This weekend, President Obama did something deeply self-interested, though it may not appear that way. When speaking to reporters from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, the president raised an issue that few media analysts expected, suggesting he would support a financial bailout package for print newspapers.
On the surface, Obama appears to be speaking imprudently. Given the recent news of imminent collapse at the New York and LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and almost any institution that puts ink to newsprint, a bailout would have to be another substantial contribution to the already enormous American deficit. And one can imagine fiscal conservatives already weary of paying for public infrastructure projects and health care loathing to give any money to the “liberal media elites.”
However, Obama’s comments on the topic reveal his own political self-interest in the matter: “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context,” worried the president, “what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.” In other words, he was shielding himself.
More than any leader in history, Obama has faced the consequences of the digital echo chamber. Blogs have been ground zero for disinformation about the black, progressive president. In a lot of ways, the rebound of institutional journalism would be a great boon to the Obama presidency.
More to the point, is a newspaper bailout really the best way forward for reviving the health of journalism? If Obama’s predictions—that Internet reporting is fundamentally flawed, and that blogs will never achieve the rigour of established media institutions—hold true, then perhaps. But more importantly, a single bailout would not address the structural issues facing newspapers today. Given the changes in technology, it’s unlikely newspapers will revert to the old modes of readership again, meaning one bailout couldn’t turn the tide. Unless the government wants to be in a position of funding print journalism indefinitely, it has to address the greater structural issues at play.
As with any problem of national importance, there’s no shortage of bad ideas on how to solve it. The forthcoming lawsuit against Google News being mulled by the Associated Press—aiming to prove that Google has been using their content illegally—would be a thoroughly counterproductive measure that only stands to make the traditional media even more irrelevant. So too would be the idea of developing an anti-trust exemption that would let news organizations get together to fix the prices of articles online, which would result in the end of free web content. Putting the digital locks back on will only drive more readers to the hyper-partisan sites already offering their wares for free.
Given the revolutionary change in how citizens consume news, only a genuinely revolutionary business model will suffice. For example, little has been said about Senator Benjamin Cardin’s suggestion of allowing large print dailies to operate under a non-profit model. This would remove the profit imperative that have driven recent cuts and would not require newspapers to embrace a technologically digressive attitude. While critics of this plan dismiss the possibility of a newspaper funded by the public as being beholden its donors, this is likely a preferable option to being beholden to corporate advertising and shareholders as the news media is today. Whether or not this solution could be workable is up for debate, but given the circumstances, we have to try something.
