The Death and Life of American Journalism

For writers and activists who spend long periods trying to sound the alarm about a crisis, there come rare moments when their complaints are echoed in the corridors of power, when voices in the wilderness are suddenly integrated into the national discourse. In the spring and summer of 2010, as we toured the country and provided our own testimony to members of the FCC, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. House and Senate, we experienced such a moment. But we are not so naïve as to believe that recognition equals transformation. And if there is a core message of this paperback edition of this book, it is that the circumstance of journalism in the United States continues to degenerate and that the degeneration threatens not just our ability as a nation to communicate fully and functionally but also democracy itself.

The fact that concerns we have raised for many years, which are outlined in this book, are now shared by those who once dismissed them encourages us.

But we are more determined than ever to move from recognition to action.

The crisis we describe in this book swept in with the force of a tsunami in the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and it continues, unabated, deep into Barack Obama’s presidency. Hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers went out of business between 2007 and 2011. According to one industry survey, 300 newspapers folded in 2009 as we were writing the hardcover edition of this book, and another 150 went under in 2010.² Broadcast news scaled back operations. The number of working journalists plummeted. Foreign news bureaus shuttered at the most rapid rate in history. Washington D.C. bureaus shut down and downsized just as rapidly, leaving vast sectors of the federal government uncovered. Statehouse bureaus went dark. Much of American public life—the legislative committees, courts, agencies, schools boards, local commissions that a free press must cover effectively for our governing system to work—went uncovered or was noted only so superficially as to serve the vested interests of political and economic power. For years media critics like ourselves have deplored the woeful quality of American journalism; now, not only is the quality of the news suffering, but the quantity of the news—indeed, the very existence of journalism as a field with paid practitioners, editors, fact-checkers, competing newsrooms and public accountability—is also in jeopardy.

Journalism cannot lose 30 percent of its reporting and editing capacity and continue to provide the information needed to maintain a realistic democratic discourse, open government and the outlines of civil society at the federal, state and local levels.

And, nothing, absolutely nothing, that has occurred in the period since we finished the hardcover edition of this book leads us to believe the circumstance is improving—in fact, quite the opposite.

The United States is not experiencing a brief recession for journalism, as the silliest commentators continue to suggest; newsrooms will not be repopulated, let alone restored to their previous vigor, with an economic recovery. Instead, it is an existential crisis, one decades in the making, and as we argue herein, it goes directly to the issue of whether this nation can remain a democratic state with the liberties and freedoms many take for granted. This is not a crisis in which we are predicting almost unimaginable dire consequences a generation down the road unless the United States shifts course. The crisis is right here, right now, and unless there is forceful policy intervention, an unacceptable circumstance will grow dramatically worse.

How much worse? A study that encapsulated the crisis was released literally days after the hardcover edition of this book. The report by the Pew Center for the People and the Press examined in exhaustive detail the “media ecology” of the city of Baltimore for one week in 2009.³ The object was to determine how, in this changing media moment, “original” news stories were being generated and by whom. They tracked old media and new, newspapers, radio, television, Web sites, blogs, even Twitter “tweets” from the police department. What did they find? The first conclusion from the researchers was an unsettling one: Despite the seeming proliferation of media, the researchers observed that “much of the ‘news’ people receive contains no original reporting. Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.” And where did the “original” reporting come from? Old media, particularly The Baltimore Sun newspaper, still generated around 95 percent of original news stories. In other words, a great many of the much-heralded online sites—even some that proudly labeled themselves as “news” operations—simply disseminated what traditional old media produced.

But don’t imagine that the dinosaurs are marching around in all their former glory. The Sun’s production of original news stories was itself down more than 30 percent from 10 years ago and down a whopping 73 percent from 20 years ago.

And don’t imagine that Baltimore is distinct. Indeed, note that 30 percent figure. It is precisely the same one that the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism settled on in its assessment of the loss of reporting and editing capacity at American newspapers since 2000.⁴ Our own research for this book and related projects on the future of journalism demonstrates that what has happened in Baltimore is happening in every corner of the country. In city after city we visited in 2010 and 2011, from Portland, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco to Philadelphia, Boston, the Twin Cities and Milwaukee, the number of paid journalists is down dramatically from where it was one or two decades ago. And the trends for television and radio are no better than they are for newspapers. The bottom line is this: Old media outlets are downsizing and abandoning journalism and new media are not even beginning to fill the void.

For an example of what this means tangibly, consider this: Reporters instigated to a significant extent the spectacular corruption scandals over the past decade that brought down Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and Randall “Duke” Cunningham, among others, and these reporters were subsequently “downsized” and/or their positions no longer exist. The United States is losing its most experienced and engaged investigative reporters—even Pulitzer Prize winners are getting layoff notices. This pattern is great news for the next generation of Abramoffs, DeLays and Cunninghams, as corrupt public officials’ transgressions will be less and less likely to be reported, and when the reporting stops, so too in all likelihood will the prosecutions. The implications for our governing system are self-evident and shocking.

But that’s not the scariest part of Pew’s Baltimore study. Of the “original” stories Pew identified, whether old media or new generated them, only 14 percent were developed by journalists defining an issue and pursuing it. A staggering 86 percent of the stories originated with official sources and press releases pushing stories to the news media, saying, hey, this is the news you should be covering. In other words, those with power are getting the stories told that they want to have told.

