The news business

Should the profit motive dominate journalism? While I think that people overascribe the role of profits in determining what gets published, there's certainly some truth to that--just read through a women's magazine and ask yourself why not one of the products they review is ever described in less than glowing terms. Most big media publications are surprisingly sanguine about losing major advertisers thanks to nasty coverage--one of my favorite reporters at The Economist seemed to average one giant company a year, more or less. But if no self-respecting major media editor would spike a story to keep business, they do have to pay attention to which coverage areas get advertising support; hence, the New York Times Style Section.

In the comments section to another post, beloved commenter Brooksfoe suggests that maybe we need public financing:

The other troubling implication of Megan's line of argument is that she's saying it is inevitable that journalism driven by the profit motive and funded by advertising will be vapid.

This is essentially an argument for massive public funding of broadcast journalism, or aggressive regulation. If it is left to advertising-funded, for-profit broadcasters to determine the shape of the political debate, that debate will be stupid and misinformed. Hence we need publicly funded, not-for-profit broadcasters to be at least as wealthy and powerful as the for-profit ones. As I recall, CNN's and FOXNews's budgets are well over $1 billion a year each.

Alternatively, one could return to old-fashioned regulation requiring broadcasters to broadcast at least 1 hour of nightly news, and a return to the Fairness Doctrine. This would be confusing to implement, obviously, in the era of 1000-channel cable broadcasting.

We do have public funding of news coverage: PBS and NPR, though they are increasingly reliant on private donors. Perhaps America should have a public broadcaster like the BBC--but that public broadcaster costs every household in Britain over $200 a year.

But that wouldn't change the basic calculus of television news provision unless you actually started heavily regulating the news. I don't see any way to do that. The FCC was empowered to regulate what went on the air because the television companies were licensed to use slices of a publicly owned commodity in scarce supply, the airwaves. I don't see any constitutional way for it to interfere in the provision of private television service to this kind of extent, particularly since the McCain-Feingold cases. If you can't prevent third parties from airing campaign ads, I don't see how you can prevent private companies from airing whatever the hell they want. But I'm no constitutional expert, so I'd love to hear lawyers weigh in.

Even if it could be done, legally, however, I don't think it should be done. I have a very visceral reaction to any suggestion that the government should get into the business of telling us what information we need. It is possible that this would fix some of the problems with news provision (although it's also possible that it would simply boost sales of Wiis and Blu-Ray players. But the cost would be tremendous. The general experience of government regulation of media content is dreadful; it is simply too easy for the government to decide that content it doesn't like is content we don't need. Would we really be better off with a "Fairness Doctrine" which allowed Bush-appointed regulators to declare that every criticism of the president had to be counterbalanced by someone articulating the administration's side of things?