I’ve got a new essay up over at the City Journal about John Nichols and Robert McChesney’s proposal to have the government heavily subsidize failing media enterprises to “save journalism.” It follows below:

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“Socializing Media in Order to Save It“
by Adam D. Thierer
City Journal March 27, 2009

With proposals to nationalize or heavily subsidize various segments of our economy more in vogue than ever, it was probably only a matter of time before someone suggested that America’s media marketplace should be brought into the government fold. John Nichols of The Nation and the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney have now provided the road map for media’s march to serfdom. The cost to the American taxpayer would be at least $60 billion, but the cost for the First Amendment and our democracy would be incalculable.

Nichols and McChesney have coauthored several books and essays about media policy that view the world through the prism of class struggle, “manufactured consent” (á la Noam Chomsky), and the rest of the typical Marxoid tripe about history and economics. In their view, private, for-profit media cannot be trusted. As they stated in their 2003 call to arms, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, media-reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” “Our claim,” they continue, “is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”

In a new Nation essay, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” the authors bring their earlier work to its logical conclusion. Saving journalism, they argue, essentially requires that media become an appendage of the state. Journalism, they claim, is a “public good,” which—like education and defense—requires constant government oversight and support: “A moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.” They propose that government devote $60 billion to “subscription subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public broadcasting.” Think of it as a “free press ‘infrastructure project,’” they say. “It would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of providing an economic stimulus.” (Isn’t it amazing how everything stimulates the economy these days?)

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