This piece is the eighth installment of a biweekly series written by David A. Foster (Center bias), based on his new book, Moderates of the World, Unite! Read the first post in the series. 

As you cast your mind back over the past two years of political news—the rallies, the debates, the polls, the denunciations, the controversies—does it seem to you that it was valuable?

It was often titillating, to be sure. