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Journalism Studies
ISSN: 1461-670X (Print) 1469-9699 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? Time for a rethinking
Robert W. McChesney
To cite this article: Robert W. McChesney (2012) FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM?, Journalism Studies, 13:5-6, 682-694, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2012.679868
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FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM?
Time for a rethinking
Robert W. McChesney
Journalism is in freefall collapse in the United States, and, to varying degrees,
elsewhere. Unless there is a dramatic rethinking in the United States, and to a lesser extent
elsewhere, all signs point to a continued deterioration of journalism. By all known political
theory this means the continuation of credible democratic governance will be impossible.
Hence this is a crisis of the greatest possible magnitude.
There is considerable consensus in democratic theory and among journalism
scholars (see Christians et al., 2009) about what a healthy journalism should entail:
1. It must provide a rigorous account of people who are in power and people who wish to
be in power, in the government, corporate and nonprofit sectors.
2. It must regard the information needs of all people as legitimate. If anything, it should
favor those without property, as those with wealth invariably have the means to get the
information they need to run society.
3. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least to prevent liars from
being unaccountable and leading nations into catastrophes*particularly wars, economic crises and communal discord.
4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of
our times*not only the transitory concerns of the moment, but also challenges that loom on the horizon. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in
power are talking about. Journalism must provide the nation’s early warning system,
so problems can be anticipated, studied, debated and addressed before they grow to crisis
proportions.
It is not necessarily the case that every media outlet can or should provide all
these services to their communities; that would be impractical. It is necessary, however,
that the media system as a whole makes such journalism a realistic expectation for the
citizenry. There should be a basic understanding of the commons*the social world*that all people share, so that all people can effectively participate in the political and electoral
processes of self-governance. The measure of a free press is how well a system meets
these criteria of giving citizens the information they need to keep their freedom.
There is more. Great journalism, as Ben Bagdikian put it, requires great institutions.
Like any complex undertaking, a division of labor is required to achieve success: copy-
editors, fact checkers, and proofreaders are needed, in addition to reporters and assigning
editors. Great journalism also requires institutional muscle to stand up to governments
and corporate power. It requires competition so if one newsroom misses a story it will be
exposed by someone else. Monopoly is the enemy of journalism, whether commercial,
noncommercial or both. A democratic press requires people covering stories they would
not cover if they were doing journalism on a voluntary basis. In short, to have democratic
journalism requires material resources that have to come from somewhere and need to be
organized on an institutional basis.
Journalism Studies, Vol. 13, Nos 5�6, 2012, 682�694 ISSN 1461-670X print/1469-9699 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.679868
If I needed to grade the US news media by the above criteria, the best I could do is a
D minus, and that is only because, being a magnanimous soul, I have instituted a generous
curve.
To some extent, the great crisis in journalism today is inherent in a system of private
capitalist control over news media combined with advertising providing the majority of
revenues. As these news media markets invariably tended toward becoming concentrated
and noncompetitive, it afforded the owners tremendous political power, and tended to
marginalize the voices and interests of the poor and working class. By the first two
decades of the twentieth century this became a major crisis for American journalism. The
solution to the problem was the emergence of professional journalism. This embodied the
revolutionary idea that the owner and the editor could be separate, and that the politi-
cal views of the owner (and advertisers) would not be reflected in the nature of the
journalism, except on the editorial page. This was a 180-degree shift from the entire
history of American journalism, which was founded on the notion of an explicitly partisan
and highly competitive press that played an integral role in the political process. This
partisan press remained intact through the nineteenth century only to be undermined by
the increasing concentration and profitability of the news media.
Under professionalism, news would be determined and produced by trained pro-
fessionals and the news would be objective, nonpartisan, factually accurate and unbi-
ased. Whether there were 10 newspapers in a community or only one or two would be
mostly irrelevant, because trained journalists*like mathematicians addressing an algebra problem*would all come up with the same news reports. There were no schools of journalism in the United States (or world, for that matter) in 1900. By the 1920s all the
major journalism schools had been established and by 1923 the American Society of
Newspaper Editors was formed and had established a professional code for editors and
reporters to follow.
