Can we steer people toward hard news — and get them to financially support it — through the use of “news vouchers” or “public interest vouchers”? That’s the subject of this latest installment in my ongoing series on proposals to have the government play a greater role in the media sector in the name of sustaining struggling enterprises or “saving journalism.”
As I mentioned here previously, last week I testified at the FCC’s first “Future of Media” workshop on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” (@3:29 mark of video). It was a great pleasure to testify alongside the all-star cast there that day, which included the always-provocative Jeff Jarvis of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He delivered some very entertaining remarks and vociferously pushed back against many of the ideas that others were suggesting about “saving journalism.” Jeff is a very optimistic guy–far more optimistic than me, in fact–about the prospect that new media and citizen journalism will help fill whatever void is left by the death of many traditional media operators and institutions. He had a lively exchange with Srinandan Kasi, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of the Associated Press, that is worth watching (somewhere after the 5-hour mark on the video).
Nonetheless, Jarvis is a enough of a realist to know that it has always been difficult to find resources to fund hard news, which he creatively refers to as “broccoli journalism.” This is what is keeping the FCC, the FTC (workshop today), and many media worrywarts up at night; the fear that as traditional financing mechanisms falter (advertising, classifieds, subscription revenues, etc) many traditional news-gathering efforts and institutions will disappear. Of course, while it is certainly true we are in the midst of a gut-wrenching media revolution with a great deal of creative destruction taking place, it is equally true that exciting new media business models and opportunities are developing. We shouldn’t over look that, as I argued here and here.
Anyway, a lot of different proposals are being put forth by scholars and policymakers to find new ways to finance news-gathering or “save journalism.” One of the ideas that has been gaining some steam as of late is the idea of crafting a “public interest voucher” or what Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols, authors of the new book The Death and Life of American Journalism, call a “Citizenship News Voucher.” And McChesney discussed this idea in more detail when he spoke at today’s FTC event on saving journalism. Continue reading →
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here’s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below.
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A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria:
From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC
by Adam Thierer
Although the pending union of Comcast and NBC Universal has not yet made it to the altar, Chicken Little-esque wails about the marriage have already begun in earnest. For example, the pro-regulatory media organization Free Press has already set up a website to complain about the deal.[1] And Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, has called it “an unholy marriage.”[2] The fever only promises to spread once the deal is formally announced, and a lengthy fight over the deal is expected at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and whichever antitrust agency reviews the deal.[3]
But reality tends to play out somewhat less dramatically than the script penned by the media worrywarts. It’s worth looking back at some of the more prominent examples of media merger hysteria in recent years to understand why such panic is unwarranted, and why a deal between Comcast and NBC Universal is unlikely to lead to the sort of problems that the pessimists suggest.[4] Continue reading →
I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney. I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech and a free society. That’s because, as media scholar Ben Compaine has noted, “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, as I argued in my 2005 Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by taking the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets. In other words, McChesney and the Free Press want an UnFree Press. To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production. And it begins, McChesney argues, by all of us having to give up this “sort of religious attachment to the idea of a ‘free-press’” from which we all suffer.
Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned. But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.” What exactly would all that mean in practice for media? In his 2002 book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”
If you want additional proof of his intentions, then I encourage you to read this lengthy interview with McChesney that appears in the new edition of The Bullet, an online newsletter produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.” (If you ask me, there’s something strangely appropriate about a socialist newsletter named “The Bullet” in light of the millions of people who died while living under socialist tyranny!) Anyway, let’s ignore that and focus on what neo-Marxist media reform entails according to McChesney. Because never before has he laid his cards on the table as clearly as he does in this interview. Continue reading →
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?)
Continue reading →
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