ournalism is no longer a viable business model, and it’s
not coming back.
Journalism is on life
support.
And we have to decide what to
do.
That seems to be the consensus of the public interest
advocates at this year’s
RightsCon 2019—the
premier global conference on human rights in the digital age, meeting now
in Tunisia.
The problem being discussed here is not how
to lure readers through pay walls and into subscriptions, but how to harness
public
investment in lump sums.
Public investment
is also known as government subsidy.
I have resisted the idea that independent journalism is not
up to the challenges of the information age.
Personally, I was inculcated with the “professional” tradition of
journalism by Watergate-era teachers.
atergate journalism was the product of a great evolutionary
leap in the early 20th century.
When President
Teddy Roosevelt didn’t like what the press printed, he derided journalists as “muckrakers.”
He sued newspapers for reporting corruption,
but his fussing only sold more papers.
Muckraking
became a badge of honor, and a tradition was born of objective and balanced journalistic
revelation of public and corporate corruption, independent of government entanglement.
Modern journalism was animated by the same
post-war idealism that birthed the (underrated) League of Nations.
However incidental, the First Amendment’s simultaneous
treatment of press and religion bolstered the notion of press-state separation.
In journalism by the late 20th century, we believed we had achieved
the
end of history, the ultimate model of a Fourth Estate in a liberal
democracy.
I wrote
an honors thesis on seemingly
archaic journalist licensing in Central America.
When I posited to my professors, the
Watergate crowd, the devil’s advocacy that maybe journalist licensing has an
upside, we shared a good laugh.
Of
course it would never work to have government oversight of journalism.
It would be the death of journalism and government
accountability in one fell swoop.
In ethics class, we were taught to be wary of any
entanglement with the subject of a story, and government is the greatest
subject of all. We grumbled our collective
didactic disapproval of the sports reporter who accepted a free ride to the
game on the team bus. White House press
credentials were a reality that made us swallow hard, but we took on faith that
access to the press room would never be restricted based on content or viewpoint. The American public wouldn’t abide it. And hey, the room is only so big.
That was the heyday.
That was when journalism was alive and kicking. We looked the other way when journalism had a
coughing fit of consolidation. We
pretended everything was OK when journalism went 24/7. We started new programs in j-schools when journalism
went online.
Eventually, though, we had to admit that we were in denial. It wasn’t the end of history. It was just the end.
dvocates here at RightsCon borrow liberally from the
language of socioeconomic development, which in turn generalized upon environmentalism.
Brittan Heller, now a fellow at Harvard, admonished
her audience to “stop saying ‘fake news,’” and, instead, to think more broadly
about “the entire information
ecosystem.”
At a panel organized by
Reporters WithoutBorders (RSF, for Paris-based Reporters Sans Fronti
ères), Mira Milosevic expanded on the problem of
“news
deserts” in various countries, the United States included, where local
news already is extinct.
Milosevic is
executive director of the
Global Forum for Media Development, and she worries
about the “lack of
sustainability” in journalism.
Consistently with
UNESCO policy, this
language portrays healthy journalism as an essential condition of human prosperity.
The language of environmentalism meanwhile tends
to elevate the crisis in journalism to accordingly catastrophic scale: journalism
is to political freedom as a green earth is to biological life.
 |
RSF panel at RightsCon 2019 in Tunis. Including, from left to right: moderator
Elodie Vialle, RSF; Julie Owono, Internet Without Borders; Mira Milosevic.
My photo (CC BY 4.0). |
The towel already has been thrown in from Walter Cronkite’s
corner. By RSF’s reckoning, journalism needs
“a multi-stakeholder approach.” If that’s
right, then we stand on the brink of another evolutionary leap. Though maybe the evolution metaphor peters
out if, like me, you’re not convinced that change can only be for the better. The stakeholders that journalism’s rescuers
would bring to the table include the public, civic service organizations, and—here’s
the kicker—“the ‘good’ forces of government,” as another RightsCon panelist put
it.
Milosevic conceded that meaningful government commitment is
essential if media watchdogs are going to tackle the populous public affairs
machinery of contemporary corporations.
And
there’s plenty of corporatocracy to tackle.
A RightsCon workshop moderated by
Privacy International's Francisco Vera, formerly of Derechos Digitales in Chile, discussed how
nations are mis-regulating personal data through trade agreements, such as our
old friend, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP, now the Comprehensive and
Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPATPP, which is better
because it’s comprehensive).
Our
governments—the bad parts—are more than eager, under the misleading banner of
free trade, to cater to corporations by signing away our fundamental privacy rights
and allowing data to be exported beyond the reach of jurisdictional law.
So it all shakes out this way:
Bad government is the problem.
Good government is the solution.
We don’t have to worry about
absolute journalistic
independence from government.
We need to
get good government to fund journalism that will fight bad government and its
corporate cronies.
Save the journalism,
save the world.
And don’t worry that
good government will be holding the purse strings.
Because, try to keep up, it’s
good.
Milosevic suggested that fines for corporate abuses of the
public trust might be channeled into funding public interest journalism.
That’s not a bad idea.
There is an appealing symmetry to buying the watchdog’s
food with a share of the savings.
It’s
like preventive
qui
tam.
It’s also not a wholly new idea.
If with waning enthusiasm, the United States,
like many countries, supports the arts and public libraries.
We experimented successfully with this approach
in 20th-century broadcasting.
Public
funding gave birth to such instrumental institutions as National Public Radio
and Sesame Street.
As the public tap has
been cinched off, both have turned to the private sector for a lifeline.
Sesame Street succumbed to HBO.
f we’re going to do public investment in free expression,
the challenge is to keep an arm’s length between investor and speaker.
On that score, America has a lousy track
record.
The American Library Association
is so battle weary on the intellectual freedom front that a RightsCon
dinner companion accused it
of cowardice: a far fall from its heroism of yore, when it championed opposition
to internet filtering and national security gag orders.
When Americans pledge public resources,
passion for individual ingenuity is soon overwhelmed by feverish fealty to the
Middle Ages maxim:
whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
Yet, I am told, journalism must now turn to government to ensure
its survival—to ensure all our survival.
I don’t disagree. I’m just
worried.
I’m giddy at the idea that we are witnessing an evolutionary
renaissance of the Fourth Estate. At the
same time, I’m nauseated at the prospect of a Faustian bargain.
Journalism is dying.
If we try to save it with a multitude of stakeholders, maybe we can resuscitate
the journalism of our ideals.
Or, like Dr.
Frankenstein, we’ll zap into existence an all new hybrid. Maybe we’ll have zombie journalism on our hands, and it will devour the
stringy remaining flesh of our gaunt democracy.
