[cross-posted from BigGovernment.com]

In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in relentless agitation for a truly radical media and communications policy agenda, and their influence is now spreading throughout the Obama Administration.

The Free Press-McChesney blueprint for media “reform” reads more like a script for State servitude. On the regulatory side, they call for media ownership restrictions, “localism” mandates, “Net neutrality” regulations, price controls on broadband, advertising and copyright restrictions, and layers of additional regulatory edicts.  Once all that red tape smothers the life out the independent press and private communications providers, they plan to have the State step in become the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate and high-tech infrastructure. For starters, McChesney and Nichols advocate a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” municipal government ownership of press and infrastructure, and many more bureaucratic programs.

Using its growing lobbying muscle in Washington, Free Press seeks to enshrine the McChesney-Nichols blueprint into law at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under the guise of a “National Journalism Strategy,” a veritable industrial policy for the press that resembles a Soviet-style five-year plan. They also want a “Public Media Trust Fund,” to make sure all the money they confiscate from private providers goes to public-subsidized competitors.  Average citizens would be in for some sticker shock, too, since Free Press and McChesney propose funding much of this new media welfare state with steep taxes on our mobile phones, Internet connections, and digital gadgets. So, get ready for the iPhone tax and new fees on your broadband bills!

Surprisingly, Free Press and McChesney don’t try to sugarcoat their radical intentions. Their self-described “radical” goal is a world of “post-corporate” newsrooms. McChesney and Nichols often speak broadly of “the problem” for the press being the capitalist system itself.  In their 2002 book, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, they argued that media-reform efforts begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media… Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”  More recently, in an interview with the Canada-based “Socialist Project,” McChesney went so far as to say that “the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists” and that “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program,” he argues. Thus, nothing short of “massive public intervention” into the news business is required. Free Press adopts a similar tone and dials up the heat inside the Beltway with apocalyptic talk about the need to have government “save the news.”  In true Rahm Emanuel-like fashion, Free Press insists, “We have a crisis. We have an historic opportunity. We can’t let either go to waste.”

Hugo-Vision for the U.S.?

If you’re beginning to think that the Free Press-McChesney plan sounds a bit like something right out of Hugo Chavez’s tyrannical press-police state, you’re not mistaken. In fact, McChesney imagines the Venezuelan strongman to be something of a misunderstood genius when it comes to how to run a “free press.”  “Aggressive unqualified political dissent is alive and well in the Venezuelan mainstream media, in a manner few other democratic nations have ever known, including our own,” McChesney has written.  That will certain come to a shock to those journalists and news outlets currently being subjected to Chavez’s reign of media terror.  Luckily — at least till McChesney and Free Press get their hands on them — there are still a few independent media outfits here in the U.S. that can report the truth about Chavez’s “democratic” press, which McChesney glorifies as the ideal for other nations.

In fact, just yesterday, editorials by The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady (“Chávez’s Assault on the Press”) and Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post (“Chavez’s Iron Fist”) painted a frightening picture of the press nightmare that now exists in Chavez’s thugocracy. O’Grady and Diehl both document the plight of Guillermo Zuloaga, who fled the country with his family to avoid being arrested by Chavez.  Zuloaga’s crime?  He has the audacity to speak the truth about the Chavez regime, and as the owner of Globovision, one of only three remaining privately held Venezuelan television stations, that makes him a threat to the thug-in-chief.  “How is it possible that he can accuse me of such things and walk free?” Chavez has asked publicly about Zuloaga.

And Zuloaga and other independent media operators clearly have legitimate cause for concern. Chavez has already yanked the license of opposition broadcaster RCTV, who he said had been working to overthrown him. The U.S. government’s Open Source Center, which provides information on foreign political, military, economic, and technical issues, has documented how “President Chavez’s government is moving forcefully to silence critics by introducing a Media Crimes bill that would give it sweeping authority to jail journalists, media executives, and bloggers who report on anything that the government considers to be harmful to state interests.”  According to Freedom House, which ranks press freedom internationally, Venezuela is the only country besides Cuba listed as “Not Free” in the entire Western Hemisphere. The organization notes that Chavez expelled Human Rights Watch officials from the country after it released a critical report entitled A Decade Under Chavez, which found that “The Venezuelan government under President Chavez has undermined freedom of expression through a variety of measures aimed at reshaping media content and control.” The National Journalists’ Guild has also accused Chavez of violating the rights of the press. The latest Freedom House report on the state of press freedom in the country also notes that:

“Free-to-air broadcast media are largely owned by the government, which operates seven channels with nationwide coverage. However, Venezuela’s leading newspapers are privately owned, and most identify with the opposition. As a result, they are subject to threats and violence by the government and its supporters, sometimes leading to self-censorship. Local and regional media are particularly dependent on government advertising revenue, leaving them vulnerable to economic retaliation for criticism.”