This is not the way it used to be. Official sources and public relations have been big players in news for a long time, and the best reporters always struggled so that they would not be taken at face value. But the old ratio of stories generated by PR and official sources versus stories created by journalists used to be closer to 40-60 or 50-50, not 86-14. As the Pew study concludes: “the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

As journalism declines, there will still be plenty of “news,” but it will be increasingly unfiltered PR. The hallmark of great PR is that the public does not recognize it as manipulation of the facts; it is surreptitious. To develop this point, although people can debate intelligently the 10 greatest advertising campaigns of all time, it is impossible to do so for public relations. If people understand a PR campaign exists, by definition it has failed. We are supposed to think it is genuine news. And there are a lot more corporations spending a lot more money to make sure we never do see through the spin. In 1960 there was less than one PR agent for every working journalist, a ratio of 0.75-to-1. By 1990 the ratio was just over 2-to-1. In 2011 the ratio stands at four PR people for every working journalist. At the current rates of change the ratio may well be 6-to-1 within a few years.⁵ Thus, there are far fewer reporters to interrogate the spin and the press releases, so the likelihood that these press releases get presented as legitimate “news” has become much greater.

In 2010 Wendell Potter published Deadly Spin, his memoir of his career in public relations, during much of which he worked with the health insurance industry to undermine any efforts at health care reform. Potter may be the first—and we hope not the last—high-level PR executive to leave the field and expose its seamy underside. What is striking about Potter’s account—even to these experienced eyes—is how effective corporate PR is at dominating the news concerning the relevant industries, all the way from energy and banking and agri-business to telecommunications and health insurance and pharmaceuticals. There’s a reason why phrases like “death panels” and “government takeover of health care” got more traction in 2009 and 2010 than phrases like “insurance-industry profiteering” and “Medicare for All.” As Potter notes, with the decline of journalism, the ease with which PR operatives get their messages out increases exponentially. That means that on issue after issue, the special interests have a decided advantage over the public.⁶

Consider the economic crisis that hit the fan in 2008 and shows too many signs of continuing not just for a few years but for a generation. The economic perspective of corporations and investors, rather than that of workers and consumers, has defined much of the news media (and business news media) coverage of the crisis. The brief moment at which politicians and journalists seriously considered defects in the financial system and the overall economy quickly passed. The same bankers that directed the economy over a cliff—and the politicians and “experts” who lucratively rewrote the rules of the game to allow unprecedented chicanery and fraud—have been rehabilitated and have resumed their positions of power and influence.⁷ Wall Street bonuses soared toward record levels in 2010 and 2011. The expert economists who presciently warned that the deregulation of the financial sector and the dangerous growth of economic inequality portended disaster have been returned to their Siberian outposts. Signs point to a permanent unemployment rate—even during “boom times” for corporate profits—at levels not seen regularly since the 1930s. The downward pressure on wages and living standards is enormous. The immense social cost, the staggering damage done to American workers and families and the entire generation of people entering the workforce, barely registers as news, but let one major bank or billionaire investor fear that the rate of inflation might approach 3 or 4 percent annually, and a portion of the business news media begins to hyperventilate.⁸

In contemporary America, getting economic issues right is a guarantee of obscurity, as major media outlets keep serving up the usual suspects. And the tragedy of this moment is that a little attention to someone whose views do not directly parallel those of the Wall Street speculators can go a long way. Consider the case of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor whose comments regarding the mortgage crisis, credit card debt and the collapse of the middle class on the old PBS program Bill Moyers’ Journal gave her a platform and a national following. She was so well regarded that the Obama administration charged her with the responsibility for setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Moyers is no longer on the air and Warren’s platforms for serious interviews were therefore appreciably fewer in 2011 when, not coincidentally, the banking and financial services industries began attacking her. If the United States had financial journalism that actually examined and interrogated banking power, Elizabeth Warren would be on solid ground and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner would be looking for a job. As it is, Geithner’s background as a Wall Street insider earns him far more generous coverage in major media than does Warren’s background as someone who has stood up to Wall Street and who, invariably, been proven correct for having done so.⁹

That calculus is as damaging as it is ridiculous.

This is not how a free press is supposed to work in democratic theory. The job of a free press is to provide citizens with the information they need to understand and address problems, not to construct false and frequently dysfunctional choices.

Because we’re on the subject of false choices, let’s consider American elections, the sine qua non of American constitutional democracy. News media are absolutely central to maintaining meaningful and competitive electoral processes in which citizens can accurately assess candidates. The heavily subsidized American press system of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged first and foremost as a means for political parties and factions to organize citizens and draw them into public life. Without romanticizing election coverage of a generation or two ago, it is fair to say that the American people made a smart call when they lost faith in political journalism as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first. Many elections are barely covered at all, and when there is coverage, it is so superficial as to be of little value. In Illinois in 2010, for example, so little attention was paid to the Democratic primary for the state’s No. 2 job, lieutenant governor, that a pawnbroker who spent heavily on TV ads was nominated. The ads failed to mention that he had been arrested in 2005 for domestic abuse or that he had failed to pay back taxes and child support. When those details were revealed, a scandal developed that would ultimately force Scott Lee Cohen from the ticket. So why didn’t voters know about Mr. Cohen’s, er, problems, before the election? As Mark Brown of The Chicago Sun-Times explained it: “We in the news media failed the voters by missing the story.” But the story wasn’t really “missed.” Like so many political stories these days, it was left uncovered by mainstream media outlets that no longer hire enough reporters to cover all the races, leaving most voters in the dark most of the time.¹⁰

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations to spent limitless amounts to buy election results, money has flooded the political process at such a rate that few eyes blink when it is suggested that as much as $10 billion will be spent on the 2012 federal elections or that a substantial portion of that amount will come from secretive donations from multinational corporations. That is twice the total amount spent in 2008 and four times the price tag for the 2000 election. Most of the money will pay for TV political ads, which tend to be of dubious value. At the same time, the media corporations that will rake in this booty have largely discontinued campaign coverage by their news divisions and have stopped broadcasting most candidate debates during primetime, with the exception of the presidential debates that party managers organize as little more than joint press conferences.¹¹

So the same industries that pay PR firms to spin the news media now bankroll political campaigns and delight in the fact that there is precious little independent journalism left to examine their business or political machinations. The “bottom line,” pun intended, is that news is fast becoming propaganda.¹²

But, wait, isn’t the Internet going to sort this mess out?

