Rep. Waxman Advocates Media Bailout
By K. Daniel Glover | December 2, 2009
Rep. Henry Waxman trekked from Capitol Hill to Federal Trade Commission headquarters today to deliver a message to journalists and news consumers: All of you need to reach a consensus about working with the government in order to bail out the struggling news industry.
The California Democrat, who chairs the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, didn’t say it quite so bluntly, but his point was clear. “Government’s going to have to be involved, in one way or the other,” to save journalism from an ongoing “market failure” that will only worsen without intervention, Waxman said.
He spoke at the second day of an FTC workshop on how journalism can survive in the Internet era.
Waxman bemoaned the demise of newspapers across the country, including in Denver and Seattle, and warned that the troubling media trends will continue. “This recent depression in the media sector is not cyclical,” Waxman said. “It is structural.”
“Congress can’t impose a solution” to that structural problem, he said. But the government should partner with the media industry to ensure a sound future for journalism. Waxman praised the record of “independent” reporting in U.S. history and said it has implications for democracy.
“There needs to be a consensus within the media industry and the larger community it serves” before the government acts, Waxman said. “We have to figure out together how to preserve that kind of reporting.”
The morning session also featured media policy activists, public broadcasters and proponents of nonprofit journalism making the case for government funding of the media.
“Congress should adopt legislation that would provide substantial additional resources” to fund public-service media, said Mark MacCarthy, a communications professor in the culture and technology program at Georgetown University. He said Waxman “gave us the path to legislative success in that area.”
Several speakers likened government intervention in the media market to past instances of federal funding for publicly valuable services, such as public safety, education and libraries.
“As a civil society, we don’t trust the open market or the free market” to provide such valuable services, said Jon McTaggart, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of American Media Group, and neither should the media be allowed to suffer because of market forces.
MacCarthy also said government involvement in the arts, sciences and other fields is “traditional, mainstream and all-American. … This is not some weird, strange aberration and alien intrusion into our life. This is the way we do things in this country.”
Members of the audience raised concerns about how journalists could serve as independent and reliable government watchdogs if the government funds their work, but the panelists dismissed those concerns. Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of National Public Radio, cited her own organization’s history of criticizing the government even though it is federally subsidized.
“No news organization worth its salt is going to accept money with conditions attached,” she said. “… If anything the opposite problem is true: ‘Oh, they’re funding us. Let’s look more deeply into them.’”
Josh Silver, the executive director of Free Press, acknowledged that there are liabilities to government-subsidized journalism but said the country has no choice but to move in that direction in order to halt “significant erosion of the Fourth Estate.”
Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, called the idea that government has never been involved in media a “mythology. “It’s a bogus argument that just keeps us from doing the right thing,” he said.
Newton said the key is to maintain a “firewall” between that involvement and the production of content, just like the longstanding wall between advertising and editorial in commercial media.
The tone of today’s discussion stood in marked contrast to Tuesday’s speeches and panel discussions at the workshop. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other speakers said the government should stay out of the news business despite the industry’s ongoing woes.
“The prospect of the U.S. government getting involved in American journalism ought to be chilling for anyone interested in public speech,” Murdoch said. Instead, he urged the government to be less involved by abandoning the cross-ownership rule that prevents one company from owning newspapers and broadcast outlets within the same markets.
Jeff Jarvis, an analyst of emerging media who is no fan of Murdoch, agreed that government intervention is a bad idea. He admonished the FTC to stay off the media lawn or risk quashing the new media sprouts of grass that are growing on it.
UPDATE: Mark Tapscott, the editorial-page editor at the Washington Examiner, is outraged that many of his journalistic colleagues are determined to chase a “pot of government gold.”
“Firewalls can work in private businesses when management insists that they be respected,” Tapscott wrote, “but it’s different when government is involved because nobody can say no to power-happy federal bureaucrats armed with regulatory authority or litigious Justice Department attorneys packing subpoenas and make it stick.“
10 comments
I should have added government roads and bridges. Ever drive through the streets of D.C?
Does anyone else feel this would be counter-productive to free speech????
Separation of Church and State…. important
Separation of Media and State…… extremly important!
Who are they trying to kid? NPR and PBS are both so unabashedly leftwing (and all to often openly anti-American) that they function at the least as the unofficial voice of the left wing of the Democratic party! [Supporting leftist Bill Moyers while rejecting the Wall Street Journal, e.g. I love Charlie Rose, and watch him regularly, certainly enough to know that his favorite pastime is Bush-Bashing!] Give me a break!
I don’t believe what I’m reading! Well, wait a minute…….yes I do too.
Slowly, little by little………business by business…….sigh
(Garand69 voices my opinion on Media and State)
For some reason I’m reminded of Kim-Yong-nam and his daily warm fuzzy headlines in the Korean News Service.
>>“As a civil society, we don’t trust the open market or the free market” to provide such valuable services [such as public safety, education and libraries], said Jon McTaggart, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of American Media Group, and neither should the media be allowed to suffer because of market forces.
