And there aren’t great reasons to think that government support would make it better.
“Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded,” says an article in Scientific American by journalism professor Patrick Walters.
A public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. That means one person’s consuming the good doesn’t leave any less of it for other people to consume, and it isn’t feasible to prevent people from using the good for free. The classic example is missile defense. If my house is defended from missiles, it doesn’t mean my neighbor’s house is less defended, and there’s no way to only defend specific houses from missiles based on whether they’ve paid for it. So, it makes sense for the government to tax people and use the money to provide missile defense to everyone.
Walters oscillates between that proper definition of a public good and the looser, informal definition, which is any good the government pays for. He mentions that “roads, bridges and schools” are “worthy of taxpayer support.” Neither roads, bridges, nor schools are public goods under the economic definition of the term. It’s easy to exclude free-riders from roads and bridges with tolling, and plenty of private schools exist. The government has made a prudential decision to use tax revenue to pay for those goods, but that doesn’t transform them into public goods.
The government also uses taxpayer money to purchase guns for the military and trucks for the postal service. That doesn’t make guns or trucks public goods. In fact, you could find some government agency somewhere that purchases just about any good you can think of. Think of how much the government spends on pens and paper, or toilets and toilet paper.
It’s important to be picky about the definition of a public good because the conclusion of designating something as such is that the government should provide it. Define it too loosely and it becomes an invitation for government to do just about anything.
Which leads us to Walters’s support for government-backed journalism. Journalism is not a public good. Certainly in the old days of newspapers, it was rivalrous and excludable. Now with online news, it’s less rivalrous — one person’s clicking on an article doesn’t mean someone else can’t click on it — but it’s definitely still excludable through paywalls and subscriptions. That makes online news a club good (and you should join the club by subscribing to NR Plus today!).
Club goods can easily be provided privately, and online news is, in fact, easily provided privately. But Walters doesn’t like the online news that is provided privately, so he tries to transform his personal distaste into an economic problem.
Journalism may not be a public good, strictly speaking, but we should all think of it as one, Walters essentially says. He writes:
Quality information cannot be seen as an optional luxury for the well-off. We need to see it as a critical need, like schools, roads, bridges, clean water and emergency personnel. Seen this way, the argument for publicly funded journalism changes dramatically.
The argument does change dramatically, just not in the way Walters thinks. Once you start arguing that news articles are as important as clean water and emergency personnel, I’m inclined to take your argument less seriously.
Walters’s very first paragraph is absurd. He begins:
“News deserts” have proliferated across the U.S. Half of the nation’s more than 3,140 counties now have only one newspaper—and nearly 200 of them have no paper at all. Of the publications that survive, researchers have found many are “ghosts” of their former selves.
Because of the internet, human beings have never before had more access to news and real-time information than they do right now, yet Walters is complaining about the proliferation of “news deserts.” That’s only true if you define “news” as “local newspapers,” which seems unnecessarily limiting. People watch TV, listen to the radio, and read news online. In fact, plenty of people in counties with local newspapers get news from those sources and don’t buy the paper. At an earlier time in American history, many counties had two newspapers: one for Republicans and one for Democrats, and they basically took turns slandering each other. Was that a better time than today for “quality information”?
In the next paragraph, Walters measures the health of the journalism industry by the employment prospects of journalists. He notes layoffs at CNN, National Geographic, and the Los Angeles Times, and the overall decline in local-news employment. Layoffs at specific firms aren’t necessarily a sign of anything other than that those firms aren’t performing well relative to their competitors. And the decline in local-news employment is a consequence of fewer people subscribing to print newspapers. It doesn’t take as many people to run a digital publication (where employment is growing, according to the Pew study that Walters links to), so we should expect total employment to decline as people consume more digital news and less print news.
Walters tries to make this problem for journalists’ employment prospects into a societal problem, in much the same way that any special-interest group tries to disguise its desire for government favors into concern for the public. The comparison between journalism and clean water is no less absurd than sugar lobbyists’ conviction that sugar protectionism is vital to national security.
“Journalism is in what economists call a state of ‘market failure,'” Walters writes, which it is not, but this is another classic phrase that is used by those calling for government intervention. Even if we were to grant that there is a market failure in journalism, it does not logically follow that government involvement would make things better.
Walters’s ideas of how government could make things better:
This support could come through tax credits that people could use to support news outlets of their choosing. News organizations could be granted tax-exempt status like churches or public schools. Designated tax revenue (for example, from levies on electronics and tech platforms and companies or from “spectrum auctions”) could be developed to support independent journalism. This funding could be overseen by a bolstered Corporation for Public Communication, as scholars Mark Lloyd and Lewis Friedland suggested in a chapter of The Communication Crisis in America, and How to Fix It. Such a board would need to be publicly appointed or elected—with the goal of assessing whether the work of a funding recipient met the public’s information needs. This would help build the infrastructure of state-supported journalism rather than something that could devolve into a state-run propaganda arm.
The “Corporation for Public Communication” might sound like the euphemistic name of a tin-pot dictator’s propaganda ministry, but don’t worry. It will be overseen by an appointed or elected board that will decide whether the information it subsidizes meets the public’s needs — wait, why is that supposed to be comforting? Imagine an election in which Tucker Carlson is running against Rachel Maddow for a seat on the board that gets to decide which information is useful, or the battles over appointments to decide whether Breitbart or Jacobin gets government funding.
The tax-credit scheme would require government to decide what counts as a “news outlet.” How partisan is too partisan? Even putting political considerations aside, could people spend their journalism tax credits on sports-reporting or cooking magazines? Would Esquire or Cosmopolitan count? Those are two of America’s oldest journalistic institutions, but I doubt they provide the “quality information” that Walters has in mind.
As for giving news organizations tax-exempt status, they have that option right now by adopting a nonprofit business model. Plenty of publications have done so, as Walters notes in the piece. I don’t see any compelling reason why publicly traded for-profit corporations such as the New York Times Company, with annual revenue of $2.3 billion, shouldn’t be taxed like any other publicly traded for-profit corporation. That it provides an important service is not a defense; we tax energy companies and pharmaceutical companies, which do far more to keep us alive than newspapers do.
Journalism is not a public good, and there aren’t great reasons to think that government support would make it better. Walters’s argument is little more than special pleading for government favors for the industry in which he works.