It is important to understand that there is nothing inevitable or ‘‘natural’’ about the
type of professional journalism that emerged in the United States in the last century.
The professional news values that came to dominate in this country were contested; the
journalists’ union, the Newspaper Guild, in the 1930s unsuccessfully attempted to have a
nonpartisan journalism that was far more critical of all people in power, and viewed itself
as the agent of people outside of power, to ‘‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the
afflicted,’’ as Dunne’s saying goes. It regarded journalism as a third force independent of
both government and big business, and wanted to prohibit publishers from having any
control over the content of the news. As the leading history of the formation of the Guild
reports: ‘‘The idea that the Guild could rebalance the power struggle between public and
publisher through a new kind of stewardship of freedom of the press became a core tenet
of their mission as an organization’’ (Scott, 2009, chap. 7).
This practice of journalism was anathema to most publishers, who wanted no part of
aggressive reporting on their fellow business owners or the politicians they routinely
worked with and relied upon for their businesses to be successful. They also were never
going to sign away their direct control over the newsroom; editors and reporters had their
autonomy strictly at the owner’s discretion. The resulting professionalism was to the
owners’ liking, for the most part, and more conducive to their commercial and political
needs.
The core problem with professional journalism as it crystallized was that it relied far
too heavily upon official sources (i.e., people in power) as the appropriate agenda setters
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? 683
for news and as the ‘‘deciders’’ concerning the range of legitimate debate in our political
culture. There is considerable irony in this development; Walter Lippmann, generally
regarded as the leading advocate of professionalism, argued that the main justification
for professionalism in journalism was that it provide a trained group of independent
nonpartisan reporters who could successfully and rigorously debunk government (and,
implicitly, corporate) spin, not regurgitate it (Lipmann, 2008; Lippman and Merz, 1920).
Another weakness built into professional journalism as it developed in the United
States was that it opened the door to an enormous public-relations industry that was
eager to provide reporters with material on their clients. Press releases and packets came
packaged to meet the requirements of professional journalism, often produced by former
journalists. The point of PR is to get the client’s message in the news so that it looks
legitimate. The best PR is that which is never recognized for what it is. Although reporters
generally understood the dubious nature of PR, and never embraced it, they had to work
with it to get their work done. Publishers tended to love PR because it lowered the costs of
production. The dirty secret of journalism is that a significant percentage of our news
stories, in the 40�50 percent range, even at the most prestigious newspapers in the glory days of the 1970s, were based upon press releases. Even then, a surprising amount of the
time these press releases were only loosely investigated and edited before publication.1
It meant that powerful interests could subtly determine what was covered in the news and
how it was covered.
The high-water mark for professional journalism was the1960s and early 1970s. Since
the late 1970s, commercial pressure has eroded much of the autonomy that professional
journalism afforded journalism, and that had provided the basis for the best work done
over the past 50 years. It has led to a softening of standards such that stories about sex
scandals and celebrities have become more legitimate, because they make commercial
sense: they are inexpensive to cover, attract audiences and give the illusion of controversy
without ever threatening anyone in power.
As editorial staffs shrink, there is less ability for news media to interrogate and
counter the claims in press releases. And powerful interests will be better positioned than
ever to produce self-promotional ‘‘information’’*better described as ‘‘propaganda’’*that can masquerade as ‘‘news.’’ The technology actually makes it easier. A major development
in the past decade has been video news releases, PR-produced news stories that are
often run as if they were legitimate journalism on local TV news broadcasts. The stories
invariably promote the products of the corporation which funds the work surreptitiously
(Farsetta and Price, 2006).
