The Death and Life of American Journalism

Having experience with the power of the press—he was the most widely read writer in revolutionary America—Paine would eventually observe: “Whoever has made observation on the characters of nations will find it generally true that the manners of a nation, or of a party, can be better ascertained from the character of its press than from any other public circumstance.”²

America, like any country that would be democratic, requires not merely a free press but a functional press—media that regard the state secret as an assault to popular governance, that watch the politically and economically powerful with a suspicious eye, that recognize as their duty the informing and enlightening of citizens so that they may govern themselves in a republic where, as Paine observed, power rests “inherently with the universal multitude.”³

These radical notions are the essential underpinnings of the American experiment. They have been well regarded and widely respected across two centuries. Yet, a free and functional press does not merely occur. While Paine argued that there is a natural right to liberty, the journalism that sustains it does not naturally follow. A media system that sustains journalism of consequence is willed into existence and maintained by a people and by their representatives.

Without a civic counterbalance to the vagaries of the market, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that journalism could wither and die. Its replacement would be not a void but the sophisticated propaganda, be it private or public, of a modern age in which it is possible to tell people much of what they need to know to consume products and support spurious wars but nothing that they need to know to be voters and citizens. This is the fear that the founders sought to guard against when they established a free press with protection in the Bill of Rights. They threw the full weight of the American government into the work of creating and sustaining a diverse, competitive, skeptical and combative media system for a nation that would rest power with an informed people rather than an enthroned magistrate. The makers of the American experiment knew precisely what they hoped to avoid. “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” explained James Madison, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”⁴

For the better part of 15 years, we have argued that the existing and evolving commercial news-media system has contributed to the collapse of quality journalism in America, creating precisely the circumstance Madison feared.We don’t claim to be pioneers in the criticism of consolidated, downsized and dumbed-down news. We discuss herein the long tradition of criticism of the problems for journalism wrought by commercial control.

The systematic deterioration of journalism has, for many years now, been observed and chronicled on the margins, among journalists, media scholars and activists. But it has until the current moment been largely ignored by the political mainstream and, not surprisingly, by the commercial news media. To some extent this neglect was grounded in the fact that the largest news-media firms were raking in colossal profits as they grew bigger and fatter over the past three decades. If firms were making money, the thinking (in what will be looked back upon as a period of capitalism-on-steroids) suggested, they had to be serving the public.

But when the money flow slowed and the speculators began to jump ship, leaving journalism to sink with the wreckage of newspapers, it suddenly became clear even to those who had once sung the commercial system’s praises that no service had been rendered.

By the end of this first decade of the 21st century, the crisis of journalism is obvious to all. Daily newspapers are in free-fall collapse. The entire commercial news-media system is disintegrating. Wall Street and Madison Avenue are abandoning the production of journalism en masse. Our nation faces the absurd and untenable prospect of attempting what James Madison characterized as impossible: to be a self-governing constitutional republic without a functioning news media.

This book outlines the dimensions of the crisis and explains how and why it came to be. In Chapter 1, we explain why the Internet has been a central factor in the collapse of the commercial news media, but also why leaving the analysis there is misleading. This is a deep-seated and long-term crisis that was created by media owners who made the commercial and entertainment values of the market dramatically higher priorities than the civic and democratic values that are essential to good journalism and a good society. Simply remaking business models to squeeze a few more dollars out of newspapers, or to find a few on the Internet, will not solve the crisis. A radically unsettling circumstance, for journalism and for democracy, demands radical policy solutions.

But they must be solutions sufficient to the task at hand.

In Chapter 2, we review the two leading “fixes” that have been at the center of most discussions to date: to use the authority of government to rewrite existing rules in order to allow old and dying commercial media to get even bigger and possibly establish a cartel on the Internet; or to simply relax and wait while entrepreneurs cobble together a new journalism system on the Internet. We are neither old-media stalwarts nor new-media fabulists. Our brief is a journalistic one that is less concerned with the print-versus-digital debate than with the construction of platforms that will sustain journalism and democracy in the 21st century. To our view, neither the “can’t we just rewrite the rules one more time?” nostalgia of the patrons of print nor the “let’s just find the answer on the Internet” utopianism of the denizens of digital is sufficient. In fact, both approaches are, upon scrutiny, revealed as structurally and practically unsound. Americans have to face the hard and cold truth: journalism is a public good that is no longer commercially viable. If we want journalism, it will require public subsidies and enlightened policies.

In Chapter 3, we tackle the behemoth myth that is handcuffing Americans as they attempt to respond to the current crisis: that American news-media institutions are and always have been operating in a “free market” system, run to maximize profit, and that the proper and necessary role of the government has been to stay completely out of the picture. We demonstrate that this is inaccurate. The vital and nonnegotiable prohibition on government censorship of media content has been blown up to make it the beginning and ending point of any discussion about what role government can play in preserving and ultimately extending the public’s right to know. We demonstrate that the government in fact created the free press throughout American history with aggressive and often enlightened policies and subsidies. Without this massive government role, it is unlikely that U.S. democracy would have survived, let alone blossomed.

We argue that Americans need to embrace this tradition as they respond to the present crisis. Unless Americans develop enlightened and extensive government policies and subsidies to spawn an independent journalism, it will not exist. And democracy will again be imperiled.

In Chapter 4, we offer our vision of the types of policies that will produce a powerful independent news media and journalism that realizes the revolutionary potential of digital technologies. We offer these proposals not on the assumption that the stating of wise ideas will conclude the debate but rather to begin the serious conversation our nation needs about journalism and media policies; we have little doubt that what we propose can and will be improved upon once Americans get the full might of their collective talent applied to the task.

Our central premise is that in this crisis moment Americans need to understand that the goal of democrats ought not be to simply patch up the old corporate news-media ship and sail it deeper into the storm. The goal must be to create a vastly superior news media that dramatically enhances the constitutional system and representative democracy.

What we know from our experience in politics and policymaking over the past two decades is that these are extraordinary times and that this crisis demands extraordinary solutions. Ideas that would have been taken off the table in the recent past are moving to the center of the debate, because the status quo and the conventional wisdom are bankrupt and discredited. If Americans do nothing, matters will get worse, dramatically worse. But if Americans act, this can be a moment of revolutionary advance. The American people are at a rare historical juncture where they hold their fate very much in their hands. They do indeed have it in their power to begin the world over again.

We discuss the real-world, here-and-now politics of media reform in our conclusion.

Make no mistake; the work of salvaging journalism is rapidly becoming one of the central political issues of this era. The first indication that the political culture is awakening to the crisis came in spring 2009, when both branches of Congress held committee hearings on the matter. In May, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, one of the most media-savvy of our legislators, convened the latter of these hearings. It featured much earnest discussion and recognition of the severity of the crisis. Senator Kerry quoted, affirmatively, from the brass plaque on a wall at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which bears the words of legendary newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.”⁵