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.
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Comments
Journalism!
It is much cheaper and faster to do write and read over the internet so why not just switch? I mean back then newspapers were the only type of cheap up to date news they can get. Now, television is getting a bit expensive ($50 for cable/ satellite I mean come on) Newspaper cost quite a bit and we have to waste paper! Switching to the internet and starting blogs and websites for new sources is a great idea to get things going on the right path. I mean what household doesn't have a computer with internet nowadays? I believe journalism will still live, we just got to learn how to adapt.
Jounalism
In today's fast moving world no one has time to read newspaper or editorials so people so blog on the internet. So they can get updated while in office or moving in car.
Are you kidding me?
Uh, your piece would have been very nice...had I read it 7 years ago. Sorry, but not only is this old news regarding bloggers, you don't seem to understand the fundamental reasons WHY people are more inclined to get their "real" news somewhere other than MSM.
Maybe next time you can present the research that shows the ownership of MSM - and then you might want to talk about the corporations they own. Perhaps you might want to even LOOK at a genre such as cable network news and just SEE how much your news is spun and regurgitated while at the same time, hypnotizing you with ads that you probably don't even notice anymore.
The REAL reason the internet(s) have threatened and will CONTINUE to threaten MSM is because it's a matter of point and click to find TRUTH - once you've determined the credibility and credentials of any given blog or website. Once it's clear to you as a consumer that you're being manipulated, suddenly, televisons go off and search engines go on.
You can rationalize till the cows come home but here's a bulletin for you. The American people are NOT stupid. They KNOW when they're being fed a pack of lies and you might simply look to the polling of the current leader's number from 2000 to 2008 as a start.
On no, this is not about $$ on the part of the consumer. It's about disgust for the endless lies and propaganda spewing from MSM and a concrete, informed decision on the part of the consumer to find truth.
In case you haven't heard, the Fourth Estate is dead.
Natural Selection
I agree with the evolution thought. Natural selection will weed out the irrelevant and irresponsible.
Corporate media is not the same as journalism
When you read the informed and in-depth analysis available all over the blogosphere (Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com, Brad Friedman on BradBlog.com, Juan Cole on JuanCole.com), and then you read/view the superficial blather put out by CNN (missing white women, anyone?), Faux News (who's John Edwards?), the New York Times (we were against the war, really. Judith who?), and NPR, the mainstream media begins to seem increasingly out of touch and irrelevant.
Look, if I want to keep up with Iraq, I can either listen to/read the cliches of an American MSM "journalist" who parrots the conventional wisdon (because s/he doesn't speak the language and only has access to what s/he's told by spokepeople of the various players), or I can read blogs like Bagdhad Burning, written by an Iraqi living the day to day reality.
On domestic news, the mainstream media seems increasingly like an extension of the marketing communications arms of their various corporate owners and not like an institution with any interest whatsoever in reporting actual reality. Nowhere is this more clear to me than in the statistically biased coverage of John Edwards. For the number of votes he's gotten, he's been covered about 1/10 as much as you'd expect. Why? Because he's down on big corporations, and that's a threat to the big corporations that own media outlets.
killing news
I think the market needs to determine the outcome on this. I believe that the founders would probably have seen government funded press as being an abridgement. I suppose that a lot of town criers were put out of work after the invention of the printing press. It should be allowed to evolve on it's own.
The government controls what
The government controls what it funds.
I completely agree with you
I completely agree with you Jason. But it is significant for us. I hope the journalist will sort out solution for this, and lets hope for the best.
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