In this book we spend considerable time assessing the Internet, considering both its role in precipitating the present crisis and the hope that it provides as a basis for a rejuvenated commercial journalism online. In particular, we assess the claims of those who hail the web as new, innovative source for news, such as Jeff Jarvis, who asserts that “Thanks to the web . . . journalism will not only survive but prosper and grow far beyond its present limitations.”¹³ To the view of observers like Jarvis, all Americans must do is let the Internet work its magic in combination with the market, and the country’s problems will be solved.

Regrettably, we have found no more evidence to support that wishful thinking over the past 18 months than when we completed the first edition of this book. Let us speak plainly: No one has developed models for making web journalism profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible popular news media.

Great journalism, as Ben Bagdikian put it, requires great institutions. Like any complex undertaking, a division of labor is required to achieve success: Copy editors, fact checkers and proofreaders are needed in addition to reporters and assigning editors. Great journalism also requires institutional muscle to stand up to governments and corporate power. It requires competition, so if one newsroom misses a story, someone else will expose it. It requires people covering stories they would not cover if they were doing journalism on a voluntary basis.

This point deserves additional comment. Invariably, during our travels now individuals approach us, presenting their own or someone else’s new plan for online journalism that will, in their view, solve many of the problems we outline. Sometimes these have been ambitious national and international projects. Some have been more focused ventures providing advertising-supported “hyper-local” journalism online. All of them, at the start-up stage and into the visible future, tend to rely on volunteer labor or extremely underpaid and exploited labor. Americans would never turn their national defense or education system or medical care or airplane piloting over to self-appointed volunteers. Why should anyone think this approach could plausibly succeed with journalism?

One exchange in particular captured the absurdity of the situation. When we visited a prominent Midwest university, one of the journalism professors disputed our claim that the Internet was not providing a sufficient basis for a new era of journalism. He told us how he and several friends who had been laid off by the local daily newspaper had begun a Web site on which they covered movies, music, restaurants and the art scene in their city. He claimed the coverage was superior to what the “old media” produced, even at its peak. It was largely a volunteer operation, with revenues from donations and a few ads. We asked this professor how good a job his Web site did covering the county board meetings, when every now and then crucial zoning issues were decided, increasingly with no press attention. “The county board?” he replied. “We don’t cover stuff like that. You’d have to pay me.”

Not much of that is happening online. Today we have a few thousand paid online news workers, interpreted liberally to include many aggregators who do little or no news gathering or reporting or even writing. More often than not, some old medium that provides the bank supports the best-known bloggers and online journalists. (John Nichols blogs voluminously, but his digital contributions would diminish sharply were he not on the payroll of The Nation.) When these old media go down, the number of paid digital journalists is likely to shrink, not grow.

To the extent that the corporate news media giants are locating a profitable niche online, it increasingly looks like it may be as a commercial “app” in the rapidly emerging wireless market. Rupert Murdoch announced his iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, in 2011, and the New York Times announced its long-anticipated plan for an online payment system in March 2011.¹⁴ But there is no reason to believe these developments will ever come close to providing the resources for a full-throttle popular journalism or that this commercial product will avoid the limitations of commercial professional journalism as it has devolved over the past few decades. Instead, they will likely accentuate them. An internal memo on journalism from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong captured the commercial logic: He ordered the company’s editors to evaluate all future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time.” All stories, it stressed, are to be evaluated according to their “profitability consideration.”¹⁵

What happens when a story—like that of a distant war or the privatization of a local water utility—fails to achieve proper “traffic potential, revenue potential”? Does it disappear off radar? And with it the prospect that citizens will know what is being done in their name but without their informed consent? That might be an acceptable Brave New World for the CEOs, but it’s a loser for a democratic society.

At the heart of too many of the emerging corporate online journalism undertakings is an understanding that the wages paid to journalists can be slashed dramatically while at the same time their workloads are increased to levels not seen for generations, if ever. Armstrong’s memo states that all of AOL’s journalistic employees will be required to produce “five to 10 stories per day.” Tim Rutten of The Los Angeles Times captured this in his assessment of AOL’s 2011 purchase of The Huffington Post: “To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” In the “new-media landscape,” he wrote, “it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.” With massive unemployment and dismal prospects, the extreme downward pressure on wages and working conditions for journalists is the two-ton elephant that just climbed into democracy’s bed. “In the new media,” Rutten concludes, “many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial capitalism—the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it. . . .”¹⁶

