Journalism trends prove that profit-seeking and truth-telling don't really mix. ......

..... Is publicly supported media the answer?


from The American Prospect:


The Truth -- So Long As It's Profitable

Journalism trends prove that profit-seeking and truth-telling don't really mix. Is publicly supported media the answer?

Ezra Klein | October 4, 2007 | web only



"I have always been firmly persuaded," wrote Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "that our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public, from the counting room." Increasingly, the slow decline of American media is proving him right. As the Internet deprives newspapers of the monopolistic business models of yesteryear and the cable channels construct a realm of perfect competition in which mild consumer preferences -- say, for the channel with a bright American flag in the corner rather than the one without -- can be expressed with a click of a remote, the newsroom's traditional buffers against triviality and hollow sensationalism are showing themselves to be deeply inadequate.

Additionally, increased competition and less cross-subsidization from classified ads means that every week's news stories come with a couple articles on how there will be fewer news stories; how this or that paper needed to close this or that bureau because this or that corporate overlord just didn't see the point.

And ah, yes, the corporate overlords. Or even just the accountants. They matter, too. The mandate of the media is not merely to inform. It is to generate revenue for stockholders, or turn enough of a profit to pay its employees. As the authors of Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Company sadly conclude, "News has become secondary, even incidental, to markets and revenues and margins and advertisers and consumer preferences. At its worst, the publicly traded newspaper company, its energy entirely drawn to the financial market's unrealistic and greedy expectations, can become indifferent to news and, thus, ultimately to the fundamental purposes served by news and the press." Or, as George Saunders pithily puts in his essay "The Braindead Megaphone," asking the media to "tell us the truth" is not the same as asking the media to "tell us as much truth as you can, while still making money."

But what if we could go back to "tell us the truth"? What if we could create a funding source that recognized the news' role as a "public good," worthy of some protection from the vicissitudes of quarterly earning reports? What if, in other words, we subsidized it? "Journalism is a rare business in that its product -- news -- has a public-service function, but unlike other public-service activities, like public education or scientific research, it is not protected from market forces by government support," writes Bree Nordenson in the September issue of the Columbia Journalism Review "So when the financial viability of the news business is threatened, so too is the press's role as the fourth estate."

And the market forces are threatening. As Nordenson explains, there's an explosion of activity in the commentary and entertainment sectors of the media, but a decided decline in the resources and viability of the unglamorous, economically intensive news-gathering functions. "ith the business model for news in transition," he writes, "mainstream media owners are cutting staff and reducing content, particularly hard-news coverage, in order to maintain the high profit margins newspapers have historically enjoyed." .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_truth_so_long_as_its_profitable