Excellent Article on the Death of U.S. Journalism

[snot]

In The Nation, by John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney (much more at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/nichols_mcchesney ):

"Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news . . . .

"The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with 'free markets.' It was the result of public policy.

"Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic. First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the 'Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.' Black argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that 'assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order.'

"But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media system is anything but an independent "free market" institution. 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."

(Edited to fix quote marks)

[Uncle Joe]

1. This does seem to be an excellent and well thought out column.

Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, snot.:thumbsup:

[nichomachus]

2. One quibble

I haven't read the whole thing, but have bookmarked it because this is a pet topic of mine.

However, I take issue with the first sentence.

Freedom of the press was always connected to the person who owned a press. It's just that in those days, the cost of entry and the means necessary to stay in business were low. It was much like today's bloggers. Anyone with a press or access to one could publish.

Gradually, the corporations corrupted that model and made the entry cost and the cost of business so high that only the corporate giants could play.

Blogs are now taking the place one held by the small independently owned newspapers. This is why the corporations are figuring out ways to restrict Internet access and raise the cost of publishing blogs.

[90-percent]

3. Why

Why should I pay to consume MSM if it is nothing more than corporate propaganda?

We want NEWS, not merely what our corporate overlords want us to read.

MSM deserves it's fate. They will do what all corporate scoundrels do, buy legislation that does away with their competition from internet blogs.


-90% Jimmy

[SteppingRazor]

4. I disagree with a couple of points there.

One, the vast majority of what is in newspapers is not, and ever could be, corporate propaganda. Or do you really believe that "House Fire Kills Two in Local Town" could have some malignant, corporatist plot behind it?

Two, blogs aren't competition for the media. The vast majority of blogs, even big-time ones like HuffingtonPost, rely almost exclusively on content from the mainstream media, and then build upon that content. Without original, initial reporting from professional journalists, bloggers wouldn't have a whole lot to blog about.

[snot]

8. Of course it's not all propaganda; but very little of it serves the true interests of the majority.

Most is just distraction, and most on the most impt. issues IS propaganda.

And there's less and less reporting even on local events such as house fire kills two.

And yes, blogs ARE competition for the corporate media, since they're doing more and more of the job traditional media used to do.

But I agree, bloggers don't have networks of their own reporters, at least not with credentials. But that's one of the author's points.

[Echo In Light]

5. Exactly. You cannot have a corrupt govt w/o a corrupted mainstream media

[SteppingRazor]

6. The rare 11-minute-delayed dupe.

:blush:

[SteppingRazor]

7. Great article.

I agree that more public funding of the free press is necessary. Those ratios of how much other western democracies spend on their public journalism versus how much we spend were pretty eye-opening.

The problem, of course, is that it's tough under the current economic climate to convince policymakers to spend that kind of dough.