As one 2011 media industry assessment of the future of journalism put it, the future of news media will be to move the corporate “brands” to the digital realm, although “the future is still a little murky as to how these brands will turn a profit in terms of online advertising, paywalls and computer tablet apps.” The report says this is “good news for public relations professionals who are trying to pitch stories” because “these sites will be looking for more content to fill their pages.” The report concludes: “As a direct result of changing media platforms, PR pros are now a part of the media in a way they have never been before.”¹⁷ Increasingly, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what makes the most sense for the profitability of news media firms is entirely inadequate, even dangerous, for the requirements of a free and self-governing people.¹⁸

Okay, things are not looking so great for working journalists, but what about the blogosphere and the newfound ability of people—rechristened “citizen journalists”—to go online, launch new Web sites, do their own thing, tell it like it is, and have the same caliber of Internet access to the world’s attention as the mightiest media conglomerate? Won’t that combine with the commercial journalism online to solve the journalism problem in the digital world? We devote considerable time herein assessing that claim and looking at the record. However, the evidence is thin, at best. Here Matthew Hindman’s extraordinary The Myth of Digital Democracy offers confirmation of our worst fears and a valuable new resource.

Although there are an infinite number of Web sites, human beings are only capable of meaningfully visiting a small number of them on a regular basis. The Google search mechanism strongly encourages implicit censorship, in that sites that do not end up on the first or second page of a search effectively do not exist. As Michael Wolff puts it in Wired: “the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.” “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Wolff quotes Russian Internet investor Yuri Milner. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast.” And once you get big, you stay big.¹⁹

In this regard Hindman’s research on journalism, news media, and political Web sites is striking. What has emerged is “power law” distribution in which a small number of political or news media Web sites get the vast majority of traffic.²⁰ The traditional giants with name recognition and resources dominated them. There is a “long tail” of gazillions of Web sites that exist but get little or no traffic, and few people have any idea that they exist. There is also no “middle class” of robust, moderately sized Web sites; that aspect of the news media system has been wiped out online. It leads Hindman to conclude that the online news media are more concentrated than the old media world. This is true too of the vaunted blogosphere, which has effectively ossified. Its traffic is highly concentrated in a handful of sites that people with elite pedigrees operate.²¹

Don’t get us wrong, here. Free speech is alive and well on the web, at least for the time being. But as Hindman has put it, we should not confuse the right to speak with the ability to be heard. We appreciate the long tail of obscure blogs, Web sites and Facebook pages as much as anyone, and we spend an inordinate amount of time on them—we dread to imagine a world without them—but they do not a free press make. Most of them languish at a certain point in time, as the lack of readership diminishes the enthusiasm to keep the project going, and there are no funds, so it must remain a volunteer operation. But the long tail points to a crucial point that the framers of the constitution understood: There is a difference between free speech and having a free press. This is why they are distinct entries in the First Amendment. Without a strong journalism—a credible independent news media—the right to freedom of speech, as indispensable as it is, loses some of its power and value. In the worst case scenario it is a digital circle jerk where people can write to their hearts’ content and possibly locate kindred spirits but not know what they are talking about—or what to talk about.

We are not vulgar materialists who run around claiming that merely accumulating resources is enough to create great journalism. Even at the zenith of the old system, as we discuss in Chapter 1, journalism relied excessively on official sources—people in government and corporate power—to set the agenda and define the range of legitimate debate. We think that we can have a journalism far better than that. It will require not only resources but also a new structure. And it will be digital. Although recent accounts suggesting the digital revolution is a mixed blessing that warrants public consideration intrigue us, the news system going forward needs to embrace the new technologies, not resist them.²² (That train has left the station; the distinction between old and new media is increasingly quaint.) So here’s our bottom line: What America needs is a well-paid journalism sector that digital citizen journalism both complements and enhances.

The WikiLeaks brouhaha in late 2010 and 2011 shines a bright light on both the promise and peril of our times. In shorthand, many have characterized the release of voluminous amounts of classified U.S. government documents as a result of the Internet and an example of how the Internet makes government secrecy much more difficult if not impossible. This is somewhat misleading and overstated; the digital era has been with us for several decades, and governments have had little trouble keeping immense amounts of material secret.

Several points were striking about the WikiLeaks release of documents to U.S. news media. First, it violated the manner in which leaks have generally worked in American journalism—where individuals in power make legitimate leaks. Traditionally such leaks are not damaging to the entire power structure; rather, they target or raise doubts about one player or, at most, one branch of the power structure. Such conventional leaks are sometimes presented as “investigative reporting” in the gutted newsrooms of our times. By releasing documents that shed light on the entirety of U.S. global operations and relations with foreign governments, WikiLeaks made many enemies inside the entire power structure of the nation. As a result, it had very few, if any, allies in the corridors of power. This suggested a genuine political crisis and a bonanza for reporters. As Glenn Greenwald put it, professional rhetoric states that journalists are “supposed to be interested in . . . exposing the secrets of the powerful, especially when the actions being undertaken in secret, are corrupt, illegal or deceitful.”²³ In theory, then, this should have been the moment when working journalists would look to the sky and thank their lucky stars to have been put on earth at this moment.

