Government funding raises a couple very interesting questions though. Why are we so viscerally opposed to it, and does it make sense to be? Is it worse than what we will, (or already do) have? Could it be better? (By the way, this post was inspired by the discussion in the comments section of Dan Kennedy's post berating a local paper from taking a rotating small business loan from the local government. The comments hash out a lot of the issues on all sides of this debate, and are quite interesting.)
As is illustrated in the post and comments linked above, many people are instinctively against government funding of journalism. This seems, on the surface, like a very rational response. We're all told, quite rightly, that journalists are meant to be watchdogs against the government, but how can they do that when they depend on the government for money? How could they be independent enough to really call government out?
I'm not really going argue against these concerns, as I truly believe most are valid. The point I'd like to make instead is that these concerns are all valid of every option out there, including what we have now, and that's what the critics are missing. First, it's a given that news sources are going to be beholden to their funders to some extent - the only way out is if you have both journalists and editors committed to the purity of journalism on one side, and funders also committed to journalism on the other, or funders who are at least not going to respond by pulling their funding. I believe there are some good journalists and editors, and maybe even some good funders, but we would not expect everyone to be.
So right now, who's funding journalism? For years, it's been advertisers. Well, we can ask a simple question - would a for-profit company likely continue to support a newspaper that is investigating them for corporate scandals? I think they'd be shirking their fiduciary duties to their shareholders if they didn't try to end investigations of whatever wrong they did. However, the big companies, the same ones with the most money to advertise, are the ones that have the greatest potential to do damage. These are the very ones we want the newspapers to go after, the ones who's lobbying we want to expose, as can be seen by the financial crisis, and the oil spill.
So advertising, today's model, might not be so great either. And advertising's drying up anyway, hence the newspaper industry's crisis. So then what, if not government funding? Well, people have suggested non-profits. Generally, there will just not be a steady enough income from small donations to get the paper to run. And larger donors create the same trouble as larger advertisers - once the paper depends on the money, that's the ballgame. From the comments in Dan Kennedy's post (and remember this is about a local paper, though it extends just fine by analogy):
I will say, I find Dan’s suggestion that a local news site find donors willing to pony up $1K or $5K far more troubling than the taking a loan through the government body.His last point about equating press money with political money allowed appeals to me innately because the ability to buy influence is so similar in both contexts (and it's why I think more people should talk about Citizens United alongside media 1st Amendment jurisprudence, but I suppose that's a side point). But again, that makes funding a paper with long-term plans really problematic.
And this is a point where I’ve always been troubled with the suggestion in some journalistic circles that the future of local journalism is or should be non-profit.
Generally, to form as a non-profit, you need a board of directors. Who is going to be on that board? Some of the most prominent people in town — the very people you most need to cover.
And when you start taking donations, your largest donors — the ones who will give $1K or $5K are the most connected and involved people in the community — the very people you need to maintain some degree of independence from and the last you should have any dependence on.
True, business-minded investors aren’t going to pay much attention to the small, local-only, disruptive news start up because that actual ROI will seem too small in real dollars, or the pay-off to long to realize. This compounds the potential conflicts associated with taking such “angel” money.
What if the mayor’s brother is the largest car dealer in town and he gives you $5K? Where’s your independence then? Or what if one of the largest property owners in town — who owns some rentals that some consider slums — gives you $1K? Are people going to believe that you’re fairly covering accusations of code violations at those properties?
In Ann Arbor, the maximum per-year political contribution is $250, so the Ann Arbor Chronicle caps its annual donor contribution at $250 per person. If you’re going to take donations from local residents, this strikes me as a good rule of thumb.
So, onto government funding. I don't really see a huge difference between our largest corporations hell-bent on destroying America out of pure greed funding journalism and government doing so. I think they're similar degrees of evil, and in fact one might argue, similar in other ways, given corporate influence in government. Also, at least in government funding, you ahve institute review boards and mandate transparency, such that if funding were pulled from an outlet based on their specific reporting, the decision could be challenged administratively. Therefore, government funding could possibly be set up to have a great deal more accountability to it than the decision to pull advertising.
I'd like to address one more point. The fear of a government-worshipping subservient media (what we're supposed to get with government funding) is already here. It's an epidemic among mainstream journalists to see who can be the most subservient and power-worshipping, thus gaining access and the most insider knowledge so that they'll be one of the cool kids (not to mention book deals). This is how Beltway journalism already works today. It's the main reason why the run-up to the Iraq war was miscovered, and the financial crisis, and the Obama Administration's continued assault on the rule of law. There are really just too many examples to link them all here, but I'll include one post just from today, involving journalists all giggly at a beach party thrown by the Administration. These are our watchdogs? I mean, if you’re gonna get all cozy with government, you might as well at least take the money already.
Finally, I suppose the last option would technically be not to have the journalism for fear of corruption due to funding. However, I just don’t consider that an option, as it would bring us back to the Dark Ages.
Probably the right scenario is a good mix of funds, including government, and different funding for different news sources, accompanied by full transparency. It would actually be hard to tell whether a given outlet would be more likely to succumb to the whims of the funders or be extra hard on them to “prove” themselves, but at least transparency would allow us to decide how much we trust the reporting on any one area of news. But make no mistake, government funds will be in the mix, and on the whole, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
