A Free Press

 A recent essay by an NPR editor, accusing public radio of a liberal political slant, has generated another round of predictable backlash from Republicans. In reality, NPR is no more liberal now than it's ever been, and nothing it is accused of doing in the essay departs from what all the other major players in journalism were doing in the same era. But every few years, it would seem, conservatives need to have a renewed outbreak of partisan furor about this—"your tax payments are going to fund liberal news!"

The truth, of course, is that public subsidies make up a tiny fraction of the funds that actually keep public media afloat. Their real business model relies on donations. But this hasn't stopped Republicans from making hay out of the image of complacent left-wing journalists fattening on the public purse. Nor does it prevent them from inferring a conscious or unconscious political bias from their business model. Because they receive public funds, the argument goes, they will inevitably support "big government." 

This is the same argument in reverse that left-wing media critics have made against the "capitalist press" from its inception: they will inevitably be biased toward the right, this argument runs, because the newspapers are run by "big business." And while the nonprofit business model that depends on fundraising has largely slipped under the radar so far, one can easily imagine a similar critique being lobbed against it in turn: "They are beholden to the whims of their major donors!"

What all of these critiques ignore, as Walter Lippmann pointed out all the way back in 1922, in his book Public Opinion, is that the money to support journalism has to come from somewhere. All human activity must have an economic basis, at some level of remove. The simplest thing for journalists, he notes, would be if the people who consumed their products and services would simply pay them for them directly—the way we do a doctor or a lawyer. But, he writes, this has never been the case with journalism. 

We are accustomed today to think of this as a problem with the internet. The usual narrative goes: everybody used to have a subscription to their local as well as several national papers; thus, they were willing to pay for the news they consumed. Then, the internet came along, and people strangely developed this sense of entitlement toward the news. Because some news was free online, people started to expect all news to be free online. And the economic basis of journalism has been dying off ever since. 

What Lippmann's 1922 polemic reveals, however, is that the internet merely accelerated a problem that has always been endemic to the press. Even in their heyday, after all, subscription fees never actually met the costs of printing. The really money for the press always came from advertising. And this, writes Lippmann, is still a price ultimately borne by the consumer—but it is one exacted from them invisibly, by incrementally higher prices of consumer goods, charged to offset the companies' ad budgets. 

Long before everyone was lamenting the demand for free news on the internet, Lippmann was already pointing out that people feel entitled to high-quality reportage without expecting to pay for it. He observes that the ethical standards expected of journalists are as high as those we demand of the church or of medicine; and yet no one thinks to compensate reporters for their efforts. We place the burden of upholding our democratic system of government on a free press, but don't actually want to fund it. 

Yet, the comparison with the church and medicine is actually apt, perhaps, for explaining why people have this attitude. Because, pace Lippmann, we don't actually expect to pay for church either. We think the religious community on the town green will be open to all comers. A pay-to-enter fee on Sunday morning would cause consternation and outrage. Church is supposed to be free. And, to the extent we admit that even a church needs funding, we expect these organizations to survive through voluntary donations. 

Likewise with medicine. Maybe our society has grown somewhat accustomed over time—by sheer necessity—to the notion that someone needs to pay exorbitant fees to the doctor. But that doesn't mean we like it, or accept it as natural. Most of us still think that health care should simply be available at no cost to anyone who needs it, because we think of it as a public good. And indeed, emergency rooms in practice have always retained their policy of serving anyone who shows up; the costs are simply displaced. 

Since this is how people actually view the news, then—as a public service—perhaps we should fund it the same way we do other public services. We should grant some limited public subsidies, and supplement these with fundraising from private donors. And indeed, a growing number of news organizations are starting to adopt this nonprofit model. I just got a donation request this morning from an online news outlet reminding me, Lippmann-style, that "If people don't pay for it, journalism will die." 

And then I remember: oh right, there is one very prominent example of a new organization that has already been operating on this nonprofit fundraising model for years: NPR! And it has worked out surprisingly well. Maybe it hasn't wholly liberated the outlet from the curse of subjectivity or capacity for error; because it can't cure human nature. But before we start calling for the public funds to be revoked for this reason, we should at least acknowledge that all other funding models will create their own biases. 

The alternative to the nonprofit "public service" donor model or to public subsidies is to rely solely on the profit-making model. And this requires serving up a product so immediately gratifying that people will shell out cash for it above the cost it takes to produce it. To create news that meets people on this level, in turn, usually requires—as Lippmann points out—telling them what they already think they know; appealing to their mental "stereotypes" and familiar images of the world—in short, becoming shlock. 

The NPR funding model, flawed as it is, at least does not allow for this outcome. It is the generosity of individual donors, who feel they are funding a public good, as well as the very limited subsidies available from the government, that have allowed NPR to go on being boring all these years. And boring news is often the most virtuous news. The alternative is to go back to having all journalism supported on the model of Edgar Lee Masters's character "Editor Whedon"—in short, a yellow press.