CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Journalism in the U.S. needs government support, preferably tens of billions of dollars - and soon, says Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communication professor and co-author of a new book making the case.
Only a few years ago, his suggestion for up to $30 billion in federal subsidies might have been considered "absurd and even obscene," McChesney said, especially given strong concerns by journalists about potential government censorship or interference with the news.
But with the rapid decline of commercial journalism, especially of the newspapers that publish most original reporting, it may be the only means left for maintaining the journalism that a healthy democracy needs, McChesney argues in "The Death and Life of American Journalism" (Nation Books), co-written with John Nichols, a political blogger and writer for The Nation magazine.
What's more, as McChesney has argued in past books and research, large government support for journalism is nothing new and should even be considered the norm. Federal subsidies have been a constant through American history, beginning with postal and printing subsidies to support newspapers in the 1800s, he said.
New research presented in the book suggests those subsidies were even more extensive than previously thought, McChesney said.
"If we had the same support of journalism by the federal government today that we had in the 1840s, it would approximate $30 billion a year," he said, based on the percentage of the nation's gross domestic product devoted to those subsidies.
"Most Americans think freedom of the press means no government censorship of an independent press - and they're right, that's half of what a free press means," McChesney said. "But in the minds of the founders and throughout the 1800s, every bit as important was that there had to be a free press in the first place, and they didn't think it would just happen naturally by the free market."
It was seen as a function of government, he said, and they saw no contradiction in creating conditions for a free press, mostly through indirect subsidies, and also leaving it alone.
McChesney sees similar support for the idea of government subsidies in the example of other present-day democracies, among them England, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Crunching the numbers on those nations' subsidies, the authors were struck to find several approaching the equivalent of $30 billion a year, if their per capita spending was applied to the U.S. population.
"The other thing that was striking to us was that the countries that did the heaviest press subsidies were the countries that even by conservative business groups' calculations of the most democratic countries in the world ... were always at the top of those lists, well ahead of the United States," McChesney said. Rather than causing a problem for healthy democratic government or the independence of the press, these subsidies would appear to encourage them, he said.
McChesney also cites the example of the U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan following World War II, where he found that U.S. generals provided "almost a blank check" in supporting the creation of an independent press in those countries.
In the context of history and the experience of other countries, "we can see that the advertising-supported market era of journalism is really an anomaly," not the "natural order of things," McChesney said. The advertising that has supported journalism for the last century "is jumping ship and not coming back," he said.
As to where, specifically, the subsidies should go, the authors offer a few suggestions, but frame them as only a starting point for discussion.
In general, they oppose bailing out or subsidizing commercial news media, instead favoring subsidies primarily for nonprofit and noncommercial media. (Many of the existing media subsidies, such as business tax deductions for advertising and free monopoly licenses to radio and television channels, have been structured to favor specific commercial interests, rather than journalism, McChesney said.)
As a starting point, they favor dramatic increases for public and community broadcasting, primarily for journalism and primarily at the local level. They also suggest the possibility of an AmeriCorps for young journalists working in underserved communities, and funds to help failing commercial newspapers transition into nonprofit or low-profit papers.
The key point, McChesney said, is that fact-gathering, independent journalism needs to be understood as a "public good," as important for a democracy as national defense. It therefore demands public support if it can't be supported by other means, he said. "I think it's pretty clear that if we sit around and wait for the market to generate journalism, if we think the market's going to solve our problem, we simply won't get it."