We already fund the executive, judicial, and legislative branches through taxpayer funds. Why not fund the fourth estate as well?
In this diary, I propose a way to make the news media independently funded by giving each adult citizen an account with funds from the federal treasury that they can allocate amongst the news sources they feel provide the best coverage.
This approach is an attempt to combine the best of public sector and private sector approaches in the service of democracy.
More below the fold...
This diary was originally posted as a
couple comments and someone suggested promoting it to a diary; I have done so and extended it.
There has been some discussion lately about what qualifies
as news media or who qualifies as a journalist. Do bloggers qualify? I think some certainly should and would qualify even better if they had a budget that allowed them to better pursue news sources directly. Do news organizations owned by corporations that have outside financial interests and who receive more money from advertisers than subscribers? I think not in that form
but I think the organizations and the people who work for them would qualify if they were beholden to their readers and not their corporate owners/advertisers.
Part of the problem is that Americans won't spend much money directly on news. In part, this is because many people don't have the money. In other cases, it is because
people lack the civic responsibility to do so. In other cases, it is because our economy and government has gotten so far out of wack that the news is depressing. And in other cases it is because the news media has lost our
trust through bias and ineptitude. And in other cases
it is because we lack the time because we now have to work
so hard. Often, more than one of these reasons apply.
News organizations have limited budgets that don't leave room for serious investigative journalism.
Maybe we need to
set aside $150 for every adult citizen in the country
in an account that they can divide among the not-for-profit news organizations (or blogger) of their choice for content.
No corporate ownership, sponsorship, or advertising. No religious affilliation or proselization allowed. I.E. the 700 club is entertainment, not news. Seperation of church and state applies.
No funding for horiscopes, astrology, psychic predictions, etc. as protection against the 900 number con artists. Corporate newsletters and union newsletters alike don't qualify.
Spending on sports and entertainment news limited to 10% of total per news organization so they don't compete on fluff.
And it should be set up so it is very hard for political parties to cut the budget. That would not be
tax and spend, either; it would be tax and save.
Broadcast, Cable, and satellite TV systems would be required to carry some number of channels of not-for-profit news funded by tax payers (In some cases, different news organizations would share a channel), in part to keep media companies from blocking access if they don't like the coverage.
We lose a lot more than the $15 billion a year or so the program would cost because the public doesn't know what is going on. We have spent ten times that amount on Iraq, so far. This in addition to a few billion for public campaign financing. $15 billion could fund around 100,000 full time journalists with travel expenses, web service, etc. By comparison, CNN has 4000 employees.
$150 is equivalent to a subscription for The Economist or the New York Times or cable news for every household. Granted, only a portion of the paper's money comes from subscription. Many years ago, Byte magazine said that subscription money paid for paper and mailing costs (half of which was for pages carrying ads) and advertising revenue paid for content.
Perhaps a portion should go to
funding paper delivery for those without online access. Or perhaps advertisements would fund paper delivery but the advertisers would have no control over which papers the advertisements appeared in. Advertisers might be able to choke off paper delivery of news entirely by collectively not advertising in papers but that would be about the extent of their control and in doing so they would choke off their own voice, too.
Or perhaps we spend the money we would otherwise spend on local delivery in providing universal access to cheap ($100) PDAs. This would provide much more choice in news sources than a few local/national papers and better access for the handicapped and non-english speakers and the PDAs would have other uses. And it makes the process of allocation easier.
All content funded through this mechanism would be required to be browser, hardware, and OS independent and standards based and usable without
any scripting, handicapped accessable, etc.
Content would be availible to all online and achived. Instead of subscribing, you would
reward news sources by your donations from your pool but everyone has the same number of dollar votes. People could choose to use software that records attaboys and awshits when reading/watching news to allocate their funds and fine tune their RSS feeds.
Total advertising revenue (not just for news) for national papers is $44 billion?, broadcast TV $41 billion, cable TV $19 billion, radio $19 billion). Unspecified local advertising is about $92 billion. Total internet advertising is under $6 billion. All told $245 billion, but that includes direct mail, sitcoms, soap operas, sports, etc. and not just news. Put another way, every household in the US indirectly pays about $2450 a year on advertising. Hopefully, people wouldn't put all their money into partisan "news" but at least if they did there would be some balance.
News organizations shouldn't be beholden to business or government interests, though they should certainly consider legitimate interests.
Business interests still have indirect influence via their employees, customers, shareholders, etc.
But it is one person, one vote instead of one (discretionary) dollar, one vote.
