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| Home Front: Politix |
| Are You Ready to Subsidize Reporters? |
| 2009-10-27 |
| Have you ever stumbled on an oxymoron so stunning that it takes your breath away? Try coupling this with a case of chutzpah so revealing that the lack of shame on the part of those involved serves as prima fasci evidence that their elite cultural isolation has rendered them incapable of critical thinking. Behold the "Independent Journalism Tax." In order to preserve independent journalism in the age of the Internet, a national Fund for Local News should be created with money the FCC now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers. This is the key recommendation buried on page 91 of a 100 page report issued last week titled "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie, Jr. Vice President of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. Lamenting the demise of the "hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the twentieth century," these guardians of journalistic integrity recommend that your tax dollars be distributed to their brethren by "Local News Fund Council boards comprised of journalists, educators, and I take it the Weekly Standard is not included ... Juxtapose this learned study with some recent poll data collected by the Pew Research Center. Only 29 percent of 1,506 adults surveyed said news organizations generally get the facts straight. The facts! Sixty percent said the press is biased, up from 45 percent in 1985. Just 26 percent said that news organizations are careful their reporting is not politically biased. The market appears to be speaking about how it views "advocacy journalism" as practiced by the likes of the money-losing Washington Post, reduced to bragging that its decline in circulation may finally be starting to slow. Kept alive by its profitable Kaplan division, one can only marvel at what sort of independence Leonard Downie would expect to maintain living on the dole. Reporters would have lots of company, of course, joining the ranks of bankers, car manufacturers, ethanol producers, and climate scientists who rely on the public weal for their daily bread. But independence? When was the last time you heard taxpayer-subsidized NPR bite the hand that feeds it? The amazing thing about Downie & Schudson's study is that the vast majority of the pages are actually devoted to describing the amazing ferment being generated by new news-gathering organizations empowered by the low barriers to entry afforded by the Web. These are supported by a bewildering array of new business models, all interacting in a dance of discovery and renewal that the authors seem to mistake for the last days of Pompeii. What clearly irks them is the lack of professional training and credentials that they believe are required to turn college kids who aren't sharp enough to study medicine, law, finance, or engineering into paeans of virtue imbued with an ethos of Olympian detachment and moral rectitude. Gimme a break. Have you ever read a newspaper article about an event you personally attended wondering which other planet the reporter actually visited that day? Have you ever been interviewed by a journalist with a major newspaper who had any subject matter expertise on the material he was covering? Were you fooled for one minute that he hadn't already written his story and wasn't just looking for sound bites that would fit his preconceived notions? Did you notice how lazy he was about tracking down a diversity of independent sources and how easily he could be guided into a self-referring circle of cronies? And these are the professionals? At least when you read a blog you know what axe the author is grinding. Who needs an editor with a 29% success rate to check the facts when you know that ten more bloggers are poised to pounce? And thanks to the Internet we can all get our own hands on the same source material the reporter is reading and decide for ourselves. Case in point is the Downie & Schudson study. Go read the mainstream press reports on it then Google up the original document. The contrast is illuminating. In the current era of single party rule, is there any chance that this further intrusion of the government into our lives might actually come true? Might we one day be forced to pay a tax every time we make a cell phone call to make sure the Press Room in the White House is stuffed with even more reporters eager to credulously swallow whatever nonsense comes out of the President's mouth? Could truly independent newspapers be forced to compete with government subsidized lapdogs like, say, truly independent banks or car companies? |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #12 Whynot nationalize them and make the bulk of them White House Press Secretaries. You mean they aren't already? |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2009-10-27 13:06 |
| #11 Lim (BSEE) = Journalism GPA->0 |
| Posted by: mojo 2009-10-27 11:39 |
| #10 Were you fooled for one minute that he hadn't already written his story and wasn't just looking for sound bites that would fit his preconceived notions? In my civilian career, I manage the electric and natural gas contracts for my place of employ. About a month after I started, Enron went bankrupt. I did a little number-crunching and quickly realized that the contract was unfavorable to us, so under the provisions of the agreement, we terminated the contract. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune called me, wanting a tale of anguish and woe about how Enron tanking had utterly ruined us. I replied that their demise had actually saved us a cool $300K. You could hear the disappointment in the reporter's voice. |
| Posted by: Dreadnought 2009-10-27 10:24 |
| #9 Because the BBC isn't biased... |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2009-10-27 09:55 |
| #8 Why not nationalize them and make the bulk of them White House Press Secretaries. Cuts out the middle man that way. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2009-10-27 08:47 |
| #7 college kids who aren't sharp enough to study medicine, law, finance, or engineering into paeans of virtue Ah, but you stopped the list of majors far too soon! You should have included things like recreation, womyn's studies, and even education on that list. Ok, maybe education is pushing it... |
| Posted by: Cornsilk Blondie 2009-10-27 08:26 |
| #6 Dear Mr. Downie, What is rent-seeking? Sincerely, Mr. E. Larson |
| Posted by: eLarson 2009-10-27 08:07 |
| #5 To a one way ticket to Antarctica. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-10-27 03:32 |
| #4 Have journalists considered formally switching to prostitution? Most did that years ago. |
| Posted by: gorb 2009-10-27 01:54 |
| #3 Not possible - even whores have a little honor and dignity. And there are some things a whore won't do - unlike Journalists. Particularly Journalist trained at the Columbia School of Journalism. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2009-10-27 00:51 |
| #2 Have journalists considered formally switching to prostitution? It's a cleaner, more honorable line of work and they won't have shut their eyes nearly as much to what's going on in front of (or behind) them. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-10-27 00:39 |
| #1 Get a job, ya bum. |
| Posted by: mojo 2009-10-27 00:25 |