Journalism’s Short-Term Rescue

Books and articles detailing the collapse of American journalism are many. Books coming up with original and concrete proposals for fixing it are few.

University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney and journalist John Nichols have just such a new book that details plans they believe could revitalize American journalism and free it from the censorship — yes, censorship — of free-market economics.

The Death and Life of American Journalism is just out from Nation Books and includes what many will deem a radical proposal for saving journalism: The federal, state and local governments should pay for quality journalism.

It’s the kind of proposal that makes the hair rise on the backs of many, including most journalists. But McChesney and Nichols insist that the same public interest that requires that governments fund educational systems and highways should also compel the use of tax dolalrs to support quality journalism — which is, after all, the life blood of democracy.

It’s a compelling argument that should and most likely will spur considerable debate in the years to come. Plenty of folks will find plenty with which to quibble in the book.

For their part, McChesney and Nichols argue that funding systems could be created that would assure the editorial independence that journalists need to do their work. And, they add, such a system would be much more robust than the current market system that “censors” unmarketable information.

But here’s some short-term proposals for pulling journalism out of its funk. In an age when it’s clear that market-based approaches to journalism are failing to provide the financial support necessary to main the kind of quality system that democracy needs, McChesney and Nichols suggest:

• Slashing postal costs to as little as 5 cents per copy for small-circulation journals at an estimated cost of $200 million annually.
• Creating a “News AmeriCorps” that would initially hire up to 2,500 new journalism graduates to staff weeklies and small dailies in struggling American communities. It would cost $90 million annually and be similar to the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s that employed such literary greats as Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow.
• “Dramatic” expansion of high-school journalism and media programs that would give millions of young people a taste of what journalistic work is like. Most great journalists got their first experiences when they were in high school and had the chance to tell the stories of their schools (five of the students on my high school paper eventually went into professional journalism), but these programs have been slashed in recent years and teachers are often inexperienced in journalism or too timid to advise newspapers that seriously report school news.

These are simply short-term fixes that don’t address the longer-range challenges facing the industry. But they serve as an example of the specificity of McChesney’s and Nichols’ work here.