So, what’s Robert McChesney’s response to Chavez’s crackdown on dissent and opposition journalism?  They had it comin’!  “If RCTV were broadcasting in the United States, its license would have been revoked years ago,” McChesney has argued. “In fact its owners would likely have been tried for criminal offenses, including treason.”

Perhaps I’ve missed something but I study the history of journalism for a living and I can’t remember the last time any media outlet had their license yanked or that any journalist was tried for treason in the U.S. for opposing a president’s policies!  But such are the tactics of shameless media Marxist.

Media Reformistas Gaining a Voice in Government

While such sympathy for the devil may seem shocking to most of us, McChesney has no choice but to defend a socialist strongman like Chavez. After all, this is basically the McChesney-Free Press blueprint for media reform!  But one would hope and think that McChesney and his merry band of media reformistas at Free Press wouldn’t be gaining much traction here in the U.S. with their self-described “radical” agenda for media takeover.  Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

For starters, some Free Press reformistas are now having real, direct influence on the Obama Administration’s media and communications agenda.  Jen Howard, former press director for Free Press, now serves as press secretary for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.  And Ben Scott, former Policy Director for Free Press, was recently appointed as a “policy advisor for innovation” to the State Department. Lord help us if it’s the Free Press’s brand of “innovation” that our government will now be promoting worldwide!  Meanwhile, as Seton Motley has noted here before, Free Press has a regular audience in FCC, FTC, and congressional hearing and meeting rooms.  McChesney was even recently invited to deliver a major address at an FTC workshop on “saving journalism.”  Meanwhile, Susan DeSanti, the FTC’s Director of Policy Planning, who spearheads the agency’s “media reinvention” effort, has publicly praised McChesney and Nichols’ “excellent book,” referring to their latest manifesto for media statism, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

The fingerprints of McChesney and Free Press can also be seen on many of the documents and projects the Obama Administration is currently producing on media policy issues.  As part of the FTC’s workshop series asking “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” the agency released a 47-page discussion draft entitled “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.” The document reads like the Cliff’s Notes for the latest McChesney-Nichols book and Free Press’s “National Journalism Strategy.” The FTC draft cites the authors over a dozen times and reproduces their proposals almost verbatim.  Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission is simultaneously conducting a proceeding of its own on the “Future of Media.” So far, its workshops have featured plenty of talk of expanded public media and “public-interest” programs — as well as multiple Free Press witnesses and submissions.

Amazingly, Obama Administration agency officials and congressional lawmakers on the Left often seem to turn a blind eye to some of Free Press’s more infantile attacks and tactics. For example, this week the group is wall-papering Chicago with “wanted” posters featuring Chairman Genachowski’s picture. The Chairman’s crime? He’s not attending a show trial hearing set up to demonize the pending merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal.  And Free Press has repeatedly eaten their own young during Net Neutrality debates by viciously blasting any Democrat who has had the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, an FCC takeover of the Internet isn’t such a grand idea.

The Stakes in the Debate

Let’s be clear about the stakes in this battle. As media historian Ben Compaine has argued, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.”  That’s exactly right and, more specifically, the media reformistas want to impose this control by borrowing the old fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending that misguided notion to all media platforms and outlets. In other words, McChesney and Free Press want an UnFree Press. To cast things in neo-Marxists terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production.

The fight for real media freedom and a truly “free press” begins with a better understanding and documentation of the radical intentions of the opposition as the struggle over the future course of America’s media marketplace continues. True freedom doesn’t begin by fettering media and communications systems with more chains, as McChesney and Free Press advocate; it begins by removing the chains that already exist and then erecting a firm wall between State and Press.

For more on this subject, see my ongoing series of essays: Should Government Bailout Media, Subsidize the Press & Seek to “Save Journalism”?

