What Role Will Government Play?
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Lawmakers are increasingly stepping up to address the crisis in the journalism business. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter in March 2009 to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the Justice Department to consider an antitrust exemption to help newspapers survive. The public benefit of saving newspapers might outweigh historical concerns about anti-competitive behavior. In Connecticut, among other places, lawmakers are also intervening to keep newspapers alive. Pelosi’s letter prompted a House Judiciary Committee hearing the following month about problems in the newspaper industry.
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen. “There is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems,” said Sascha Meinrath, Research Director for the New America Foundation, during a speech at eComm in March 2009.
In a February 2009 white paper, Public Media 2.0, the Center for Social Media, called for the government to play a major role in the new public media landscape by encouraging policy and funding to support new platforms, standards and practices. In the white paper, Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide of American University also called for government to fund content production. Bruce Ackerman, Ian Ayres and David Sasaki have also suggested a national endowment or foundation to support journalism similar to the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Science Foundation. Such a government role is common abroad. The British tax television sets to support the BBC, although that is now a small portion of their global budget. In January 2009, France’s state TV stopped running advertising in hopes to run more like the BBC. Similarly, Spain’s prime minister reduced ad time by 25% on state-owned RTVE and increased state subsidy from 5 to 50%.
While government could fund content production, there are questions about whether this is the most appropriate means of supporting media. For one, old government funding models might not fit the emerging online environment for producers and consumers. As Tracy Van Slyke, director of The Media Consortium, pointed out in an article for the Guardian, such models rely on an institution-based model of investigative journalism, but the online ecosystem is now much more distributed across individuals and organizations. Furthermore, since one of the pillars of independent media is to be a watchdog for government, will it be willing to bite the hand that feeds it?
People perpetually debate the appropriate balance between private and public sectors’ roles, but it has especially heated up related to the media industry. “The reason why you need private industry and government in these spaces is because private industry helps push the envelope and government helps prevent the worst excesses of private industry,” Meinrath explained in his eComm speech. He said that we are currently witnessing a failure of government to play a sufficient role in protecting the public’s access to media.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by erinpolgreen: If gov’t officials had the will, they cld support #media beyond loosening anti-trust regulations http://bit.ly/7NQZAC #bigthaw #futureofnews…