Creating independent news media

Creating a viable free press has emerged as a central issue because of the rapid disintegration of the commercial news media system, says Robert W McChesney.

THERE are a number of foundational areas for research in communication in the coming generation. They all relate, in my mind, to structural communication policy battles in the immediate future. The outcome of these policy debates will go a long way toward shaping the direction in which our species is headed in the coming generations.

We still know too little about the Internet and the effects of digital communication upon not only our media systems, but our brains, our culture, our economy and our politics. Likewise, we still have a remarkably underdeveloped understanding of advertising and commercialism, despite their omnipresence in our lives.

We know, too, far too little about the environmental effects of communication technology, and the broader role of communication in the climate crisis before us. I could continue in this vein....

But the central issue before communication scholars for the immediate future, and until it is satisfactorily resolved, is the research necessary to enact policies to create viable independent news media, i.e. institutions necessary to produce journalism for a free and self-governing society. It is most important because without it, all other issues fall by the wayside.

To employ an analogy from economics, independent news media are the 'capital goods' of a free society; without them the 'consumer goods' of freedom and self-government cannot be produced. A credible free press means a system that:

* Provides rigorous analysis and accounting of people in power and who wish to be in power, both in the public and private sector;

* Provides a range of informed opinion on the key issues of the day and can ferret out truth from lies, so liars cannot act with impunity and citizens can have some confidence in the system;

* Does not have the range of legitimate stories and opinions determined by what those in political or business power believe is legitimate;

* Provides an early warning system for major issues so they can be recognised and addressed peacefully and at a lower cost than would be the case otherwise;

* Regards the journalism needs of all people, even - no, especially - poor people, to be equal and equally important.

Each medium need not do all of this, but the system as a whole must make this a reasonable expectation.

Creating a viable free press has emerged as a central issue because of the rapid disintegration of the commercial news media system. It is a worldwide phenomenon, but it seems most acute in the United States, at least to this American observer.

Propaganda and spin

In short, research demonstrates that the number of paid working journalists in most American communities has plummeted since the high point some two decades ago. In virtually every city examined there are never as many as half the number of journalists as there were in the late 1980s, and this does not even account for sometimes significant population growth. It is only going to get worse, possibly much worse, in the visible future.

Large sections of public life are no longer covered or are only barely covered. The criteria listed above for a free press are in a shambles. The ratio of public relations workers to working journalists has gone from around 1:1 in 1960 to nearly 4:1 today. At current rates it will likely be 6:1 or 7:1 in less than a decade. Research demonstrates that what 'news' does exist comes increasingly from 'official sources' or press releases.

We are in the Golden Age of Propaganda and Spin. Journalism as we have known it is basically dead. We are entering uncharted waters, and we have reasons to fear that our societies may drown. An entire generation of scholars who have been studying news media and media effects need to scrap their basic assumptions and start from square one.

The Internet figures in any discussion of the crisis in journalism in two ways. First, many observers and scholars hold the Internet responsible for disrupting the business models of news media, and all media for that matter. The Internet made it difficult to sell traditional media products to consumers, and undermined advertising, which historically provides the lion's share of revenues that support US journalism. It effectively ended classified advertising for American newspapers, a crushing blow.

Advertisers never were interested in supporting journalism per se; they did so because it was the only effective way to accomplish their commercial objectives. Now that the Internet and the digital revolution are here, advertising has numerous better options, and news media hold no special allure. No advertising. and not much journalism. Moreover, with the balance of power shifting decisively to advertisers, those news media seeking ad dollars find much greater pressure to compromise their integrity.

Although the Internet has done considerable damage to commercial news media, and would have forced a reckoning at some point, a great deal more research needs to go into the business of journalism. The fact is that US commercial news media were shedding editorial jobs and closing bureaus for two decades, during periods of record profits and long before Google even existed. In my view, a more fruitful analysis looks at the tensions between commercialism and journalism, and understands the rise and fall (and distinct limitations) of professional journalism in this context.

Second, with no sense of irony, many of the same people who attribute the crisis of journalism to the Internet argue that there are no grounds for concern because the Internet will spawn a new news media system, one probably far superior to what it has just destroyed. We need to better understand how the Internet can revolutionise and improve journalism and politics in general, because the potential is enormous.

But it is not guaranteed by the technology. The evidence regarding journalism is now clear: the Internet has created almost no paying jobs doing journalism compared to the tens of thousands that have been lost. On its own, the Internet cannot work any magic. Journalism requires revenues, institutions, people getting paid. That isn't happening on the Internet and there are no reasons to expect that it will.

The collapse of journalism is spawning a thoroughgoing reappraisal of US news media historically as well as a renewed interest in the actual nature of government-news media relations since 1776. It is some of the most promising research going. What is exciting about this new wave of research is that it is coming from historians, legal scholars, and economists, and is finding a striking degree of common ground. It is the type of research that needs guidance from communication programmes, because they are best suited for interdisciplinary approaches, and because their first concern is always media.