There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too.  Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of the classic study Who Owns the Media?, has added his own two cents in his latest essay over at the Rebuilding Media blog. Like everything Ben writes, it is well worth reading:

If newspapers have essentially been able to thrive on the revenue from advertisers alone (again, with cost of printing more or less covered by circulation revenue), why are they having so much trouble today? The answer is not one single factor, but a major contributor is that newspapers – whether print or digital—are just worth less to advertisers than they were 20 years ago. Back then, local advertisers did not have many options for reaching the mass local audience. What was the alternative for auto dealers? For real estate agents? Supermarkets or department stores? For some, direct mail was one possible option. But that was about it. Using pre-prints instead of ROP became attractive for some large display advertisers, leaving the publishers with a piece of the cash flow. Advertisers were hit with regular rate increases. And they pretty much had to pay, The publishers made good money. But then a double whammy. Just about the time the Internet became a real alternative for classified listings—think Craigslist, Monster.com, eBay, Autotrader.com—and for retailers—think DoubleClick, Google, et al—the boys at the cable operators had perfected the insertion of highly local spots into their feeds. Between 1989 and 2007 local cable advertising increased from $500 million to $4.3 billion—or from 0.4% of all advertising to 1.6%. Advertising in newspapers fell from 26% to 15% in this period. Although some of the highly local advertisers going to cable may have taken some of their funds from budgets for radio or other local media, it is probable that a significant share came from the hides of newspapers. I estimate perhaps up to 20% of the decline in local newspaper advertising share can be attributed to local cable spots. The other whammy, the gorilla in the room, is Internet advertising. No need to elaborate. But its impact on newspapers is not just that it has siphoned off dollars per se. Much more importantly is that the Internet has given most advertisers greater market power against newspaper publishers. Many big advertisers—like car dealers, real estate offices and big box retailers—don’t need the newspapers as much.

Ben’s got it exactly right. The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of  “protectable scarcity” (thanks to Canadian media expert Ken Goldstein for that phrase).  There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears.  We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans.  That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.

If you want to boil the newspaper death spiral down to an equation, it would look something like this:

(1) unprecedented technological change

+

(2) massive inflow of new media competitors / platforms

+

(3) end of geographic “protectable scarcity”

=

(4) inability to capture a guaranteed audience

&

(5) complete loss of advertiser / investor confidence

And the process is viciously self-reinforcing.  Again, a seemingly hopeless death spiral.  So, do papers have any hope?  Compaine considers where papers might turn next in terms of a business model:

I suspect that what we will find in the intermediate future is a mix of models and choices, among them:

• The Detroit model [Detroit Free Press and Detroit News] is one reasonable experiment: An attractive daily digital version, with home delivery of the paper reduced to Thursday, Friday and Sunday.
• An advertising supported all digital model, with the publisher closing down the printing plant, selling off its trucks, laying off the circulation and production departments.
• A voluntary pay model. This may take one of several forms. The “shareware” model for software has proven to work to a point. Users are asked to pay what they can or think the product is worth. Many users will be free riders. But, as we see with public television and radio, millions in their audience make annual contributions. (In 2007 at least one-third of those who downloaded Radiohead’s free “In Rainbow” album made a payment, in some cases higher than what the band would have received from a CD sale.)

The problem with that last model is that it might help some papers remain afloat, but it is highly unlikely such a model could sustain the industry as we know it today.  There’s a reason, after all, that NPR doesn’t have a lot of competitors in the non-profit radio world; only so many benefactors — whether corporate, foundations, or individuals — are willing to spread around their donations when it comes to news.  A non-profit model or charity-based model might work for a couple of big-dog dailies with generous sugar daddies — think the New York Times and Carlos Slim — but that model won’t work for most other papers.

As Ben suggests, the best hope likely lies in some combination of all of the above, with a particular focus on finding a way to monetize the all-digital model (model #2) as quickly and effectively as possible.  But some papers are late to that game, and even those that moved aggressively to get everything online have found that the economics are still challenging in a crowded field.  The advertising cross-subsidy they lost is in the old world has already been captured online by many others. There’s just less ad $$$ to go around with so many other outlets presenting more targeted and affordable platforms than what old newspapers offer.

Regardless, I think it’s time to accept the uncomfortable reality that the newspaper industry as we know it is dead and will never return.  As an old newspaper fanatic and journalism student, this makes me a bit sad.  I still get two dailies on my doorstep every morning and will certainly miss them when they pass from this Earth.  Of course, a lot of that news will be repurposed online. And other news sources and outlets are still out there or will develop in response.  But challenging issues remain about how “long form” investigative journalism gets funded going foward. I don’t believe in the pollyanish fantasies about a world of user-generated content and “We-dia” giving us all the important news of the day.  You can’t reassemble the New York Times one Twitter at a time.