Amid Internets Mainstream Media Implosion: Should Government Fund News?!?

Caveat . . .

Kansas City is now dominated by "public" broadcasters who mostly earn their funding by corporate sponsorships, large private donors and "viewers like you." However, a small but still significant portion of their funding is subsidized by the government.

Here's a bit of naval gazing that we enjoyed and our readers might consider for context . . .

By far the greatest damage to the news ecosystem over the past 20 years has been at the local level. Nearly all of the 2,900 newspapers that have closed or merged since 2005 have been small weeklies, according to researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This has left broad swaths of the country lacking professional reporting of any kind. The death rate among daily papers has been less extreme, if only because many continue to exist in greatly diminished form. One example: Denver’s two primary dailies, the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, employed more than 600 journalists before the Rocky went under in 2009. Ever since, the Post has been peeled like an onion by its owner, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Today, its newsroom directory lists just 59 journalists, who are tasked with covering a region that is home to nearly 3 million people.

“As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked,” observed PEN America in a 2019 white paper. “With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Not all citizens, though. A weakened local press corps is a gift to someone like George Santos, whose serial fabrications went mostly (if not entirely) unreported during his campaign for Congress.

Accordingly . . . Government handouts & more regulation is the answer proposed by more than a few progressives: 

"Some have called for direct and muscular government intervention. Policy proposals include tax credits for publications that hire reporters and for advertisers that place ads in those publications, as well as increased government spending on public-service ads. A potentially more powerful mechanism: a law compelling Google and Facebook to compensate publishers for the news content the tech companies display on their platforms. Publishers around the world have lined up in support of a law enacted in Australia in 2021 known as the News Media Bargaining Code. The law creates a framework for publishers to negotiate payments from tech giants."

The downside . . .

THERE'S A WORD FOR GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF NEWS . . . PROPAGANDA!!!

And it's even easier for people to ignore. 

Meanwhile, the biz of profiting from eyeballs remains tough in a world that's easily distracted and readers who would much rather know explore personal connections than consider current events, public policy and the implications for the world outside of their own personal experience.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

The Atlantic: Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?