It did not quite happen that way. Those in power swung into high gear, unleashing a public relations and media blitz about the evils and mendacity of WikiLeaks. Attention shifted by and large from the content of these documents to overblown and unsubstantiated claims that WikiLeaks was costing innocent lives as well as to an assessment of the personal character of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Barack Obama and Sarah Palin might disagree about a few issues, but they were singing from the same hymnal when it came to attacking and even threatening WikiLeaks. ²⁴ Greenwald only slightly exaggerates when he states that “there was almost a full and complete consensus that WikiLeaks was satanic.” The onslaught discredited and isolated WikiLeaks, despite the dramatic content that could be found in the documents WikiLeaks had published. The point was to get U.S. editors and reporters to think twice before opening the WikiLeaks door. It worked. Unsettlingly, as journalists around the world rallied to defend basic principles about leaks and speaking truth to power, American journalists and commentators responded to the WikiLeaks revelations in a way often indistinguishable from government spin doctors. Greenwald ended up defending WikiLeaks on numerous broadcast news programs—because it was difficult to find other WikiLeaks defenders among journalists—and discovered that his on-air opponents were often working reporters: “There wasn’t even really a pretense of separation between how journalists think and how political functionaries think.” ²⁵

Second, implicit in the WikiLeaks disclosures was a broader yet pointed critique of American news media. If WikiLeaks provided the truth of how the U.S. government regarded the world, why did the news generally present a rather different view, one more in line with American propaganda needs rather than the actual truth? WikiLeaks revelations, for example, highlighted soft U.S. media coverage of Arab allies. In this sense WikiLeaks was a direct challenge to the integrity of American journalism, and this was not an issue working reporters and editors have ever been keen to develop, publicize and debate. This encouraged the tendency to delegitimize WikiLeaks among journalists and news media.

Third, the WikiLeaks episode did not even lead to a long-overdue examination of why exactly so much material is kept secret from the American people in the first place and whether this is compatible with the principle of self-government. Journalists and what remains of the news media are the only institutions positioned to challenge and capable of battling government secrecy—doing so is among their most important functions—and they squandered an important moment to draw public attention to this issue. Award-winning journalist Sanford J. Ungar noted in The Columbia Journalism Review that WikiLeaks should have drawn attention to “an obvious underlying problem: that the obsessive over-classification of US official information has reached a point where it is impossible to know with confidence what truly deserves to be keep secret and how that can be done effectively.” Ungar quotes Erwin Griswold, the U.S. solicitor general in charge of prosecuting the Pentagon Papers case for the Nixon administration who later renounced his position, noting in 1989 that “the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with government embarrassment of one sort or another.” Griswold added that “apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely any real risk to national security from the publication of facts related to transcriptions in the past, even the fairly recent past.”²⁶

Finally, to be clear, WikiLeaks is not a journalistic enterprise with a staff that prepares news pieces for popular consumption. What WikiLeaks does is release secret documents to news media, which then have to do the hard work of assessing and presenting the material. Here the biases just mentioned combined with the PR blitz and the shrinkage in newsrooms to produce the ironic effect that despite a mother lode of material being released, not much of it received sustained and critical attention in major American media. In fact, a number of U.S. news outlets were content to cherry pick documents so as to offer an absurdly flattering portrayal of U.S. diplomacy, whereas The New York Times seemed bent on exaggerating the alleged Iranian threat.²⁷ The notable exception was Greg Mitchell’s groundbreaking coverage of every aspect of the story on The Nation magazine’s Web site; Mitchell showed what could be done with the story, and he never let go of it. Unfortunately, Mitchell got little in the way of competition from the mandarins now employed by those publications that made their names turning Pentagon Papers and “Deep Throat” leaks into journalistic gold.²⁸

For the most part, elite journalists found ways to perform stenography to power even as they were handed information that had the potential to open great debates about foreign policy—debates that could have, indeed should have, given the American people not only a better perspective on how their country operates internationally but also a better opportunity to demand greater Congressional oversight. No wonder the semi-official line from Washington held that the documents contained little that was especially startling. This was just gossip, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other D.C. insiders suggested, and it certainly posed no meaningful challenge to received wisdom about the world and the American role in that world.²⁹ Gates and his compatriots constantly reinforced the “message” that the WikiLeaks moment was not comparable to what happened when the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971. The official line is that the WikiLeaks documents contain no “smoking gun”—and that if Americans are interested in discussing the matter at all they should consider whether Julian Assange is a weirdo or ask what would possess someone to release the minutiae of diplomacy, which is better kept secret. And, this official reasoning continues, people should not be at all concerned about the locking up of a supposed leaker, Private Bradley Manning, in a domestic version of Guantanamo.³⁰

The journalists of the rest of the world, however, found a lot more than “minutiae” in the WikiLeaks cables. Britain’s Guardian newspaper and Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine assigned dozens of journalists to the WikiLeaks story and produced hundreds of stories. Likewise, India’s national daily newspaper The Hindu and the Italian news magazine L’Espresso worked with WikiLeaks to generate breaking coverage. This was journalism at its best. After foreign journalists worked the WikiLeaks cables over, their stories led to a serious revision of how people in countries across the world understood their own governments. The WikiLeaks cables did not cause the extraordinary 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, but they certainly added fuel to the fire. The truth, we were again reminded, is a powerful weapon—but it requires journalism if it is to become a democratic force.

Will America ever have such journalism?

We say “yes.” But getting to “yes” is going to require a new understanding of journalism.

In our view the evidence is overwhelming: If Americans are serious about reversing course and dramatically expanding and improving journalism, the only way this can happen is with massive public subsidies. The market is not getting it done, and there is no reason to think it is going to get it done. It will require a huge expansion of the nonprofit news media sector as well. It is imperative to discontinue the practice of regarding journalism as a “business” and evaluating it with business criteria. ³¹ Instead, embracing the public good nature of journalism is necessary. That is the argument we make in this book.

