The Decline of American Journalism - Robert McChesney

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The New York Times has become the national newsroom. It is the only place that has a newsroom that covers national politics seriously, that has a staff that does it. And for that reason, it's a national newspaper. It has subscribers all over the country. It's the only place you can go. So, there's room for one paper. There's room for one newspaper that can make money nationally and do what The New York Times does. Doesn't seem like there's room for much more than that. Certainly, for general news. Not just business news or a specific area - sports news.

So, we're down to one. But you know what we had forty years ago in the United States, by comparison? There were probably a dozen major American newspapers that not only had a big Washington bureau, they had bureaus in London and Paris and Moscow. In South America. They were covering the world. You actually saw international news, which doesn't exist anymore - ironically, in the global age. So, there's one newsroom left. And to some extent, The Washington Post will cover domestic politics. It champions the stuff in Washington. And The Wall Street Journal does some good reporting, still

But the rest of it? It's mostly just gossip. Now, there are some great reporters, don't get me wrong, and you're one of them. There are some great reporters covering stuff, but it's not in that world. It's on the margins, on the fringes. It's being supported through - like you have to do - trying to find people to support you, willing to give you money, who understand the importance of the work. But there's not enough money out there, even if you find rich people to give you money, to bankroll the sort of resources you need to cover Baltimore, Maryland, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the country. That's the great crisis we face, not to mention the national news.

Yeah, I agree with all that. The thing about this concentration of ownership that I was saying is that the interest of finance is now so directly involved in the media that the boundaries of where they are willing to go is still within the realm of the two-party duopoly. Even though The New York Times is unparalleled in the United States, in terms of a functioning international and national newsroom. It's still about Republicans versus Democrats.

But even on other issues. I've been preoccupied with BlackRock, this big asset management company. It controls seven trillion dollars. Between them, State Street, Vanguard and some of the other smaller ones, they vote the shares that control something like 95 percent of the S&P 500. But when I tried to find stories about BlackRock that really are revealing, the place I found them was on Bloomberg. Well, Bloomberg is privately owned, whereas The New York Times is owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and the other institutional investors. I guess people know where their bread is buttered. In no way am I disagreeing with how the market for journalism is collapsed. I'm just saying it's gotten worse than that because the ownership is so intertwined now that the same people who write about nuclear weapons and nuclear war strategy work for the same ownership that owns the twelve companies that make nuclear weapons.

So, it reinforces the problems to begin with and then some.

Let's talk about how to change this. To really change it, we're going to need a breakthrough politically, at least at some state levels. We haven't seen anything with the donor model get to scale. Even The Intercept, which has some serious money from Pierre Omidyar and does good investigative journalism and does get referenced in the mainstream press. I guess maybe Democracy Now is the most successful outlet based on the foundation-and-donor model. But the vast majority of Americans have never heard of Democracy Now.

So, it's going to be connected to the issue of a political breakthrough at the national and state levels because there needs to be some really serious public money put into a real democratic media. And that's a political problem. The private donations alone are just not going to be enough. Like, you could imagine a state, especially a bigger state like California, say, putting up real funding for independent media if they would have the political guts to do it.

But, anyway, how do you imagine this changing?

Well, I think I'm open minded. I think we have to see what works. Throw a lot of ideas out there, work on them, and see what develops. I don't think there's one plan that will solve it, necessarily, although there are some things we know for sure. What most Americans don't realize is that the First Amendment to our Constitution, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, is a structural demand on the government to make sure there is a press system, that there is an independent free press. It's not just, don't censor the press. You've got to have a press that exists in order for it to be protected from censorship. Our free-press tradition has two parts.

The first the first part I talked about, that there actually be a free and independent press, was forgotten by the time the commercial media giants came along in the 20th century. It was assumed that the market would always produce a huge news media. That was never a problem. You'd always have this huge news media and the only thing you worried about was the government censoring it.

Well, in fact, at the time of the American Revolution, there was no guarantee you'd have a press system. It required massive public subsidies to have a press system. We had enormous public subsidies. The primary one was the post office, which was created to be the free (or for a nominal fee) distribution arm of every American newspaper for the first hundred years of American history. This made it possible for to have this plethora of diverse views in newspapers which were foundational to our political democracy, the best parts of our democracy. There wasn't a single social movement of value from abolition to the suffragettes to labor - all the rights to expand the franchise - that wasn't led by editors, that wasn't led by news media. The media was the center of democracy. Those media only survived because they were supported by the post office providing free distribution or really inexpensive postage that covered all their distribution costs.

That's our American tradition. We had this rich tradition of understanding the exact problem you outline, that you need a news media to have a functioning democracy and we can't bank on the market to provide it. And we're in a situation now where the market clearly has given up. It's failed. This is a public good, news media. It's something society desperately needs, but the market won't produce in sufficient quality or quantity.

So, how do we solve that? The great political problem: how do you get sufficient public funds to support independent, uncensored news media, but without letting the government control who gets the money and how it's used? That's the problem. Is it solvable? Well, the postal subsidy solved it. The postal subsidy? Everyone got it if you were a newspaper. They didn't care what your politics were.

In fact, the reason why we know it was such an extraordinarily successful policy is that the first great scandal with the post office till big newspapers came was in the antebellum period when Southern postmasters refused to carry abolitionist newspapers. And that was considered such an outrage in the North, it was one of the main factors that drove northern anger at the South and hatred of slavery. It would take away democracy if you couldn't even talk about slavery or abolition. There's a handful of other incidents in which you have the post office attempting censorship. They were always criticized. In fact, during World War I when anti-war tracts were censored, what the US government did was deemed so outrageous that it led to all the great First Amendment decisions the Supreme Court made that we live with today. They came on the heels of World War I. A lot of that came from most Americans considering the post office's censorship of anti-war material just obscene.

So, we have this rich history of solving that problem successfully. Now we've got to come up with how we do it in the digital age. How do we do it in era in which you don't need ink in newspapers, in an era in which you want to have local media? Local media disappears in the digital era because once you go digital, localness means nothing. For you to do your program, Paul, even if you want to do just Baltimore, Maryland, when you put it online, it's seen as easily by someone in China as it is in Baltimore, Maryland. You basically have an international audience automatically. Localism is stripped out of the technology. And for that reason, we've got to come up with a way to have local media that covers communities, that draws people together - independent, competitive media that's functional and accountable.

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