In a nutshell, this research demonstrates that journalism has many attributes of a classic public good, and having people purchase news media has never come anywhere near providing sufficient resources for a credible free press. The US news media have relied upon some combination of government subsidies or advertising to exist. There is a rich history of massive government direct and indirect subsidies of US journalism going back to the nation's founding, and these subsidies have only very rarely involved censorship over content.

Indeed, the influence of corporate owners and advertisers over the content of the news has been far greater by any accounting. With the collapse of the commercial system, the logic suggests that if we are going to have a viable press system it will require large public subsidies and our task therefore is to devise subsidies that protect and promote democratic values. It will have to be a significantly non-profit and non-commercial system.

Creating independent, accountable and competitive news media

The task before us is to continue this research, historically and internationally. We need hard and detailed studies of public and community media, of media markets, of alternative institutional structures, and much else. We need to understand how the digital revolution can dramatically assist and improve, possibly even revolutionise, journalism. The goal must be to determine the structures and subsidies necessary to create independent, accountable and competitive news media. There are not going to be perfect solutions, but some ideas will be much better than others. And almost anything will be better than nothing.

The crisis in journalism is occurring at a perilous historical moment. The global capitalist economy is stagnant, and even establishment figures warn that we are entering an era of very slow growth, crumbling infrastructure, declining social services, falling wages, growing inequality, and high unemployment. Likewise the environment crisis is getting ever more severe, as the public policy response has been tepid, if not tragically pathetic. It too has increasing social and economic costs.

Too many sections of the world are at war and humanity possesses a stockpile of unimaginably powerful weapons that can obliterate our species if not all of life in a matter of days, even hours. By any reckoning we are entering a politically turbulent period, and the need for credible journalism has never been greater. Its absence all but assures greater corruption and outcomes to the pressing political issues of our times that will be less than optimal.

We often pronounce the importance of a viable free press system for the existence of a truly democratic political system. What is every bit as important is the converse: journalism, as defined in this essay and understood by most conventional assessments, requires democracy every bit as much as democracy requires journalism if it is to prosper. Journalism is not agnostic on the question of democracy; its fate hangs in the balance. So journalism and communication more broadly are in the middle of the political turmoil of our times.

In these times people are going to be searching, at times desperately, for alternatives to the capitalist status quo. There is a range of alternatives, and I suspect many new options not yet in existence, with some being more democratic and humane, and others tending toward more authoritarian and illiberal outcomes. And here there is an important new area of research and participation for communication scholars.

For much of the 20th century, the major post-capitalist alternative was the one-party communist regime, typified by the Soviet Union. Whatever the benefits of these societies in terms of economic development, health care and social services, they almost uniformly had dreadful press systems and deplorable records concerning civil liberties and democratic practices. Allowing for exceptions and variations, they were deadened societies, often police states, which paid propagandistic lip service to human liberation.

The communist rulers loudly proclaimed this was socialism and the only alternative to capitalism, and the Western leaders and pundits happily agreed. It was a marriage of convenience. Given that choice, most people in the world understandably preferred capitalist democracy. It has contributed to the great demoralisation of our times, that there is no way out.

Now that we have some distance from the defunct and discredited communist era, we can see that the matter of socialist alternatives has a much richer and more democratic history than the Cold War typology countenanced. Prior to the Soviet era, and alongside the Soviet era, socialist movements regarded themselves as extending the promise of democracy beyond the limitations imposed by capitalism, and their practices bore this out. This is the rich tradition that is re-emerging in the world today, particularly in Latin America, and it may well serve as a harbinger.

For communication scholars, there is a great deal to be learned in the Venezuelas and Bolivias and Ecuadors of the world. I would theorise that we should pay particular attention to the media systems that emerge in these democratic nations with popular governments critical of global capitalism and domestic inequality. Most of them are wrestling with traditional commercial news media owned by the wealthiest families and having a singular hostility to anything that threatens their interests. These traditional media can become a major barrier to democracy and significant conduits of propaganda. If the response of new popular regimes is to simply repress the old media and replace it with state or party organs, I think it fair to say that the democratic promise of these regimes will be compromised, even terminated.

If, on the other hand, these popular governments institute genuine decently funded community and independent media, not under the thumb of the state, we may begin to see the contours of something truly revolutionary: a genuinely democratic public sphere. But it will not be easy and there are going to be countless problems and issues along the way. Many nations without necessarily sympathetic national governments will see their own experiments at the local level or on a smaller scale. It is where our eyes belong. We have much to learn, and to teach. More than we can imagine rides on the outcome.     

Robert W. McChesney is Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US. This article is reproduced from Media Development (No. 4/2010).

*Third World Resurgence No. 247, March 2011, pp 49-51