Journalists Looking For Government Money

We've been following the ongoing struggles of the print media, watching as some publications have died off and others have held to outdated principles and decried the influence of the internet. A side effect of this has been many journalists put out of work and many others fearful that informed reporting is on its way out as well. Now, an editorial in the Washington Post calls for a solution journalists would likely have scoffed at only a few years ago: federal subsidies. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols write, "What to do? Bailing out media conglomerates would be morally and politically absurd. These firms have run journalism into the ground. If they cannot make it, let them go. Wait for 'pay-wall' technologies, billionaire philanthropists or unimagined business models to generate enough news to meet the immense demands of a self-governing society? There is no evidence that such a panacea is on the horizon. This leaves one place to look for a solution: the government." They hasten to add, "Did we just call for state-run media? Quite the opposite."

Comments

We already HAVE gov subsidized media conglomerates

[Anonymous Coward]

The broadcast spectrum monopolies that CBS,NBC,ABC don't pay a cent for and use to ram nonstop propaganda and spam down our throats, plus the entire copyright system (deployment of government power to control what people can do with the information on their own computers). That's many many billions of bucks worth of subsidies, maybe 100's of billions. The cellular phone spectrum monopolies are at least creating revenue, but the broadcast garbage is supposedly a public service.

Shut down broadcast TV completely, I mean all of it, have one govt-operated channel for emergency info but have it show weather reports and/or CSPAN 24/7 unless an actual emergency is taking place. Turn the rest of the spectrum over to low-power unlicensed use (like wifi). If companies want to show cheesy sitcoms, use the internet. And adjust the copyright system to stay out of people's private noncommercial communications, but to clamp down on companies (that means Google, Facebook, etc) cashing in on incidental noncommercial publishing (that means stuff like slashdot comments, that are essentially ephemeral and conversational in nature, but get vacuumed and monetized by 3rd parties who had nothing to do with producing them).

Re:good description

[gerf]

They have run journalism into the ground...

Bull. Their business models just suck. Really, advertising potential has not decreased, but only shifted ever so slightly. If you offer a truly good experience on a local oriented website, you can recoup the losses of the drop in dead-tree paper sales. There might be more work involved, but there is still potential

Government media CAN be objective and unbiased.

[Anonymous Coward]

The American Press is already owned by the government, just not directly. When was the last, really hard hitting documentary you saw on American television? When was the last time you saw a journalist beat up on a senator or congressman (with good, tough, questions and a refusal to yeild) that led to them "blackballing" that particular newspaper/journalist?

One of the best Australian TV shows that is quite prepared to ask tough/embaressing questions of any member of parliament is the "7:30 Report", on the ABC. The ABC (Australian Broadcast Comission) television station is solely funded by the Government, yet there is never, ever, any question about the integrity of its host (Kerry O'Brien), despite the interviewees often being the ones responsible for his pay cheque.

I imagine it is a lot worse for all of the commercial outlets beceause they have to walk the line of being tough but nice so that where there's a new, exclusive, story to break, they have a chance of getting it. To Government funded media, there's no quest to be first with a major, breaking, story, only to do it right and do it well.

Without corruption, I can't find a way to justify the pandering of American reporters to their politicians. And that exists today, without any subsidies, etc.

Re:Government media CAN be objective and unbiased.

[lawpoop]

The American Press is already owned by the government, just not directly.

The government doesn't own the press in the United States. Rather, they are both owned by corporations. The corporations want you to *think* that the government "owns" the press, and that the government is a Big Bad Boogeyman who must be defanged, because representational democracy is the only weapon the people have against unchecked corporate power.

Re:Government media CAN be objective and unbiased.

[TheRaven64]

One of the advantages something like the BBC has is that it is too big for government officials to blackball. It an MP goes on Question Time or Newsnight and gets a grilling, then clips from that will show up everywhere. If they then refuse to talk to BBC reporters then that will be reported. The journalistic establishment is quite close nit in London and if you are refusing to talk to some reporters then you can bet that the ones that you will talk to are going to go out of their way to give you a hard time. If you don't talk to any, then they'll just get your opponents to talk about you instead of letting you speak.

Re:Government media CAN be objective and unbiased.

[commodore64_love]

Yeah except Beck used the same "ask questions" paradigm even when he worked for CNN. It's not a fox thing. Beck was like that even when he was on other stations.

And you know, is it really so terrible to want to know why Anita Dunn is saying Mao Tse-tung is her favorite philosopher who she regularly turns too? That's like saying I really admire how Adolf organized the deathcamps. (frowns). Why Van Jones accuses whites of dumping our pollution in black neighborhoods? Why Congresman Frank told reporters that the "government option" is only step one, and that in the 2010s he and others will be pushing for a complete government monopoly for healthcare (i.e. like the UK and Canada). No more private insurance. No more choice.

I don't agree with Beck's "the world is ending" viewpoint, but at least he's showing me things that MSNBC or CNN never show me. (I guess DNC-NBC is too busy showing black men carrying rifles, and claiming they are actually white racists. i.e. Propaganda.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MHcCNWVeW4

Re:good description

[FutureDomain]

Have you read Pravda lately? Ironically, they sometimes seem to be more insightful than the American media.

Re:Subsidize paper chauvinism now!

[SlappyBastard]

I call bullshit! You can't cite the worst example as universal proof, you fucking Anonymous Coward!

There are tons of good web news sites out there. Read Talking Points Memo some time. Read Calculated Risk -- economics news on the web already far outpaces anything that has appeared in print since the days of Adam Smith. Does anyone remember reading anything in the print days as cool as the stuff Nate Silver posts online?

Web news already is superior.

