Interestingly, when the US redesigned West-German politics after WWII, publicly funded journalism played a central role. Comparing the quality of German and American journalism today could turn up some good arguments supporting your case.
How about this? Suppose labor unions, progressive worker co-ops, and like-minded civic groups joined forces, just like the good ol days when labor unions ran their own newspapers, because they understood that freedom of the press cannot be only for those who own the presses, given the inordinate power they wield? Something that far right billionaires understand all too well today, much to our woe.
This is an approach that countries other than the US have had for decades. I live in Canada, and the CBC gets most of its funding from the federal government (it’s also big enough across television, radio and internet to get a piece of the shrinking ad market, but public funding is its main support).
As a result, CBC News is one of the only Canadian outlets still doing investigative journalism and breaking major stories, even as media conglomerates like Postmedia vacuum up local papers and strip them for parts.
Of course, Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of the Conservative party (and frontrunner for Prime Minister in the next Parliament) wants to strip that funding and kill CBC stone dead. So this is about to become a major fight in Canada too.
Love to see city pols who gleefully defund schools turn around when the teachers strike to piously proclaim how "Their priority is getting the kids back to school so they dont fall behind".
Fucker, you are the ones who closed down all the local buildings and crammed them into a big suburban complex that despite being brand new has them crammed 30 to a room with out wven chalk unless the teacher goes out of their own pocket!
There is a third way: public sustained pressure on the tech companies to collaborate more extensively in the creation of the base data and funding that news needs. AI could also help fill this gap. This takes away right wing knee jerk reactions but also put the emphasis where you correctly assign - tech eating the seed corn.
Even Silicon Valley elites must eventually admit that destroying the public square can erode the civic American society they claim to cherish.
Canada is currently trying to force the tech companies to share their ad revenue with news orgs that get clicks off their sites, but Meta at least has responded by just censoring news for Canadians on FB and Instagram. They're gambling that most people won't notice or care and that seems to be working for them fine
If you haven't checked out the MN Legacy Amendment, it's one model for how this can work. Dedicated tax revenue established through a ballot initiative to fund projects and programs oriented toward creating a better future. You can read about it here: https://www.legacy.mn.gov/about-funds
The latest episode of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast is a nice companion to this, the episode is "What's Really Killing the News Media? w/Victor Pickard".
Public funding can mean not just taxation, but funding by a community through donations. A newspaper supported by its community, i.e. a nonprofit newspaper, reflects the public interest directly. And a nonprofit newspaper is protected by the rules of nonprofit governance. Everyone in town has a strong interest in making sure their newspaper serves the community.
Love the idea of having tech companies taxed to keep local print journalism alive. My local paper (Reno, NV) is barely hanging on. I kept my subscription for an extra couple of years even if there wasn’t any stimulating content. I struggled over canceling it for months. Finally, I decided I just didn’t have enough packages that needed the stuffing. 💔
Well done on this, Hamilton. I'm a big believer in stepping out of a crisis to view it from a distance and, even if that means coming up with what can at first sight appear to be madcap ideas, the solutions that can attract dismissive guffaws from established stakeholders can give cause to rethink a whole sector's structure. This is certainly something to be pursued.
My initial thought was the police. They are enforcers of the law regardless of who has broken it. And yet it is trite to observe that the police and public prosecutors, even the judiciary, are not fully impartial. The journalism profession is one of our checks and balances, a guarantee against outlandish behaviour: one might almost view them as a step up from the conscientious citizen who reports criminal activity:
- victim of misconduct
- witness of misconduct
- whistleblower
- reporter/investigator of misconduct
- the police
- prosecution
- judiciary
- legislature.
Hence, the reporter/investigator of misconduct is a link in a chain of offsets that seek to balance excesses of prerogative or even abuse of power and forms an essential lynchpin between the general public who are victims or witnesses of misconduct, plus those moved to call it out, and the instances that are empowered by the state to take action to prevent or prosecute misconduct. If it is possible to structure the bottom four instances such as to be resilient to abuses of power and manipulation, then it should be possible to ensure that state-funded journalists likewise remain immune from pressure and duress. However, the safeguards to prevent the paymaster from calling the reporter's tune would need to be extremely craftily designed.