The bottom has come out of the cup of journalism over the past generation, and
has accelerated in the past decade. It is not simply that the quality has deteriorated;
the quantity is in marked decline as well. We are now rapidly approaching a point where
there is nowhere near sufficient journalism for the constitutional system to succeed. In a
nutshell, there is roughly 30 percent less labor and resources going to producing the news
today than there was in 2000, and perhaps half of what there was 25 years ago, on a per
capita basis. The wheels came off corporate journalism in 2007, and subsequently the
number of newspapers and newsrooms has declined sharply. Why do corporations no
longer find journalism a profitable investment? To some extent it is that increasingly
monopolistic news media corporations gutted and trivialized the product for decades and
this ultimately made the ‘‘news’’ irrelevant (O’Shea, 2011). To some extent the crisis
exploded as it did because the Internet destroyed the traditional business model by giving
684 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
advertisers far superior ways to reach their prospective consumers. ‘‘The independent
watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism*going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy,’’ a 2011 Federal Communications Commission
study on the crisis in journalism concluded, ‘‘is at risk’’ (Waldman and the Working Group
on Information Needs of Communities, 2011, p. 5).
A study that encapsulated the crisis was released by the Pew Center for the People
and the Press in 2010. It examined in exhaustive detail the ‘‘media ecology’’ of the city of
Baltimore for one week in 2009.2 The object was to determine how, in this changing media
moment, ‘‘original’’ news stories were being generated, and by whom. They tracked old
media and new, newspapers, radio, television, websites, blogs, even Twitter ‘‘tweets’’ from
the police department. What did they find? The first conclusion from the researchers was
an unsettling one: despite the seeming proliferation of media, the researchers observed
that ‘‘much of the ‘news’ people receive contains no original reporting. Fully eight out of
ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information.’’ And
where did the ‘original’ reporting come from? More than 95 percent of original news
stories were still generated by old media, particularly the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In
other words, a great many of the much-heralded online sites*even some that proudly labeled themselves as ‘‘news’’ operations*simply disseminated what was being produced by traditional old media.
It gets worse: the Sun’s production of original news stories was itself down more
than 30 percent from 10 years ago and down a whopping 73 percent from 20 years ago.
The bottom line is this: old media outlets are downsizing and abandoning journalism and
new media are not even beginning to fill the void.
This has had devastating implications for political journalism. The numbers of
foreign correspondents, foreign bureaus, Washington, DC bureaus and correspondents,
statehouse bureaus and correspondents, right on down to the local city hall, have all been
slashed to the bone, and in some cases the coverage barely exists any longer (Waldman
and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities, 2011, pp. 44�5). In an era of ever-greater corruption the watchdog is no longer on the beat. It was striking that the
biggest political scandals in Washington in the past decade*the ones that brought down Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and Randy ‘‘Duke’’ Cunningham*were all started by a daily newspaper reporter’s investigation. Those paid reporting positions no longer exist, and
those specific reporters no longer draw a paycheck to do such work. This means the next
generation of corrupt politicians will have a much lower degree of difficulty as they fatten
their bank accounts while providing their services to the highest corporate bidder.
Blowing stories of corruption and misconduct, as horrific as they are, may not be the
worst of it. Even more serious is the lack of coverage of the details of what is in legisla-
tion and budgets, what is debated at hearings and buried in official reports, and what
regulatory agencies are doing, even when there is no explicit corruption, but just politics
as usual. This is the stuff of politics; when people talk about wanting a serious issues-based
politics, this is precisely what is meant. But everywhere in the nation most of this
government activity is taking place in the dark, certainly compared to two or three or four
decades ago.
Everywhere it is the same: far fewer journalists attempting to cover more and more.
As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) observes, reporters and editors ‘‘are
spending more time on reactive stories and less on labor-intensive ‘enterprise’ pieces.’’
Television reporters ‘‘who just once reported the news now have many other tasks, and
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? 685
more newscasts to feed, so they have less time to research their stories.’’ It is especially
disastrous at the local level, where smaller news media and newsrooms have been wiped
out in a manner reminiscent to a plague. The Los Angeles Times is now the primary news
medium to cover 88 municipalities and 10 million people, but its metro staff has been cut
in half since 2000. The staff ‘‘is spread thinner and there are fewer people on any given
area,’’ Metro editor David Lauter laments. ‘‘We’re not there every day, or even every week
or every month. Unfortunately, nobody else is either’’ (Waldman and the Working Group
on Information Needs of Communities, 2011, pp. 12, 90, 46, 52).