Let’s be clear on what we mean by the “public good” nature of journalism: That means journalism is something society requires but that the market cannot produce in sufficient quality or quantity. Readers or final news consumers have never provided sufficient funds to subsidize the popular journalism system that self-government requires. For the first century of American history the public good nature of journalism was understood implicitly and massive postal and printing subsidies addressed this understanding. For the past century, however, the infusion of advertising to provide the vast majority of revenues supporting the news masked the public good nature of journalism. But advertising had no specific attachment to journalism, as we demonstrate in Chapters 1 and 2, and is jumping ship as better alternatives present themselves in the digital universe, especially as news media appear less commercially attractive. Journalism increasingly is left standing naked in an unforgiving market, and it is shriveling in the cold gusts.

The future of journalism left to the market will likely approach what education would be like if all public subsidies were removed. With no subsidies, our education system would remain excellent for the wealthy who could afford private schools in the first place, mediocre at best for the middle and upper-middle class, and nonexistent or positively frightening for the increasingly impoverished lower-middle and working class—the majority of the nation. This would be a nightmare for any credible democratic or humane society, and it would be a major step back toward the middle ages. The same logic applies to journalism. As we discuss in Chapter 3, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the duty—not merely the right—of the democratic state is to assure a viable news media. In the landscape of 2010s America, that means enlightened public subsidies.

Understanding “journalism as a public good” also helps explain one of the persistent questions we are asked when we discuss the crisis of journalism. “Isn’t the basic problem,” the question generally begins, “that most people are morons who either have no interest in journalism or are only interested in idiotic stories about celebrities? If people wanted good journalism, isn’t it logical to expect the commercial news media to give it to them?” On the surface this seems like such a convincing premise that it is generally posed as a rhetorical question, to which all who have any hope left for the human species are expected to retreat in shame. Public good theory explains that no matter how strong the consumer demand, it will never be sufficient to provide the resources for a popular democratic journalism. Even when Americans have been most rabid about news and politics, there was not sufficient demand to subsidize a popular news media.

But public good theory is important in another way: It also highlights that it is impossible for the market to accurately gauge popular support for the news. The market cannot express all of our values; we cannot individually “purchase” everything we value. Our experience discussing the crisis of journalism with tens of thousands of people over the past 18 months has reinforced our view that a preponderance of Americans, and especially younger Americans notorious for their lack of interest in newspapers and conventional news media, want to have credible reporting on corporate and government affairs, even if they do not necessarily plan to read or view the news reports thereby produced. But they want to know that the work is being done and people in power are being held accountable, issues are being covered—and they are willing use their tax dollars to pay for journalism even if they themselves prefer to watch a reality TV show or listen to their iPods.

And, who knows, to return rhetorical question fire, maybe if there was better and more compelling journalism, people might not find it so irrelevant to their lives?

Of course, the notion of government support for journalism strikes many as downright un-American, a dangerous measure that will be far more likely to increase the likelihood of a dystopian future rather than enhance journalism, freedom and self-government. Everywhere we travel we hear this; it has become so deeply ingrained in American political consciousness—across the political spectrum—that it requires no evidence to be asserted categorically and end all further debate—which is fitting because there is no evidence. We demonstrate in what follows that press subsidies are as American as apple pie; indeed, our democratic culture was built on them. If the U.S. government subsidized journalism today at the same level of GDP that it did in the 1840s, the government would have to spend in the neighborhood of $30–35 billion annually. This is probably the single most striking empirical point we make in the book, and it has proven, more than anything else, to be a game-changer for how Americans understand their own free press tradition.

What we demonstrate herein is not merely the size of these press subsidies but also that the framers who put them in place understood them as a necessary investment in democracy and as part of a commitment to a heterogeneous and vibrant participatory political culture. Thomas Jefferson, with the encouragement of his friend James Madison, proposed in 1791 that President George Washington name as the Postmaster General of the United States—overseer of the largest government agency by a wide margin—the most daring and controversial of its pamphleteers, Thomas Paine. It was a radical notion, too radical it would turn out for Washington, who was ill at ease with Paine’s challenges to organized religion, consolidated wealth and authority in general. Jefferson turned to Paine, as do we, for inspiration and for the model of a take-no-prisoners, speak-truth-to-power journalism that has as its end not a recreation of the old order of empowered elites and cowering masses but a new order in which the will of an informed and emboldened people shall be the law of the land.

Federal press subsidies—for example, postal subsidies and paid government notices—have diminished in real terms to only a small fraction of their nineteenth-century levels, though they remain to the present day. Public broadcasting is the most visible contemporary media subsidy, and in 2010 it received approximately $1.1 billion in public support annually. State and local governments as well as public universities provide much of this public subsidy as well as some $420 million from the federal government.

We share the concern about government control over the content of journalism and reject any subsidies that would open the door to that outcome. We also understand that a government with a massive military and national security complex like the United States could be especially dangerous with its mitts on the keys to the newsroom. But we would ask those who worry about major media becoming an amen corner for the government to consider the manner in which the corporate news media cheer on U.S. foreign policy and militarism, often, as in the case of the 2003 Iraq invasion, with disastrous consequences. Remarkably, the same no-questions-asked approach was in evidence as major media covered President Obama’s unilateral decision to involve U.S. forces in the bombing of Libya in the spring of 2011—a decision made without seriously consulting Congress, let alone a request for the declaration of war required in the U.S. Constitution. As steadfast advocates for a free and independent media that speaks truth to power, we believe that the current circumstance is unacceptable; our major media do not speak truth to power. More often than not, especially in matters or war and peace, they provide an uncritical sounding board for those in power. For the purpose of ending this abuse of the public trust, we advocate new models for funding journalism, models that maintain ironclad protections against government censorship and direction of journalists while at the same time freeing those journalists from the grip of corporate interests and commercial pressures.