In the 1840s in Britain, one of the demands of the Chartist movement was annual parliamentary elections, which, it was argued offered the best check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal male suffrage every twelve months. In effect the prospect of bribing sufficient members of parliament every year was seen as a bar to members of parliament being susceptible to bribery. This demand is the only one the Chartists failed in, for cost reasons (their other demands were unsuccessful but got implemented anyway over time). The Chartists had an incomplete understanding of how lobbying worked; they viewed the prime danger of weighted interests lying in the nature of the man elected to parliament himself.
Any central government funding of journalism could very quickly turn into the Russian model, and it would take only a mild deviation from the true and honest path to bring such journalism within state-controlled, as opposed to state-funded, hands. The speed with which Gazprom took over the mainstream media outlets in Russia in the 1990s shows the avid nature with which media control was viewed as a key to control of the people in the Russian Federation. I just wonder what safeguards could be incorporated to prevent such a bastardisation of a wholesome idea in the liberal west.
Someone mentions the German model: that could be fruitful pickings, looking at just how the eminently neutral ARD (mostly fact-based, with expressly identified "comment" insertions in its TV news reporting) and ZDF, whose bulletins tend to be longer, comment-loaded (much more than ARD) but, after seeing them for several decades now - eminently fair, in my fair-minded mind, that is (https://www.zdf.de).
Publicly-funded journalism fits right in there. And yes, all the above are funded by largely different means, but that is in part because we have several different levels of government. Several angles to work.
Yes!
Tax ‘em. Break up the tech companies, too!
Interestingly, when the US redesigned West-German politics after WWII, publicly funded journalism played a central role. Comparing the quality of German and American journalism today could turn up some good arguments supporting your case.
Victor Pickard was just making exactly the same point in an article for ScheerPost (https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/04/why-the-market-not-to-mention-the-billionaires-cannot-save-journalism/ ).
How about this? Suppose labor unions, progressive worker co-ops, and like-minded civic groups joined forces, just like the good ol days when labor unions ran their own newspapers, because they understood that freedom of the press cannot be only for those who own the presses, given the inordinate power they wield? Something that far right billionaires understand all too well today, much to our woe.
This is an approach that countries other than the US have had for decades. I live in Canada, and the CBC gets most of its funding from the federal government (it’s also big enough across television, radio and internet to get a piece of the shrinking ad market, but public funding is its main support).
As a result, CBC News is one of the only Canadian outlets still doing investigative journalism and breaking major stories, even as media conglomerates like Postmedia vacuum up local papers and strip them for parts.
Of course, Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of the Conservative party (and frontrunner for Prime Minister in the next Parliament) wants to strip that funding and kill CBC stone dead. So this is about to become a major fight in Canada too.
Love to see city pols who gleefully defund schools turn around when the teachers strike to piously proclaim how "Their priority is getting the kids back to school so they dont fall behind".
Fucker, you are the ones who closed down all the local buildings and crammed them into a big suburban complex that despite being brand new has them crammed 30 to a room with out wven chalk unless the teacher goes out of their own pocket!
There is a third way: public sustained pressure on the tech companies to collaborate more extensively in the creation of the base data and funding that news needs. AI could also help fill this gap. This takes away right wing knee jerk reactions but also put the emphasis where you correctly assign - tech eating the seed corn.
Even Silicon Valley elites must eventually admit that destroying the public square can erode the civic American society they claim to cherish.
Great piece, agree entirely. Wrote something about the Irish situation last week.
https://open.substack.com/pub/howtofallapart/p/a-love-letter-to-journalism?r=i982n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Canada is currently trying to force the tech companies to share their ad revenue with news orgs that get clicks off their sites, but Meta at least has responded by just censoring news for Canadians on FB and Instagram. They're gambling that most people won't notice or care and that seems to be working for them fine
If you haven't checked out the MN Legacy Amendment, it's one model for how this can work. Dedicated tax revenue established through a ballot initiative to fund projects and programs oriented toward creating a better future. You can read about it here: https://www.legacy.mn.gov/about-funds
The latest episode of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast is a nice companion to this, the episode is "What's Really Killing the News Media? w/Victor Pickard".