I should also point out that under this system, an industry would probably suffer from having the news biased against it on average if, and only if, that industry has more victims than beneficiaries. The health care industry, for example, has lots of doctors, nurses, clerks, insurance industry employees, pharmacuetical employees, medical equipment manufacturer employees, patients whose lives were saved, patients who were treated well, etc. who may favor news sources that provide favorable coverage. It also has all the people who are overcharged for medical services, who don't have access to health care, who received bad care, and disgruntled employees who will favor sources that provide unfavorable coverage. Ultimately, if the health care industry is doing a good job it should get good coverage and if it is doing a bad job it will get bad coverage. An industry that receives bad coverage overall probably only has itself to blame and has no reason to exist in its present form. People working in the industry might vote to fund positive coverage but would be well advised to read negative coverage as well as positive, giving them the opportunity to correct problems within the industry before the weight of public opinion imposes changes from without.
Most industries in their present form would be likely to get negative coverage but under good management would get neutral or even positive coverage. This is because they been paying attention to executives and shareholder's short term interests while ignoring shareholders long term interests, customer's interests, employee's interest's, the interests of the public affected by things like pollution, etc. Any industry should be able to get more people who support it than people who oppose it; otherwise, why does it exist in the first place? Monopolies, for example, tend to plant the seeds of their own destruction but many people get hurt before those seeds mature. An efficient market of news could actually help companies. Yeah, if one person gets hurt a thousand people may hear about it (that might not via a news media beholden to corporations) and that may temporarily hurt the company but on the other hand the company will be more inclined to fix the problem; in the absence of a free news media, the company lets the problem continue until instead of a thousand people who heard of someone who was hurt they have a thousand people who were directly hurt or all of sudden when the problem gets too big for the media to ignore a million people hear about someone who was hurt in a spectactularly bad way or that a large number of people were hurt. Would firestone have had to recall 6 years worth of tires made after they knew there were problems or would they have fixed the problem earlier saving hundreds of lives or better yet avoided it altogether by learning from their first huge recall?
I don't expect average coverage to be anti-business in the long term. While some on the left are anti-business, I think most progressives aren't really anti-business just anti-corrupt-business. We the people need jobs and goods and services and in many cases legitimate business is the most efficient way to provide them. It isn't in our
interests to select news sources that are biased against legitimate business interests. I want to see articles about the bad things business do but I also want to see articles about the good things they do, including steps in the right direction.
And the corruption actually hurts legitmate businesses. It is so bad that even businesses
with good intentions find they are forced into corrupt practices. In the short term, corruption may help a business but at the same time it hurts other businesses
and even hurts the corrupt business in the long term.
Communism and Capitalization in their extreme forms are both unworkable. A real economy needs to take the best of both worlds. The current economy is a
Tragedy of the Commons
. By removing the market inefficiency in our current
news system, we can help restore efficiency to the marketplace.
This system I am proposing is itself a hybrid.
It uses public funding but free market principles in allocating that funding.
I would like to hear comments from people who know better than I what the budgets of the existing news media are. How much money is raised from subscribers, how much from advertisers or sponsors, and how much are they subsidized by their parent organizations. How much of the money goes to content creation and how much to distribution.
Another topic for discussion is what the criterion should be to be eligible for funding under this program. We want the money to go to news rather than degenerate into a form of soft money for political campaigns and sham think tanks.
We don't want the government to have much control over who
qualifies, though. If we leave it to people who vote with their allocated news dollars, will that be sufficient?
Dare we allow such organizations to receive funding from
any other sources even private donations from individuals
(the problem here is that wealth in this country is currently distributed in the hands of the few). My thinking is that organizations should not have corporate ownership or funding and that private donations, if allowed at all, should be limited to a small dollar amount per person. Print media could accept subscription fees that
only covered the actual cost of print distribution - no profit. Freelance journalists/bloggers would be allowed
to have a day job or own a business but would not be allowed to be paid for the time they spent blogging. Even small
contributions from peoples own personal finances, even if limited in dollar amount have the opportunity to create
disparity - many people do not have a disposable income.
My guess is that if the funding comes from the citizen allocated pool of money, what we will end up with is a mixture of neutral media, left wing, right wing, and
a variety of other perspectives. With current party alignments (prior to recent scandals), if people voted by ideology you might get 30 percent right wing, 20 percent left wing, and 50 percent moderate or neutral but
with a wider range of opinions that just left/right - I am just using that axis as one perspective.
I think that would be an improvement over the current system.
If people voted half for "neutral" sources and half for
their ideology, you would get 15 percent right wing, 10 percent left wing, and 75% that passed for neutral. That would be pretty good and similar to the notion of a newspaper carrying neutral content and separate opinion
content.
Exactly to whom should we allocate the accounts? Taxpayers? Registered voters? All adult US citizens?
Post-pubescent Minors? Should we give each business one vote subject to the criteria that there must be more employees (including owners) than businesses so a millionaire can't spend a million dollars to create 2000 sham businesses to get 2000 accounts. Legal Immigrants? Convicted felons? Felons can't vote in elections but many felons wouldn't be felons if they weren't disenfranchised in the first place.