There may not be much journalism, but there still is plenty of ‘‘news.’’ On the
surface, at least on cable and satellite television, it can seem like we are marinated in
endless news. Increasingly, though, it is unfiltered public relations generated surrepti-
tiously by corporations and governments, in a manner that might make Walter Lippmann,
were he to return to life, never stop throwing up. In 1960 there was less than one PR agent
for every working journalist, a ratio of 0.75-to-1. By 1990 the ratio was just over 2-to-1. In
2012, the ratio stands at four PR people for every working journalist. At the current rates of
change, the ratio may well be 6-to-1 within a few years (McChesney and Nichols, 2011,
preface to paperback edition and Appendix 3). There are far fewer reporters to interrogate
the spin and the press releases, so the likelihood that they get presented as legitimate
‘‘news’’ has become much greater. The Pew Center conducted a comprehensive analysis of
what the sources were for original news stories in Baltimore in 2009; it determined that
fully 86 percent originated with official sources and press releases. These stories were
presented as news based on the labor and judgment of professional journalists, but, as
Pew noted, they generally presented the PR position without any alteration (Pew Research
Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). As Lance Bennett (forthcoming)
demonstrates, PR notwithstanding, this is a fertile environment for conjecture, gossip and
half-baked stories to get into the news.
For a good decade, pundits have argued that the Internet would provide a new
system of commercially viable journalism. Jeff Jarvis asserts that ‘‘Thanks to the web . . .
journalism will not only survive but prosper and grow far beyond its present limitations’’
(2010, p. xx). To the view of observers like Jarvis all Americans must do is let the Internet
work its magic in combination with the market and the country’s problems will be solved.
After a good decade of experimentation, it is clear that as traditional journalism
disintegrates, no models for making Web journalism*even bad journalism*profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible popular news media have been
developed, and there is no reason to expect any in the visible future. 3
Today we have a
few thousand paid online news workers, interpreted liberally to include many aggregators
who do little or no newsgathering or reporting or even writing. More often than not, the
best-known bloggers and online journalists are supported by some old medium which
provides the resources. When these old media go down, the number of paid digital
journalists is likely to shrink, not grow. Severely underpaid or unpaid, research concludes
that the original journalism provided by the Internet gravitates to what is easy and fun,
tending to ‘‘focus on lifestyle topics, such as entertainment, retail, and sports*not on hard news’’ (Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities, 2011,
p. 16).
At the heart of too many of the emerging corporate online journalism undertakings
is an understanding that the wages paid to journalists can be slashed dramatically, while
at the same time workloads are increased to levels not seen for generations, if ever.
686 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times captured this in his assessment of AOL’s 2011
purchase of the Huffington Post: ‘‘To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a
galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.’’ In the ‘‘new-media landscape,’’ he
wrote, ‘‘it’s already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the
tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.’’ With massive
unemployment and dismal prospects, the extreme downward pressure on wages
and working conditions for journalists is the two-ton elephant that just climbed into
democracy’s bed. ‘‘In the new media,’’ Rutten concludes, ‘‘many of the worst abuses of the
old economy’s industrial capitalism*the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child
labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it . . .’’ (Rutten, 2011).
In April 2010, one of the most thoughtful and well-regarded figures in American
journalism, Karen Dunlap, the president of the Poynter Institute, testified before a FCC
panel on the state of American journalism. She pointed to a fresh analysis of the media
business by a Poynter scholar ‘‘who calculated that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6
billion in reporting and editing capacity since 2000 or about 30 percent over that period.
