A public good: Can government really save the press?

Abstract

Amid concerns of ‘market failure’ in the U.S. commercial news industry, this paper explores more than a decade’s worth of scholarly arguments that government intervention and investment is the best solution to what many deem a crisis in American journalism. Through the lenses of First Amendment theory and political economy, the analysis examines a range of ideas and proposals that, in many ways, began with Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism in 2010 and continue up through Victor Pickard’s Democracy Without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society in 2020. The paper concludes that, while a ‘positive’ interpretation of the First Amendment would seem to demand such intervention, the window of opportunity has closed due to a range of political and economic forces that have either developed or become further entrenched over the past decade. To that end, it calls on journalists and journalism scholars to work to shift the discourse of journalism, to characterise it as an essential, nonpartisan public good – one no different than education. It argues that such a shift, along with enough evidence of further market failure, could someday help inspire the necessary political and economic will to help rescue the floundering news industry on a wider scale.