State-run media
Get ready for it. American state-run media as a ‘necessary public good’. Sure, because the buffoons who have run journalism into the ground also need to be rewarded with a stimulus program to keep their jobs and their liberal institutions afloat.
Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.
Because the free market has failed? What– failed to reward blatant liberal bias? Failed to reward shoddy reporting and a failure to check facts? Failed to keep afloat journalists who skew their stories so routinely that the new objectiveness is in fact liberalism. The reason for these failures is that journalism = liberalism. There is no objectivity.
…We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.
So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let’s eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.
What to do about newspapers? Let’s give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial “news hole,” say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper–this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms–and for us citizens–to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well. ~thenation.com
Couple this with the fairness doctrine and what do you have? State-run and approved media.