The Deadline For the Headline Is the Breadline

My last stop at the Wisconsin Book Festival this year was to see Robert McChesney and John Nichols talk about the impending death of journalism and offer up a solution which is to be found in their book The Death and Life of American Journalism. Nichols was delayed because his flight was running late and so McChesney took the stage alone and was introduced by Norm Stockwell of WORT.

The first half of the talk was about how bad things have become in American journalism. Journalists are a dying breed, we were told. Furthermore, the Internet just wasn't picking up the slack and providing the quality reporting that we once had. (Bill Lueders was in the front row at this talk and I think he really ate all this up.)

Nichols finally showed up and launched into his flag-waving routine. His notion was that the United States was founded on the principle that we'd struggle towards democracy as time went on. Not everyone had the right to vote and some people were but 3/5 of a person but it was a start. Information needed to spread in order to fan the flames of democracy. Only armed with information could people rule themselves.

He got fairly animated when noting that cable talk shows employ no reporters and that we are getting rid of journalists at an unprecedented rate. The statistics from a Pew study formed the final part of his argument. It examined Baltimore media and concluded that 96% of news stories had their genesis in old media. His urgency and intensity returned when noted that 86% of stories were power speaking to people. (No doubt press releases and the statements of political officials dominate.)

At this point McChesney took over by saying that this problem is quite solvable but that we're blinded by the idea that the government shouldn't be involved in subsidizing the news. He said that it was imperative that we stop thinking of the media as being a commercial enterprise because, he maintained, it was a public good. In a disappointing analogy, he said that while neither he nor Nichols will ever set foot in a national park again, they are in favor of supporting them in all their public goodness. (Disappointing because they see so little value in the parks, that is.)

The Founding Fathers are invoked again as he explained how they subsidized journalism in the nascent republic by having the Post Office distribute newspapers at a dramatically reduced rate. McChesney bolstered his case by pointing to The Economist's Democracy Index which showed that the "most democratic" states are also the ones that have the largest media subsidies. Other rankings show that the freest news media belong to those countries that subsidize them. Indeed, subsidized journalists tend to be more adversarial. I believe these bastions of freedom and adversarial journalism are in Scandinavia and Northern Europe.

One statistic that raised my eyebrows was that those countries with the most subsidized journalism were also among those who opted out of the "coalition of the willing" with regards to Iraq. OK, fine. But why did they opt out? McChesney came across as a snake oil salesman here. World peace – just add subsidized journalism. Could there have been any other factors involved? Economic? Or perhaps memories of destruction of the 20th century? I thought this statistic was just too simple.

Another thing which irked me was the selective quoting of the Founding Fathers. That's dangerous business because they were not all of one mind. Sure, they were all white men but, for example, Jefferson and Hamilton were not exactly two peas in a pod. Did anyone vote against the Postal Act of 1792? If so, what were their reasons? Beware of Lefties who quote only Madison and Jefferson.

While I admit that I am not intimately familiar with the early history of our nation's postal service, I do think that there is a difference between subsidizing journalism by making distribution hyper-cheap and subsidizing the enterprise by paying the rent on newsrooms and journalist's salaries. Still, I take McChesney's point that 18th century postal rates for newspapers stands as a counter to the notion that government subsidization of journalism is foreign to this country.

There wasn't much time for audience Q&A but Isthmus' Bill Lueders managed to slip his question in. He asked Nichols to address Madison media. Specifically, he said that The Cap Times and WSJ had shed lots of staff yet the reporting has seemingly gotten better. TCT has fewer articles but the ones they do have are more in-depth. Aren't Madison newspapers making lemonade of very high quality? Nichols response was that, while some good work is being done now, essentially the quantity of yore is still to be missed. He made a good point which was that our courts get little to no coverage. Furthermore country governments are frustrated by the lack of coverage they get.

Lueders added that, while the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel doesn't have the largest presence at the Capitol, they are doing a great job. Nichols' rebuke was that things were better when there were more reporters covering state government. You had some great reporters, some mediocre ones, and some poor ones. And this kind of blanket coverage exceeds the lemonade being made by the papers today.

Despite some skepticism, I am interesting in reading the book where the case is, no doubt, laid out more fully. Nichols left the audience with a somber thought: "The old media system is crashing into the wall. It's done."

For another take on the lecture, read what Christie Taylor wrote over at Dane 101.