The Columbia Journalism School has just put out a report calling for more government help to resuscitate local reporting, and, with near perfect timing, the Obama administration has been showing why this is a terrible idea.
More than a little unhappy at a major news organization failing to regard its initiatives as divine intervention in the affairs of humankind, top spokesmen - including President Barack Obama himself - have taken steps to intimidate and marginalize Fox News.
At the same time, this administration, like previous ones, is trying its best to coax favorable coverage from other news outlets. But there is something the government now lacks on any broad scale, and that's the control of purse strings that almost invariably translates into control of a whole lot more.
The federal government, for instance, gives local schools billions in financing and then makes demands. We don't want to do all that, states and school boards respond. Fine, says the government, then you lose the money.
In other areas, such as the arts, government intervention through grants is a matter of saying yes or no to applications, but the possibilities of abuse are many, such as rewarding grants to projects hard to conceptualize as art at all and even socially debilitating while projects of merit get no grants and less attention.
Even if it is assumed the opposite was true -- that the criticized projects were actually magnificent -- how can it be argued that the politicians attacking them did not have a right to try to redirect the money to projects some might consider trite and stupid. After all, you can maintain these critics in high office have low taste, but you cannot deny they have responsibility for how taxpayer funds are dispersed.
The authors of the report, Leonard Downie Jr., former editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a Columbia professor, do not call for outright subsidies to all the nation's newspapers, but their remedies for ever fewer newspaper reporters doing ever less in-depth local reporting do include possibilities for political influence that reaches far beyond what we now have.
They want the Federal Communications Commission to extract fees from such sources as the Internet to fund grants for "innovative" local reporting, which is to say, there could be a significant government role in projects examining government and taking on all kinds of social issues, opening new possibilities for official manipulation no matter what mechanisms are in place. The two also want more public financing for public TV and radio to provide a great deal more local news.
There's more -- not all bad -- but the substance is that the government should spend money it does not have in places it does not belong and in ways that further enable it to twist news stories to its liking. Seeing little reason to worry, Downie and Schudson cite the BBC in Britain as an example of how a government-financed news outlet feels free to criticize government. Maybe so, but the BBC has a definite ideological attitude helping to determine what those criticisms are, and if I were a British taxpayer, I would not want to underwrite what is said.
Because National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System are so small a portion of the media whole, there's no large danger in them. But suppose more and more news is publicly funded and that some of it begins to irk the powers that be. You could easily have a decision to drop the support or finance other grants as a means of counteracting something as offensive to these officials as Fox News is to the Obama administration. And if you think public officials would not dare go so far, look at how some Democrats have been openly talking about exerting more control over radio through the Federal Communications Commission because of their dislike of some of the conservative commentary.
I hate the decline of newspapers, but here's my guess: Innovators are going to come up with answers to news deficits without government help.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
COLUMN
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