This comes from the sector that produces the vast majority of original reporting in local,
national and international news. Even the many news start-ups replace only a small
fraction of editorial capacity, and they, too, must find long-term sustainability.’’ Then
Dunlap repeated the conclusion of a just finished Project for Excellence in Journalism
report: ‘‘Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is
difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the
potential tools offered by technology.’’4
The evidence points inexorably in one and only one direction: if the United States,
or any nation, is serious about improving journalism, not to mention creating a real media
utopia, the only way this can happen is with massive public subsidies. The market is not
getting it done, and there is no reason to think it is going to get it done. Journalism will
require a huge expansion of the nonprofit news media sector as well. It is imperative
to discontinue the practice of regarding journalism as a ‘‘business’’ and evaluating it by
business criteria (Levy and Nielssen, 2010). Instead, it is necessary to embrace the public
good nature of journalism. That is my core argument. If one accepts that, everything else
falls into place.
Let’s be clear on what is meant by the ‘‘public good’’ nature of journalism: that
means journalism is something society requires but that the market cannot produce in
sufficient quality or quantity. Readers or final news consumers have never provided
sufficient funds to subsidize the popular journalism system self-government requires. For
the first century of American history, the public good nature of journalism was understood
implicitly, and was addressed by massive postal and printing subsidies. For the past
century, the public good nature of journalism was masked by the infusion of advertising
to provide the vast majority of revenues supporting the news. But advertising had no
specific attachment to journalism, and is jumping ship as better alternatives present
themselves in the digital universe, especially as news media appear less commercially
attractive. Journalism increasingly is left standing naked in an unforgiving market, and it
is shriveling in the cold gusts.
The future of journalism left to the market will likely approach what education
would be like if all public subsidies were removed. With no subsidies, our education
system would remain excellent for the wealthy who could afford private schools in the first
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? 687
place, mediocre at best for the middle and upper-middle class, and non-existent or
positively frightening for the increasingly impoverished lower-middle and working class,
the vast majority of the nation. It would be a nightmare for any credible democratic or
humane society, and a major step back toward the Middle Ages. The same logic applies to
journalism. That means, in the landscape of 2010s America, enlightened public subsidies.
Understanding ‘‘journalism as a public good’’ also helps explain one of the persistent
questions I am asked when I discuss the crisis of journalism. ‘‘Isn’t the basic problem,’’ the
question generally begins, ‘‘that most people are morons who either have no interest in
journalism, or are only interested in idiotic stories about celebrities? If people wanted
good journalism, isn’t it logical to expect the commercial news media to give it to them?’’
On the surface this seems like such a convincing premise, that it is generally posed as a
rhetorical question, to which all who have any hope left for the human species are
expected to retreat in shame. Public good theory explains that no matter how strong the
consumer demand, it will never be sufficient to provide the resources for a popular
democratic journalism. Even when Americans have been most rabid about news and
politics, there was not sufficient demand for circulation revenues to subsidize a popular
news media.
But public good theory is important in another way: it also highlights that it is
impossible for the market to accurately gauge popular support for the news. The market
cannot express all of our values; we cannot individually ‘‘purchase’’ everything we value.
My experience discussing the crisis of journalism with tens of thousands of people over
the past several years has reinforced my view that a preponderance of Americans, and
especially younger Americans notorious for their lack of interest in newspapers and
conventional news media, want to have credible reporting on corporate and government
affairs, even if they do not necessarily plan to read or view the news reports thereby
produced. But they want to know that the work is being done and people in power are
being held accountable, issues are being covered, and they are willing use their tax dollars
to pay for journalism even if they themselves prefer to watch a reality TV show or listen to
their iPods.
And, who knows, to return rhetorical question fire, maybe if there were better and
more compelling journalism, people might not find it so irrelevant to their lives?
The questions that often arise when one submits news media should be regarded as
a public good, and should receive massive public subsidies, are ‘‘But, wait, doesn’t that
violate the American constitution and the American Way? Isn’t the American free press
tradition*indeed, the democratic press tradition*built on an explicit and unequivocal ban on government subsidies? What are you, some kind of weirdo?’’
