Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has come out in favor of a fascist press system. It goes without saying that Mr. Bollinger wouldn’t describe it that way, but that would be the end result of adopting his suggestion to Federally subsidize and supplement the press.
We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies–especially the Internet–is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.
At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.
Still, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Mr. Bollinger urges the creation of a monolithic Pravda, a purely government provided news service.
We should think about American journalism as a mixed system, where the mission is to get the balance right.
In short, he prefers yet another “public-private partnership,” the now-familiar progressive corporatist model that met with such success in Italy in the 1920s. Odd, how the “private” party in that arrangement always turns out to be the junior partner. And yet he maintains that “state support does not translate into official control.” He seems not to have learned the popular phrase: he who pays the piper calls the tune.
His concern is for more than the media companies’ falling revenues, however. A purely private system, so he claims, puts the Republic at risk. Bollinger tells us that:
… trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown — a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance….
American journalism is not just the product of the free market, but of a hybrid system of private enterprise and public support. By the middle of the last century, daily newspapers were becoming natural monopolies in cities and communities across the country.
For someone with degrees in political science and law, Mr. Bollinger seems to have scant knowledge of the most obvious history. Setting aside the ambiguity of the phrase “public institution” (as if a newspaper were in the same category as the court system), he blithely ignores that Los Angeles, New York, and many other cities have until recently had many newspapers each. Even as it is, New York still has three major dailies and Los Angeles has two. (That’s not even counting online publications.)
To date, the media companies have been private and there’s been no shortage of news coverage. We’ve had no need of Federal subsidies for the press for over two centuries, so why now?
Mr. Bollinger complains that the Internet has so undermined the ability of the media companies to attract business they must have public funding. Indeed, he says we should actually have more public news organizations, a la PBS and NPR. (Why those should not be enough, he doesn’t say.)
However, he’s wrong even on this point. There’s no reason the New York Times, ABC, and many others can’t compete online. Indeed, they do. If they fail to attract enough customers maybe they should make their products more trusted once again.
That, not surprisingly, is the one issue Mr. Bollinger won’t come near. Traditional major media outlets — both print and TV — have seen declining revenues in large part because fewer and fewer believe any longer what they say. Objectivity isn’t merely a thing of the past for these news outlets, it’s openly mocked as impossible by the J-school grads who control them.
That sword cuts both ways, though. If you’re going to get your information from a biased source, why not choose one that shares your bias?
Hint: as a Progressive, Mr. Bollinger implicitly believes that any company that produces a service for money is necessarily biased and in a bad way. But the Federal government — since it allegedly has no pecuniary interest — is Ivory soap pure. He’s unable to see that the desire to retain customer trust by protecting their reputation for honesty is a strong incentive for news businesses to outdo Ivory in the purity stakes.
So, why hasn’t that incentive worked? Because, there have been stronger incentives at work pushing the other way. Progressives have come to dominate every major media outlet over the past 40 years, and in their hierarchy of values, making money is a distant second to pushing their philosophy.
Until the major media companies again regard their customers as thinking people and not mere pawns in a culture war, they’ll continue to lose them. Federal money — and the strings necessarily attached — will only make that problem worse.
In one sense, though, the incentives have worked. Customers have moved en masse to other outlets to get their news and op-eds, sources not so in thrall to the world view of the New York Times. It may well be that this is what bothers Mr. Bollinger most.
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