"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.

Government Subsidies are a Part of the Future of Journalism, and That's Not a Bad Thing

Ready for a controversial statement that I fully believe? Here goes: Government subsidies and funding of journalism will be included in future news models in this very country, and I don't believe that's a bad thing. As far as whether it will happen, I just think it's pretty much a given, since there's just no other way the papers will be able to afford to keep making quality news. Advertising’s drying up; non-profit models just don't work because there's not enough money, unless the paper is beholden to a few very wealthy donors, which is also problematic.

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.)