United Liberty

Steve Coll at the New Yorker argues that there is an irreplaceable good that is provided by newspaper journalism, and that that good is mostly an accident of history:

What’s just a little worrying, however, about all this recent discourse about business models—micropayments verses Web display advertising futures, and so on—is that it risks misconstruing what is most important in the destruction taking place during the revolution Shirky describes. There is no danger in this revolution to the prospect of big, innovative, American-based businesses trafficking in widely disseminated, highly profitable media and information—just ask Google, Yahoo, Bloomberg and many others about that. The threat, instead, is to the values and practice of independent, professional journalism, as we have known it since the nineteen-sixties or so. This journalism is, admittedly, a kind of accident of history. The big, confident, foreign-reporting, government- and corporation-investigating newsrooms of the period between 1960 and 2005—and the skills and standards they developed and disseminated—resulted from the confluence of quasi-monopolistic business models, the elevation of the scientific method in American society during the post-war period, and the cultures of professionalism that grew up simultaneously in the social sciences and practical professions (not just journalism, but law, accounting, economics, etc.). Professional journalism as we know it—independent investigations on behalf of the public; impartial witnessing of terrible events at home and abroad; independent foreign correspondence designed for American audiences and to address American interests; reporting on powerful institutions without fear or favor, and with a sense of fairness; the clarification of complexity—all of this is as much an accident of history as the symphonic music and opera patronized by the great European courts of the late eighteenth century.

This journalism and these journalists—not alternative ways to make a dollar from news and information—are what should concentrate our minds. What is the critical and irreplaceable public good that they perform, exactly? Is there one? (I think so, but not everybody does, so let’s argue about it.) If there is a public interest in journalism, it surely does not involve foreign correspondence and crossword puzzles equally. So what is in (foreign correspondence, investigative reporting) and what is out (business news, sports news) of our consensus definition? If this public good is threatened with extinction, what are the ways to combat that? These are the questions that belong to journalists and those who care about journalism; the rest is for venture capitalists.

This was also the topic of Dan Carlin’s latest Common Sense podcast. Carlin articulated that the corporate media are really the only ones in American society with the means to pursue and investigate subjects on the behalf of the public. As outside of the box as the perspectives unleashed by the new media are, we don’t have alot of revenue. United Liberty doesn’t have a correspondent in Beirut.

If that’s something that’s important enough to us to save from being lost, would we want to follow the BBC model? Would we want our newspapers to become another lever to be pulled by politicians? Would a subsidized news industry become so inclosed that it would no longer be able to respond to the demands of the public?