The jury may be out on the last question, but to the first two the answer is an
emphatic No. The emergence of advertising to provide the preponderance of resources
masked the public good nature of journalism. It gave the illusion that the market could
provide a sufficient quantity of journalism, and professional standards could guarantee
sufficient quality. But advertising always had an opportunistic relationship to the news,
and now that there are superior means to satisfy commercial ambitions, journalism sees its
revenue base evaporating. But if advertising has provided the majority of revenues to
support journalism since the late nineteenth century, how did US newspapers survive in
the nation’s first century when advertising played a much smaller role? Indeed, when
Tocqueville came to America he was astonished by the plethora of newspapers compared
to anywhere else in the world. What’s up with that?
688 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
The answer is simple: the American free press tradition has two components. First is
the aspect everyone is familiar with, the idea that the government should not exercise
prior restraint and censor the press. The second, every bit as important, is that it is the first
duty of the government to see that a free press actually exists so there is something of
value that cannot be censored. This second component of the American free press
tradition has been largely forgotten or ignored since the advent of the corporate-
commercial era of journalism, but the Supreme Court, in all relevant cases, has asserted its
existence and preeminence. Justice Potter Stewart noted: ‘‘The Free Press guarantee is,
in effect, a structural part of the Constitution’’ (Stewart, 1974�5, original emphasis). ‘‘The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was,’’ he added, ‘‘to create
a fourth institution outside the Government as an additional check on the three official
branches.’’ Stewart concluded: ‘‘Perhaps our liberties might survive without an indepen-
dent established press. But the Founders doubted it, and, in the year 1974, I think we
can all be thankful for their doubts’’ (Stewart, 1974�5). In his opinion in the 1994 case Turner Broadcasting System v. FCC, Reagan appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded,
‘‘Assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental
purpose of the highest order’’ (Simon, 2002, p. 273).
Press subsidies are as American as apple pie; indeed, our democratic culture
was built upon them. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, John Nichols and
I demonstrated the crucial role that postal and printing subsidies played in the formation
of the republic and the first century of American history: ‘‘If the United States federal
government subsidized journalism today at the same level of GDP that it did in the 1840s,
the government would have to spend in the neighborhood of $30�35 billion annually’’ (McChesney and Nichols, 2011, p. xxvii).
Federal press subsidies*e.g. postal subsidies, paid government notices*have diminished in real terms to only a small fraction of their nineteenth-century levels in real
terms, though they remain to the present day. Public broadcasting is the most visible
contemporary media subsidy and it received in 2008 approximately $1.1 billion in public
support annually, and only a fraction of that supports journalism. State and local govern-
ments as well as public universities provide much of this public subsidy, as well as some
$400 million by the federal government.
There are legitimate concerns about government control over the content of
journalism, and I reject any subsidies that would open the door to that outcome. I also
understand that a government with a massive military and national security complex
like the United States could be especially dangerous with its mitts on the keys to the
newsroom. But the United States, for all of its flaws, remains a democratic society, in
the conventional modern use of the term. Our state is capable of being pushed to make
progressive moves as well as regressive ones.
The problem with the categorical rejection of public subsidies in the United States
is that it not only ignores the actual history of massive democratic journalism subsidies in
the United States, it also does grave injustice to the really existing track record of other
democratic nations. What happens when we look at nations with multi-party demo-
cracies, advanced economies, electoral systems and civil liberties? Places like Germany,
Canada, Japan, Britain, Norway, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Belgium,
Sweden, France and Switzerland?
What do we find? For starters, all these nations are huge press subsidizers compared
to the United States. Let’s put it this way, what would the United States have to spend to
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? 689
support public broadcasting, not to mention other journalism subsidies, if it spent at the
per capita rates of other democratic nations? If America subsidized public media at the
same per capita rate as nations with similar political economies like Canada, Australia and
New Zealand, US public broadcasters would have a government subsidy in the $7�10 billion range. If America subsidized public media at the same per capita rate as nations
along the lines of Japan, France or Great Britain, US public broadcasters would have a
government subsidy in the $16�25 billion range. If America subsidized public media at the same per capita rate as Germany or Norway or Denmark, US public broadcasters would
have a government subsidy in the neighborhood of $30�35 billion (Benson and Powers, 2011, p. 61).
