The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. Philadelphia, PA: Nation Books, 2010. 334 pp.
This book offers a well-documented argument for why federal subsidies of mass media are needed. Robert McChesney, the Gutgsell endowed professor of communication at the University of Illinois, has written extensively about the state of the media. He is joined in this book by John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of the Capitol Times in Madison, WI.They begin with the history of press freedom in the United States, quoting from early proponents of free expression. Thomas Paine, they note, said that the manners of a nation “can be better ascertained by the character of its press than from any other public circumstance.” They quote James Madison as saying that, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it… is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” And they include Thomas Jefferson’s famous preference for newspapers without government to the opposite.
The authors also take the position that the First Amendment does not mean that the government cannot subsidize media, but simply that it cannot censor or control media. They point out that there always has been government subsidy of newspapers through favorable postal rates, and subsidization of broadcasting through the free granting of exclusive radio and television frequencies that are worth thousands if not millions of dollars.
McChesney and Nichols believe media subsidies are necessary at this time because of the extreme economic difficulties facing all news media. They point to the decline in circulation and advertising revenue for newspapers and the decline in television audiences. (Indeed, an August study finds that TV network viewers are aging twice as fast as the general population, making networks much less attractive to advertisers.) They also document the loss of jobs in the news media.
While acknowledging that the Internet and the recession are partly responsible for these trends, they believe the problem predates the current economic downturn. The problem began two decades ago, they say, when ownerships began to emphasize profits at the expense of service. Providing much higher salaries for CEOs and high dividends to stockholders became the main goals, and layoffs of news personnel followed. CEO salaries, which were twenty-three times those of reporters and editors in 1970, are now 230 times those of rank-and-file newsroom staff.
The authors make the case for government subsidy of journalism well, but they do not address the related issue of declining credibility of newspaper and television news. Is there reason to believe that federal subsidies will help this? Isn’t it possible that changes are needed in the news product and how we define news to create more public confidence and interest in the news media?
The authors also overlook two major developments that may represent models for press survival. One is the online New York Times, which reaches 21 million people daily—40% of the total daily circulation of U.S. print newspapers. What will the impact of this trend, if it spreads to other traditional and new news outlets, be on other metropolitan dailies?
The other development is the move of the Christian Science Monitor to cease its daily print product, replacing it last year with an online news Web site teamed with a weekly print publication. That idea is a brilliant solution to the distribution problem of a paper with national circulation, but it also may be an answer for papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Constitution with regional circulation that covers hundreds of miles.
The Death and Life of American Journalism focuses on big-city newspapers, yet surveys show that readership of small-city newspapers is greater than that of their metro brethren. Smaller newspapers offer local coverage not usually available on the Internet except through their own online editions. Their economic future, therefore, is arguably not the same as that of big-city newspapers.
The authors work out a reasonable system for operating a federal subsidy of the news media. They begin with the proposition that “the corporate, advertising-supported, profit-driven model for journalism is no longer viable,” an argument consistent with their previous work, individually and together, regarding the damage that the global “corporatization” of media companies has done to free expression and media diversity. In their 2004 book, Tragedy & Farce, McChesney and Nichols focus on “how the American media sell wars, spin elections, and destroy democracy,” and in Our Media, Not Theirs (2002), they focus on “the democratic struggle against corporate media.” McChesney is a founder and principal in media watchdog organizations Media Matters and Free Press.
One of their new subsidy suggestions is a substantial postal rate reduction for publications with less than 25% advertising. They then propose a journalism division of AmeriCorps to place young journalists in nonprofit news organizations to get training and improve local coverage. The federal government also should facilitate the conversion of failing newspapers from corporate ownership into a new ownership arrangement, they argue, suggesting three options—501c nonprofit, L5C Low Profit Limited Liability, and employee or community cooperative ownership.
They also propose to expand public broadcasting, which has long been underappeciated and underfunded in this country. They point out that the United States spends less than 2% of what Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Japan spend on their public media.
This is a well-documented book. Appendices expand on the founding principles of this country, the work of Eisen-hower and MacArthur in creating free and independent presses in Germany and Japan, and statistics on media economics.
Not everyone will agree with either the authors’ premises or their conclusions, but existence of an economic crisis in our media is undisputable. This book is an important starting point for a necessary dialogue.
GUIDO H. STEMPEL III
Ohio University