Translation: We don’t trust the American people to buy liberal newspapers (which are failing badly to do anything but propagandize, while MORE information is available on the Internet, eg, right HERE; neither the big (failing) newspapers nor network television has had much, if anything, to say about Climate-gate, in which the biggest hoax in history is being debunked..and this is just a flea on the tip of the iceberg), so we expect the taxpayers to subsidize newspapers that they don’t/won’t buy or read because they prefer the truth. Sounds fair to me…NOT!
The Drudge Report beats the big city liberal rags hands down on a daily basis. Does HE require a bailout? Or is he making money because people WILLINGLY (not taxed into doing so) check out his site to see what’s new?
Valuable services?
Just for the record: Our schools are broken, they have fallen and can’t get back up; education spending is an utter waste of taxpayer dollars. Schools simply keep SOME of the hoodlums off the street during the day. (This, BTW, is the “public safety” aspect!) When caught off school grounds, the little miscreants are offered the choice of jail or school. (Why got to school at all? “Dat where duh pu$$y at,” is a direct quote. If you are offended by the truth, be offended. Stick your head in a “used” toilet, for that matter. Neither would bother me.)
High school “graduates” are entering college… unable to read or do math at the 6th grade level. Teaching is difficult (and teachers can’t even pass their own tests!), but not too bad if you’re willing to propagandize our children (as opposed to teaching).
My children are grown and gone, but got educated because we live out in the country, where farmers take it seriously when their children SHAME them on a daily basis at school! Guess what happens?
Taking field trips, showing videos/movies/etc, and indoctrinating students with government (communist) propaganda is EVER so much easier!
Public safety? How many times have YOU seen the video of that black guy who was selling US flags to participants in the Tea Party…when several big, fat thugs came along, pulled him out of his seat, then beat him, kicked him (including his head), and called him a n——-? They were charged with Disturbing the Peace, a slap on the wrist for felonies (hate crimes and hate speech will send non-SEIU thugs to prison, where these vicious tubs of feces belong). There is talk of their being prosecuting on more appropriate charges and possibly sent up the river for a few years. Who knows? Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.
Would any sane person bet, say, $20, that McTaggart is NOT a communist? I might bet $20 that he IS. On the risk/reward ratio, however, he isn’t WORTH $20.
Next prevaricating liberal excrement:
>>Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of National Public Radio, cited her own organization’s history of criticizing the government even though it is federally subsidized.
>>“No news organization worth its salt is going to accept money with conditions attached,” she said. “… If anything the opposite problem is true: ‘Oh, they’re funding us. Let’s look more deeply into them.’”
Sell me a bridge, lying [expletive deleted, but it’s highly offensive to women]! What a crock!
If the swill above was not reported here at AIM, I would think that the reporter was on LSD. While I don’t know that Ms Shriller (oops! is that misspelled? let me dry my tears) is qualified to to comment on criticizing the government…since Bush left office.
I used to work a job where the boss had NPR on all the time. The “news” was a wet paper bag, and I would come in the next day and tell co-workers what the truth was. (Not knowing what’s going on in the world is something of a national avocation. That’s why we have a communist president.) NPR has a tenuous grasp of this concept (reporting the news), and I resent the money that “public” (liberal) radio and TV suck up, while providing NOTHING OF VALUE in return.
If they were worth reading or listening to, they could get ADVERTISERS! What part of “If I like it and can afford it, I’ll buy it; if not, I won’t” don’t these petty dictators understand?
I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL NOVEMBER 2010! Of course, I’ll have a private ballot, but you can’t guess how I’ll vote, now can you?
BTW, separation of Church and State is neither important nor in the Constitution. Freedom of religious expression is BOTH, however.
From here it looks like traditional print (news) media are in decline for three reasons. 1)In the present economy, ad dollars are slim. 2) The Internet is a compelling and more attractive alternative for news and information – particularly for younger generations; and 3) big city papers are geared toward a “liberal” inner-city audience when the bulk of the news consuming public is playing right-center field out in the burbs.
One might continue to subscribe to a paper with an editorial page listing to port, but when leftist opinion seeps into what and how hard news is covered, sooner or later you’re going to look elsewhere.
The same thing is happening in television. Channels with an obvious left bias are losing share to channels not tilted toward San Francisco Bay. So what’s next – subsidize CNBC?
Schools simply keep SOME of the hoodlums off the street during the day.When caught off school grounds, the little miscreants are offered the choice of jail or school. My children are grown and gone, but got educated because we live out in the country, where farmers take it seriously when their children SHAME them on a daily basis at school!
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December 3 at 10:19 am | #1 | Link
Federal funding is only a band-aid fix. Ultimately it causes more problems than it solves.
How do you like government mail delivery? Government (“public”) education. Government agriculture programs? Government retirement (Social Security)programs?
Nevertheless, some people never learn.