This does not even factor in the extensive newspaper subsidies that several
democracies employ. If the United States federal government subsidized newspapers at
the same per capita rate as Norway, it would make a direct outlay of approximately $3
billion annually. Sweden spends slightly less per capita, and has extended the subsidies
to digital newspapers. France is the champion at newspaper subsidies. If a federal gov-
ernment subsidy provided the portion of the overall revenues of the US newspaper
industry that France does for its publishers, it would have conservatively spent $6 billion
in 2008.5
By American conventional wisdom, all these purported democracies must be much
closer to police states with Orwellian propaganda the order of the day. But are they? I start
with Britain’s The Economist, a business magazine keenly in favor of private enterprise,
deregulation, privatization and disinclined toward large public sectors. Every year The
Economist produces a highly acclaimed ‘‘Democracy Index,’’ which ranks all the nations of
the world on the basis of how democratic they are. In 2011 only 25 nations qualified as
democratic (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2011). The criteria are: electoral process and
pluralism; functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil
liberties. The United States ranks 19th by these criteria, according to The Economist. Most
of the 18 nations ranking ahead of the United States had government press subsidies on a
per capita basis at least 10 or 20 times that of the United States. The top four nations on
the list*Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden*are among the top six or seven per capita press subsidizers in the world. Yet these are the four most democratic and freest
nations on earth, according to The Economist, and they all have perfect or near-perfect
scores on civil liberties. (The United States is tied for the lowest civil liberties score among
the 25 democracies, and on this issue trails a good 20 of those nations in the more
dubious ‘‘flawed democracies’’ category in The Economist’s rankings.)
Although all of the Democracy Index criteria implicitly depend to a large extent
upon having a strong press system*and the report specifically discusses press freedom as a crucial indicator of democracy*‘‘freedom of the press’’ itself is not one of the six measured variables. Is there a more direct take on the relationship?
Fortunately, there is, if the Democracy Index is supplemented with the research of
Freedom House, an American organization created in the 1940s to sponsor freedom
and oppose totalitarianism of the left and right, with special emphasis on the left. Free-
dom House is very much an ‘‘establishment’’ organization, with close ties to prominent
American political and economic figures. Every year it, too, ranks all the nations of the
world on the basis of how free and effective their press systems are. Their research is
detailed and sophisticated and particularly concerned with any government meddling
whatsoever with private news media. For that reason, all communist nations tend to rank
690 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
in a virtual tie for dead last as having the least free press systems in the world. Venezuela
currently is ranked number 163 in the world, despite having a large and vocal legal
opposition press that opposes the elected Chavez government. State regulation of
commercial broadcast media as well as the chilling effect of government criticism of the
uncensored private print media are enough for Freedom House to consign Venezuela
to the same group of nations largely consisting of outright dictatorships with scarcely a
trace of significant domestic media dissent; Venezuela is the only nation in the Americas
alongside Cuba considered to have a ‘‘not free’’ press. So Freedom House can go toe-
to-toe with anyone when it comes to having sensitive antennae to detect government
meddling with the existence or prerogatives of private news media.
Freedom House hardly favors the home team. It ranks the United States as being
tied with the Czech Republic as having the 24th freest press system in the world. America
is ranked so low because of failures to protect sources and because economic conditions
have made journalism more difficult.
So what nations rank at the top of Freedom House’s list of the freest press systems
in the world? The list is dominated by the democratic nations with the very largest per
capita journalism subsidies in the world. Four of the first five nations listed by Freedom
House are the same nations that topped The Economist’s Democracy Index, and all rank
among the top seven per capita press subsidizers in the world (Freedom House, 2010). In
fact the lists match to a remarkable extent. That should be no surprise, as one would
expect the nations with the freest and best press systems to rank as the most democratic
nations. What has been missing from the narrative is that the nations with the freest press
systems are also the nations that make the greatest public investment in journalism, and
therefore provide the basis for being strong democracies.
