Newspapers around the world are crumbling, even the large battleships like the Guardian. It simply doesn’t pay to produce well researched news (subjective) in the Internet age. Paywalls don’t seem like a solution that could be adopted by most papers. The void is being filled by fake news and sensationalism, while large newspapers are being at risk to become pet projects of some billionaires, whatever intention they have.
The question is, do you think journalism is a good that the government should subsidize? I’m aware that major issues are quality control, how to distribute the money, and how to make sure that it’s really used for its purpose (all subjective). Still, countries like Germany do subsidize their press, so it can work.
You’re going to have huge issues with alleged political bias.
Australia has a taxpayer-funded broadcaster, the ABC, which is regularly (and not, IMHO, entirely baselessly) accusing of leaning politically left and giving undue weight to stories on leftist issues/causes.
I predicted years ago people would start suggesting this, and that by 2020 it would be a really serious raging political debate. The newspapers themselves have already been hinting at it. You’ll all see.
[QUOTE=Streetcat]
The question is, do you think journalism is a good that the government should subsidize?
[/QUOTE]
The problem with this hypothesis is kind of obvious:
There has been quality journalism in the past, and there is today, without the bother of government financing. There is basically no evidence at all that government subsidies make for better journalists. That’s not to say there aren’t good journalists working at subsidized media outlets, because there are, but there’s crappy ones too, and many fine journalists are NOT subsidized.
There is no way, realistically, for the government to be able to figure out how to subsidize good journalism without subsidizing bad journalism.
The thing with government-supported anything is that people will be paying for it with their taxes. More and more, it seems people are wanting more and more to control what is and isn’t paid for by their taxes (ie. what is taught in schools, what art is in museums, what health procedures are funded, etc.). And with the increased polarization of the populace and politicization of the news, I imagine that many people will certainly cry foul that their money is going to this or that supposedly conservative/liberal biased rag.
And in a larger point, I think that the radical freedom of the press that the US is theoretically built on (despite that many of the early papers were largely owned or partially funded by this or that politician) demands that the press lives or dies by the support or lack thereof from the people. If we cannot come together to support fact-based news, then that is our loss as a citizenry in this (theoretically) radically free country. But then I fall on the Jeffersonian side of the Jefferson/Hamilton split of lesser/greater government control of society.
Government subsidies would destroy whatever good the press is supposed to do. The idea is that they serve as a sort of unofficial check on government power, a watchdog of sorts, “speaking truth to power”. How well are they going to do that when it’s the power that’s cutting their checks?
In my state, “this is a government subsidy” is the argument the Governor is using to remove the requirement to post public notices in the paper.
It’s a Cheap argument (from a Cheap Political Hack) that is trying to run all newspapers in my state out of business. The underlying assumption is that the information can be put on a website and that everyone has a working computer.
Except that… everyone doesn’t… and ‘Public’ notices means ‘Public’ notices. (It’s not public if you have to have a thousand dollar computer and an Internet connection to access it.)
This is my gut reaction, as well, being a (photo)journalist in a previous life. Even my college newspaper was self-funded (no money from the university) to maintain editorial independence and avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof. I would be uneasy at an institution whose job is, at least partly, to police the government in the public interest accepting money from said government it is keeping watch on.
I admit, I haven’t thought this completely through, but that’s my initial reaction. It seems to run counter to the idea of a strong independent press.
Are you strictly advocating public support of the News Paper medium, or do you just want to support good journalism in general? Even though I subscribe to the print edition of the Washington Post, I recognize that over the next decade or so this format is likely going the way of dairy men dropping off milk bottles on your doorstep. It is not an efficient way to get news to the masses. But good investigative news reporting need not be confined to news papers. There is already limited government funding of journalism through NPR and PBS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If you wanted to subsidize journalism it would probably be best to work through these already established entities.
The CBC here in Canada does a pretty good job. Overall, I find that their reporting is pretty fair and reliable. They do have a slight left-leaning bias but they are definitely not slavish to the gov’t of the day.
I spend a lot of time on the SDMB disagreeing with you – so it’s nice to see there’s one good argument we have in common!
If the Washington Post had been heavily government-subsidized, there would have been pressure to fire Woodward and Bernstein. If the subsidies were the difference between the paper’s survival and its bankruptcy, how would that pressure have been resisted?
I’m not sure if government subsidies are a good idea or not, but the truth is that good reporting is expensive. It is a lot cheaper to report what celebrities think about an issue than to report on the issue itself. Although it is nearly ten years old, I highly recommend watching this TED talk that discusses the issues involved.
That pockets of investigative journalism still exist is a minor miracle, but no one wants it anymore and it goes against the interests of the rich and powerful. The enterprise should be allowed to die with dignity.
I agree with you on this , we don’t need the government controlling what we are able to read especially when we have an incoming president that want to take away our freedom of free speech !
(Bolding mine) Basically this, although it’s more people want it but don’t want to pay for it, and they want it to tell them things they don’t already know are happening.
What journalists think are important investigative stories and what their readers think are important investigative stories are often two different things.
Interesting controversy somewhat related: a bill in the NJ legislature to remove the requirement that state govt agencies post official legal notices in newspapers, saying they could just do it online. The GOP governor Christie supports it, and it’s naturally being painted by some as him v the media as payback for their coverage in his ‘Bridgegate’ scandal and/or by him as (now exiled?) Trump backer adopting a Trumpian anti-media attitude. That neglects however that both houses of the NJ legislature have Democratic majorities so no bill would have any chance without significant Democratic support, which this one has, which is why it matters whether Christie would go along with it.
Anyway aside from motives by Christie, the newspapers seem to pretty much admit it’s a subsidy mainly by saying they’d have to lay people off if they lost this gteed source of ad revenue. Their argument doesn’t seem to mainly be about all the people nowadays who have any need to read state govt legal notices, lack internet connections, but buy newspapers. Seems to me it has become a subsidy given the direct web alternative. And this is the basic problem of the print media business model, this example is a small coda to the death of classified ads in general due to the web.
In general, subsidizing media outlets because web makes them obsolete might be a real political issue in some countries and perhaps an interesting philosophical discussion in the US but I see no chance of it in practical political terms in the US, not if done directly and openly anyway.