More importantly, we are confident enough in America to believe that our people and their elected representatives can get the job done.

The United States, for all of its flaws, remains a democratic society in the conventional modern use of the term. Our state is capable of being pushed to make both progressive as well as regressive moves.

This is a crucial distinction. We will be the first to argue that if a dictatorship or authoritarian regime subsidizes journalism, the “news” will more likely than not be propaganda that is designed to maintain an antidemocratic circumstance. But that does not mean the same outcome necessarily occurs when democratic nations institute press subsidies. Indeed, there is little evidence that press subsidies in democratic societies comparable to the United States increase government propaganda or that they grease the wheels for a transition to a dictatorship by the dominant party and a loss of freedom. Most of the evidence—in fact, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence—is precisely the opposite.

Accordingly, the problem with categorically rejecting public subsidies is that doing so not only ignores the actual history of massive democratic journalism subsidies in the United States—as we discuss at length in Chapter 3—but it also does grave injustice to the existing track record of other democratic nations. What happens when we look at nations with multiparty democracies, advanced economies, electoral systems and civil liberties—places like Germany, Canada, Japan, Britain, Norway, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, France and Switzerland?

What do we find? For starters, compared to the United States, all these nations hugely subsidize the press. Let’s put it this way: What would the United States have to spend to support public broadcasting, not to mention other journalism subsidies, if it spent at the per capita rates of other democratic nations? If America subsidized public media at the same per capita rate as nations with similar political economies like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, U.S. public broadcasters would have a government subsidy in the $7–10 billion range. If America subsidized public media at the same per capita rate as nations along the lines of Japan, France or Great Britain, U.S. public broadcasters would have a government subsidy in the $16–25 billion range. Finally, if America subsidized public media at the same per capita rate as Germany or Norway or Denmark, U.S. public broadcasters would have a government subsidy in the neighborhood of $30–35 billion.³²

This does not even factor in the extensive newspaper subsidies that several democracies employ. If the U.S. federal government subsidized newspapers at the same per capita rate as Norway, it would make a direct outlay of approximately $3 billion annually. Sweden spends slightly less per capita and has extended the subsidies to digital newspapers. France is the champion at newspaper subsidies. If a federal government subsidy provided the portion of the overall revenues of the U.S. newspaper industry that France does for its publishers, conservatively, it would have spent $6 billion in 2008.³³

Instead, as noted, the total U.S. subsidy for public broadcasting sits at a paltry $1.1 billion, making the United States the global outlier in subsidizing public media not to mention newspapers and journalism. By American conventional reasoning, that is the way it should be, and the only issue to be discussed is whether that $1.1 billion subsidy should be slashed or eliminated. As one American critic puts it, public media subsidies may range from a “media welfare state” to a “Soviet-style five-year plan”; whatever the intent, they invariably lead to “a wholesale government takeover of the press.”³⁴ By this logic these other ostensibly democratic nations, with their out-of-control government subsidies for journalism and public media, should be fairly unsavory places to live.

We could rely on our personal experiences. Both of us have had the privilege of traveling to many of these nations in recent years, and our impression is that these are far from police states nor do their extensive public media systems and journalism subsidies invoke comparisons to a sham democracy, not to mention a one-party state. Quite the contrary. In fact, when John Nichols addressed journalists from across Europe and around the world in the spring of 2010 as the keynote speaker at the Congress of the International Federation of Journalists, what he heard from the assembled reporters and editors was strong support for subsidies and other governmental interventions that are broadly viewed as freeing journalists from the pressures that corporate PR and advertisers pose.³⁵

But appearances can be deceiving. So we sought harder evidence from unimpeachable sources that would not necessarily be inclined to endorse press subsidies.

We start with Britain’s The Economist, a business magazine keenly in favor of private enterprise, deregulation and privatization, and it is disinclined toward large public sectors. Every year The Economist produces a highly acclaimed “Democracy Index,” which ranks all the nations of the world on the basis of how democratic they are. In 2010 only 26 nations qualified as democratic. The criteria are: electoral process and pluralism; functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties. The United States ranks 17th by these criteria, according to The Economist. Most of the 16 nations ranking ahead of the United States had government press subsidies on a per capita basis at least 10 or 20 times that of the United States.³⁶ The top four nations on the list—Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden—are among the top six or seven per capita press subsidizers in the world. Yet these are the four most democratic and freest nations on earth according to The Economist.

Although all of the Democracy Index criteria implicitly depend to a large extent on having a strong press system; “freedom of the press” itself is not one of the measured variables. Is there some way we can get a more direct take on the relationship?

Fortunately, there is, if we supplement the Democracy Index with the research of Freedom House, an American organization created in the 1940s to sponsor freedom and oppose totalitarianism of either the left or the right, with special emphasis on the left. Freedom House is very much an “establishment” organization, with close ties to prominent American political and economic figures. Every year it too ranks all the nations of the world on the basis of how free and effective their press systems are. Their research is detailed, sophisticated and particularly concerned with any government meddling whatsoever with private news media. For that reason, all communist nations tend to rank in a virtual tie for dead last as having the least free press systems in the world. Venezuela currently is ranked no. 163 in the world, despite having a large and vocal legal opposition press that opposes the elected Chávez government. State regulation of commercial broadcast media as well as the chilling effect of government criticism of the uncensored private print media are enough for Freedom House to consign Venezuela to the same group of nations largely consisting of outright dictatorships with scarcely a trace of significant domestic media dissent; Venezuela is the only nation in the Americas alongside Cuba considered to have a “not free” press. Thus, Freedom House can go toe-to-toe with anyone when it comes to having sensitive antennae to detect government meddling with the existence or prerogatives of private news media.