Re:There Is No News Crisis

[hairyfeet]

I think the problem is just the opposite, in that they are doing EVERYTHING wrong, because they are still trying to print the same paper they did in 1965, when if you missed the 6 'o clock news you were SOL. The reason I gave up on the local and state papers were the ONLY actual local and state stories were bake sales, who died, which little league team won the local game. That's it. No hard hitting questions, no looking into local or state grafts and corruption, just local "fluffy kitten" stories and the same old AP crap spewed with a hard spin on top to try to make it look like it wasn't a straight copypasta.

I just don't know if they CAN recover, or if they have been so infected with the "too big to fail" mentality, where they think they can just keep churning out the same tired old crap, "maximizing profit potential" by only keeping a few 'reporters" around to add spin and retype press releases, and generally acting the same as when LBJ was president. I bet if you took any of the failing papers and switched them for any of the other failing papers, frankly the readers wouldn't notice.

So I don't know whether the Internet bloggers can take up where they left off, but frankly the "reporting" done by the state and local papers I have read is simply worthless, and is therefor failing because its readers recognize it to be lousy. They simply don't report from what I have seen, at least around here, they just regurgitate and spin. With all the talk about how much we "need" a free press, if this is the sort of free press they are talking about frankly they can keep it.

Two points

[microbox]

Whoever holds the purse strings is in control.

• The BBC is a government institution that holds its own purse strings -- effectively having the right to raise its own taxes.
• In western countries, public news organisations offer by far the highest quality of reporting. Furthermore, we get that without advertising, and for less total cost. It's amazes me that people will dismiss such a solution out of hand.

Personally I can't wait for the demise of corporate media -- which is beholden to advertising and other corporate interests, and has a dismal record for blatant editorialising.

Journalistic Co-Op

[misfit815]

I'd buy into one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative

Re:good description

[TubeSteak]

In the modern world we don't need 100 reporters at a White House press conference. The job can be done by three or four, and then aggregated and translated.

3 or 4 reporters can't turn into an ugly mob when a gov't official starts shoveling shit down their throats.
So lets keep the large press conferences and press pools.
Or do you really think 3 or 4 people can represent 300 million Americans?

Which is largely why professional 'reporters' are losing out to people with knowledge about the subject matter but with only amateurish reporting skills. If the journalist is merely a conduit, well, then frankly a blog page can do that.

Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India
http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz/content/jul2008/gb2008078_678274.htm

Journalists aren't losing out to bloggers.
Sooner or later the USA is going to outsource everything.

Re:good description

[jadavis]

the newspapers are folding because people are reading their news online...for free

The WSJ[1], and the Economist[2] are doing just fine. Why are particular publications immune? There must be another explanation.

[1] http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2009/10/wsj_rising_circulation_offers_glimmer_of.php
[2] http://www.economistgroup.com/our_news/press_releases/2009/results_for_the_year_ended_march_31st_2009.html

Re:good description

[commodore64_love]

Those who think "sensationalism" or "political slant" is anything new need to go watch the movie His Girl Friday, made in the 1930s. This stuff dates waaaay back all the way to the 1800s. It's nothing new.

When you have a free press it's only natural the paper will reflect the view of whoever owns it. It's our job as citizens to read both sides of the story and determine where the truth lies. Back in the past that would have meant reading both the Philadelphia Democrat and the Inquirer (republican-slanted).

Responsible mainstream journalism?

[zogger]

Where has that been hiding? Where were they during the buildup to the iraq invasion, covering all the WMD non stories, that they were pushing after getting "the real info" from out of the government's lie-hole? Parrots, not journalists, the safe way, no boat rocking, no fact checking. Where was all this "fact checking" going on, the post, the ny times, where? Where has been the useful coverage of the economic situation, where were the *good articles*, with the real skinny, main stream traditional news, regurgitating Whitehouse and Fed and Treasury press releases, or places like matt taibbi's stuff in the rolling stone, and dr. housing bubble blog and so on? Why can't they investigate government COMPLETE BS statistics on the economy, and you have to go to shadowstats instead to get it de obfuscated? Where has the real news of war come from, those "embedded" reporters? Ha! How about black box voting? Main stream news..not a peep, it took blackbox voting dog org and brad blog and places like that to get some notice and action going out there, you sure as hell didn't see abcnbccbswallstreethjournalnewyorktimeswapo nonsense bringing it up, and that is sort of *important* in an alleged free democracy. Where the hell is their coverage of sibel edmonds rather *interesting* tale?

One million examples there, tends to indicate a "trend"

  Blow dried blowhards. They know where their check comes from and what they can say or not.

Naw, let the controlled establishment propaganda arm of government/ big money interests (the same exact thing) crash and burn, they DESERVE it. They deserved it years ago, as pointed out by an insider journalist a long ago, who grew disillusioned working for the mainstream press and switched to being independent and working for the then new labor movement:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Re:good description

[hairyfeet]

I think you missed the point I was trying to make that BOTH sides are so heavily spun to make a good 99% of what they say propaganda. I quit listening to NPR 5 years or so ago when they went on and on about we should be cutting checks and giving lots of aid to illegal aliens because there was a bad crop in California that year. Uhh hello? Did they miss the ILLEGAL part of that sentence, as in breaking our laws, not paying taxes, draining our hospitals? But of course because things like amnesty (total crock and a spit in the face to those that obeyed the law to get here) is a left issue because Mexicans vote Democrat they were ALL for it.

The point was ALL media has become Fox news or NPR. Either you get Obama is God, or you get he is a dirty illegal alien who snuck over from Kenya to take our freedoms. propaganda is propaganda is propaganda, whether they are spewing for "your" side or not. I'd argue that BOTH sides are so damned corrupt now that without reporters shining a light on the shady deals and selling us out for big fat checks, well without that BOTH sources of media are frankly completely worthless.