Public funding can mean not just taxation, but funding by a community through donations. A newspaper supported by its community, i.e. a nonprofit newspaper, reflects the public interest directly. And a nonprofit newspaper is protected by the rules of nonprofit governance. Everyone in town has a strong interest in making sure their newspaper serves the community.
Love the idea of having tech companies taxed to keep local print journalism alive. My local paper (Reno, NV) is barely hanging on. I kept my subscription for an extra couple of years even if there wasn’t any stimulating content. I struggled over canceling it for months. Finally, I decided I just didn’t have enough packages that needed the stuffing. 💔
Well done on this, Hamilton. I'm a big believer in stepping out of a crisis to view it from a distance and, even if that means coming up with what can at first sight appear to be madcap ideas, the solutions that can attract dismissive guffaws from established stakeholders can give cause to rethink a whole sector's structure. This is certainly something to be pursued.
My initial thought was the police. They are enforcers of the law regardless of who has broken it. And yet it is trite to observe that the police and public prosecutors, even the judiciary, are not fully impartial. The journalism profession is one of our checks and balances, a guarantee against outlandish behaviour: one might almost view them as a step up from the conscientious citizen who reports criminal activity:
- victim of misconduct
- witness of misconduct
- whistleblower
- reporter/investigator of misconduct
- the police
- prosecution
- judiciary
- legislature.
Hence, the reporter/investigator of misconduct is a link in a chain of offsets that seek to balance excesses of prerogative or even abuse of power and forms an essential lynchpin between the general public who are victims or witnesses of misconduct, plus those moved to call it out, and the instances that are empowered by the state to take action to prevent or prosecute misconduct. If it is possible to structure the bottom four instances such as to be resilient to abuses of power and manipulation, then it should be possible to ensure that state-funded journalists likewise remain immune from pressure and duress. However, the safeguards to prevent the paymaster from calling the reporter's tune would need to be extremely craftily designed.
In the 1840s in Britain, one of the demands of the Chartist movement was annual parliamentary elections, which, it was argued offered the best check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal male suffrage every twelve months. In effect the prospect of bribing sufficient members of parliament every year was seen as a bar to members of parliament being susceptible to bribery. This demand is the only one the Chartists failed in, for cost reasons (their other demands were unsuccessful but got implemented anyway over time). The Chartists had an incomplete understanding of how lobbying worked; they viewed the prime danger of weighted interests lying in the nature of the man elected to parliament himself.
Any central government funding of journalism could very quickly turn into the Russian model, and it would take only a mild deviation from the true and honest path to bring such journalism within state-controlled, as opposed to state-funded, hands. The speed with which Gazprom took over the mainstream media outlets in Russia in the 1990s shows the avid nature with which media control was viewed as a key to control of the people in the Russian Federation. I just wonder what safeguards could be incorporated to prevent such a bastardisation of a wholesome idea in the liberal west.
Someone mentions the German model: that could be fruitful pickings, looking at just how the eminently neutral ARD (mostly fact-based, with expressly identified "comment" insertions in its TV news reporting) and ZDF, whose bulletins tend to be longer, comment-loaded (much more than ARD) but, after seeing them for several decades now - eminently fair, in my fair-minded mind, that is (https://www.zdf.de).
Publicly-funded roads, publicly-funded schools, publicly-funded defense...
Publicly-funded journalism fits right in there. And yes, all the above are funded by largely different means, but that is in part because we have several different levels of government. Several angles to work.
You may be interested in a new film by Rick Goldsmith, which I wrote about here: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/01/23/stripped-for-parts-american-journalism-on-the-brink-new-parkway-rick-goldsmith
Thank you for addressing the issue. I think one approach with lots of merits is some form of voucher system as the one proposed by Dean Baker https://cepr.net/fighting-billionaires-control-of-the-media-individual-news-vouchers/