The commenter who suggested promoting this to a diary observed that commercials/advertisements were part of
the culture and they enjoyed some commercials. In some cases, considerable art (beyond the art of con-artistry
or marketing) does go into commercials. Other times,
ads can be very annoying. This system would
not eliminate commercials or ads, just those on news.
Commercials would still be allowed on entertainment.
Even on news, advertisements might be allowed (to pay, for example, for print distribution) but advertisers would
have no say in what publication the ad appeared to prevent editorial influence. People would have to actually subscribe to newspapers (no fee if distribution costs covered by ads) otherwise you would have "papers" that
depleted the advertising pool by delivering papers with
no content or biased content to people who don't want them
(under the current system, free papers at least have to
convince the advertisers that readers would actually be
interested in the content). Think of a system like google ads where advertisers buy content without knowing where it will appear. An advertiser could specify a geographic
constraint (for local ads) or a subject matter area but
not a bias on that subject matter. A company could specify a subject matter of health care, for example, but not whether the coverage was favorable or against. Some mechanism should be in place to prevent completely
defunding world news, politics, etc. for example, the
targeting information could be more advisory than
mandatory.
The system should not allow keyword
specifications so specific that they allow bayesian spam filter like techniques could be used to differentiate between ideology or require coverage to include certain elements.
I mentioned Byte (a computer magazine) earlier with its 50% ad content. Because this was a targeted publication
and the ads were targetted to the readership, the ads themselves could be of interest. Some level of targeting is benificial to both readers and advertisers. The trick is to allow legitimate targetting while preventing targetting that is designed to influence content or the
availibility of content. If we allow ads on TV news at all, a company could choose to advertise on tv news, but it can't specify which news program or which station. A local company could specify a narrow geographic area but not which station in that area.
A national or multi-national company could specify a larger geographic region such as a state but
not a particular station or a geographic area that would narrow down to a particular station.
This system would passively provide a little bit of protectionism. News would largely reflect the interests of
the American public. If a company decides to outsource
jobs to another country, it will lose some of its influence over news coverage. Under the current system, foreign governments or corporations can buy US news media
or influence editorial content by purchasing (or refusing to purchase) ads. They can still purchase ads on entertainment. Many people want to know what is going on in the world so they will support world news.
My proposal mostly focuses on funding content.
More thought needs to be given to funding expensive distribution mechanisms such as print newspapers, print magazines, and broadcast radio/television that reach people who don't have computers. News programs would be legally separated from the networks or stations that currently produce them. Some mechanism is needed to let the public,
not the media companies that own the stations, decide which news program gets airtime and in which timeslots. TV stations are granted spectrum allocations, a public resource, and owe the public in return so it is reasonable
to put some requirements on them for news. We might choose to compensate them from the citizen controlled accounts or
from revenue from advertising on news that is neither controlled by the station nor the advertisers for the delivery of the news programs. These outdated delivery mechanisms don't provide as much flexibility as internet
based delivery mechanisms. One option is to give
people the choice of paper delivery (one daily paper, or a number of weekly/monthly news magazines/newsletters) or universal access to basic computing/network functionality (A cheap PDA with modem or wireless or a set top box).
This proposal doesn't address the issue of corporations influencing culture by manipulating entertainment content through advertising. Entertainment content influences social attitudes. Anyone who has studied the history of the inclusion and depiction of racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women on TV is familiar with the pernicious influence of advertisers. However, programs have emerged that provided positive depictions and many are quite popular , in part because they filled a vacuum, and because of their popularity, they seem to get advertising. However, TV mostly follows rather than leads social progress.
How would existing news organizations fare under this system? Well, first they would be separated from their
parent companies and advertisers. A transition plan would be needed to minimize cashflow disturbances. Organizations like CNN and the New York Times would probably fare pretty well. Probably a lot better than they are doing now as their readers/viewers desert them for deriliction of duty. And ultimately, their budgets would probably go up as this proposal is about increasing funding for news. Their share of the pie would go down but the pie would be bigger. And they have the advantage of having a large enough staff that people can specialize and be in remote locations.
And the journalists would have more freedom.
Popular News blogs would gain funding allowing them to
function better. Some bloggers could retire from their
day jobs or at least earn a little money on the side.
Here on Kos, the tip jar might become real.
Unfortunately, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Rielly would probably receive funding but so would Air America, DemTV, and the debunking Rush sites, etc. Rush and O'Reily don't deserve funding, not so much because of their ideology as because of they pay fast and loose with the facts. But I don't see an easy way to qualify news organizations based on accuracy, ideology, etc. without giving the government too much control over who is and isn't a legitimate news organization. Fox news, notorious for presenting heavily biased coverage under the claim of "fair and balanced" reporting, would get funded but the primary cause of the bias would be removed. There would be inertia from acquired bad habbits, past hiring practices,
and conservative management but it would probably drift towards neutral.
A separate fund would provide for campaign finance reform.