What the Freedom House research underscores is that few of these successful
democracies permit the type of political meddling that is routine in US public broad-
casting, particularly by those politicians who want to eliminate public broadcasting, with
no sense of irony, because it has been ‘‘politicized.’’ Although no nation is perfect and
even the best examples have limitations, these nations consistently and overwhelmingly
demonstrate that there are means to effectively prevent governments-in-power from
having undue influence over public media operations, much like how in the United States
we have created mechanisms to prevent Governors and state legislatures from dictating
the faculty research and course syllabi at public universities. In other democratic nations,
public broadcasting systems tend to be popular and are defended by political parties from
across the political spectrum.
Research demonstrates that in those democratic nations with well-funded and
prominent nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting systems, political knowledge tends
to be relatively higher than in nations without substantial public broadcasting, and that
the information gap between the rich and the working class and poor is much smaller
(Curran et al., 2009).
Stephen Cushion’s recent research confirms this pattern and notes that public
service broadcasters tend to do far more campaign reporting than their commercial
counterparts. One conclusion of Cushion’s is especially striking: those nations that have
maintained strong public broadcasting continue to have better campaign coverage
(e.g. news about policy that can help inform citizens about the relative merits of a political
party or a particular politician). Moreover, the effect of strong public broadcasting is
that commercial broadcasters tend to maintain higher standards than they have in
FAREWELL TO JOURNALISM? 691
nations where public broadcasting has fallen off in resources and campaign coverage
(Cushion, forthcoming).
Likewise, in a manner that evokes the US postal subsidies of the nineteenth
century*and that might baffle the contemporary American cynical about the possibility of democratic governance*the newspaper subsidies tend to be directed to helping the smaller and more dissident newspapers, without ideological bias, over the large successful
commercial newspapers (Cushion, forthcoming). Recent research on the European press
concludes that as journalism subsidies increased, the overall reporting in those nations did
not kowtow but in fact grew more adversarial toward the government in power (Benson,
2011, pp. 314�9). The point is not to romanticize other democratic nations or to put them on a
pedestal. Journalism is in varying degrees of crisis in nations worldwide. In other countries,
resources for journalism are declining as in the United States, even if the public subsidies
provide a cushion. Moreover, the quality of journalism is hardly guaranteed even with
greater resources; controversy and occasional sharp criticism of severe flaws properly
attends any discussion of the caliber of journalism in every democratic nation (see Blumler
and Coleman, 2010; Davies, 2008). Resources are simply a necessary precondition for
sufficient democratic journalism.
To put it another way: journalism subsidies are compatible with a democratic
society, a flourishing uncensored private news media and an adversarial journalism. The
track record is clear that the problem of creating a viable free press system in a democratic
and free society is a solvable problem. There may not be perfect solutions but there are
good and workable solutions. And in times like these, when the market is collapsing,
and when self-government is imperiled, they are mandatory. In this instance, Margaret
Thatcher’s aphorism holds true: this is no alternative.
NOTES
1. See Smith (2004, p. 191), Solomon (1992, p. 66) and Trevor Morris and Simon
Goldsworthy (2008). See also http://www.nku.edu/ �turney/prclass/readings/media_rel.
html.
2. All quotations and statistics mentioned are from Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism (2010).
3. For a treatment of the scorched-earth approach of a newspaper publisher who is
regarded as a visionary in the move from print to digital, see Carr (2011, pp. B1, B6). For a
treatment of the handful of the most successful new digital newsrooms at the local level,
which depend overwhelmingly on donations and foundation grants, see The Knight
Foundation (2011).
4. These remarks were prepared for testimony offered on April 20, 2010 at the FCC
workshop, ‘‘Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Impact on Competition and Diversity
in the Media Marketplace’’ (Dunlap, 2010).
5. See Rodney Benson and Matthew Powers (2011, pp. 49�53, 34). The French government provides roughly 13 percent of the revenues of the French newspaper industry. The total
revenues of US newspaper industry in 2008 were approximately $48 billion. See the data
of the Newspaper Association of America (http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers.aspx).
Our estimate does not include the emergency three-year $950 million subsidy the
French government made to address the crisis facing French newspapers. On a per
692 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
capita basis that would be like the US government making a three-year $5 billion
additional subsidy.
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694 ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY
