring.
And it works for the BBC. * Flinch *
The argument is that journalism is too important to let fail because the market can’t support it. Other things like that include roads and national parks and schools and libraries and firefighters and other great Benjamin Franklin-esque programs. Without government help, these important things may not exist.
Free Speech lawyer and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is all for it. Columbia’s dean of the journalism school seems to be on board, too, so long as it’s BBC-like, or indirectly subsidized.
The extra-cynical (or extra-wing-nut, depending on your stance) might venture a government-supported press couldn’t be any worse or more corrupt than a press owned by major conglomerate corporations, who seem to be manipulating the news as it is. If it’s going to be manipulated, it should at least be manipulated by a branch of the people, right? No more GE or News Corp. deciding what’s important.
And then the smaller-government ilk go ape, start the next Communist witch hunt.
So what’s the answer? It may be too early and complex to know. But it’s easy to point at the market and say it has failed. It’s a little harder to look at the market and tell people to ride it out for a bit, as it may be that the market hasn’t failed, it’s just changing.
It may be that in the future, when there is no paper cost, when video is cheaper, when communication technology is better and cheaper, when news organizations don’t have to house their employees, when all that overhead is reduced (kind of like when record labels and movie studios don’t have the cost of discs and packaging anymore), that a new system is developed along with a new press that can sustain itself and is a more omnipresent watchdog than ever.
It may be that journalists will have to dismount their high horses. It may be that the market is rejecting an outdated method while raising up another more decentralized method, and that neither the government, nor major corporations are needed.