Freedom House hardly favors the home team. It ranks the United States as being tied with the Czech Republic as having the 24th freest press system in the world. America is ranked so low because of failures to protect sources and because economic conditions have made journalism more difficult.

So what nations rank at the top of Freedom House’s list of the freest press systems in the world? The democratic nations with the very largest per capita journalism subsidies in the world dominate the list. Four of the first five nations Freedom House lists are the same nations that topped The Economist’s Democracy Index, and all rank among the top seven per capita press subsidizers in the world.³⁷ In fact, the lists match to a remarkable extent. That should be no surprise, as one would expect the nations with the freest and best press systems to rank as the most democratic nations. What has been missing from the narrative is that the nations with the freest press systems are also the nations that make the greatest public investment in journalism and therefore provide the basis for being strong democracies.

What the Freedom House research underscores is that few of these successful democracies permit the type of political meddling that is routine in U.S. public broadcasting, particularly by those politicians who want to eliminate public broadcasting, with no sense of irony, because it has been “politicized.” Although no nation is perfect and even the best examples have limitations, these nations consistently and overwhelmingly demonstrate that there are effective means to prevent governments in power from having undue influence over public media operations, much like how in the United States we have created mechanisms to prevent governors and state legislatures from dictating the faculty research and course syllabi at public universities. In other democratic nations public broadcasting systems tend to be popular, and political parties from across the political spectrum defend them. It is also worth mentioning that in other democratic nations public broadcasters tend to give far greater coverage to electoral campaigns than commercial media and tend to reduce the level of information inequality between social classes.³⁸ They are a democratic force. We could use strong dose of that medicine in the United States.

Likewise, in a manner that evokes the U.S. postal subsidies in the nineteenth century we examine in Chapter 3 and that might baffle the contemporary American who is cynical about the possibility of democratic governance, the newspaper subsidies tend to be directed to helping the smaller and more dissident newspapers, without ideological bias, over the large, successful commercial newspapers.³⁹ Recent research on the European press concludes that as journalism subsidies increased, the overall reporting in those nations did not kowtow but in fact grew more adversarial toward the government in power.⁴⁰

Our point is not to romanticize other democratic nations or to put them on a pedestal. Journalism is in varying degrees of crisis in nations worldwide. When this book came out in early 2010, it gained a good deal of attention in Europe and Australia as a cautionary tale, a warning of what might happen if journalists and governments in other countries made the same mistakes that have been made in the United States. The concerns are hardly irrational. In other countries, resources for journalism are declining as in the United States, even if the public subsidies provide a cushion. Moreover, the quality of journalism is hardly guaranteed even with greater resources; controversy and occasional sharp criticism of severe flaws properly attends any discussion of the caliber of journalism in every democratic nation.⁴¹ Resources are simply a necessary precondition for sufficient democratic journalism.

Nor is our point that the United States should adopt foreign models willy-nilly. We are, for example, generally opposed to subsidies going to commercial media except under stringent conditions in which the subsidy is universal and also applies effectively to noncommercial media. Our point is simply that journalism subsidies are compatible with a democratic society, a flourishing uncensored private news media and an adversarial journalism. The track record is clear that the problem of creating a viable free press system in a democratic and free society is a solvable problem. There may not be perfect solutions, but there are good and workable solutions. And in times like these, when the market is collapsing, they are mandatory. We have no alternative.

We make that case in the chapters that follow. This then leads inexorably to two questions: What sort of policies and subsidies can we develop to promote independent journalism and a free press in the United States? What do we need to do politically to bring these policies about? We begin to address these issues in Chapter 4 and the conclusion. We also provide an update on the political landscape for solving the problem of journalism in the United States in the Afterword we have written for this edition.

Ultimately, the point of this paperback edition is the same as that of the hardcover edition. We seek to open a great national debate about the future of journalism in America. Although we have ideas about where that discussion should go, we are excited about the debate itself. Let us close with a story from our visit to the University of Virginia on our book tour in the winter of 2010. In a restaurant several blocks from the campus that Thomas Jefferson laid out, before our evening talk we met with a group of exceptional journalism students who had read the book and wanted to talk about our proposals. They especially liked our proposal for a “Journalism for America” initiative that would provide young people with stipends to cover underserved communities in the United States. But they had questions. Several women asked whether we had considered expanding the program so that young people with the background to do so might provide international coverage that was relevant to immigrant communities in the United States. By the end of the dinner they had framed out a plan for linking the “Journalism for America” initiative to the Peace Corps so that young journalists could cover an immigrant community in the United States for a year and then travel with the Peace Corps to foreign lands with connections to the American communities. Thus, an Ethiopian-American community in Minnesota could get coverage by a Journalism for America/Peace Corps writer who had lived and worked in that community from Ethiopia. And the young writer could get both domestic and international reporting experience that might position her for the job she hopes to attain as an international correspondent. We loved the vision. But, above all, we loved the evidence that, when Americans are invited to outline a future for journalism, when they are brought into the process rather than pushed to the sidelines, they are ready and willing to do so in the most dynamic, creative and meaningful ways. We came away with confidence that, when this great debate opens up, as it has begun to do, American journalism and American democracy will flourish.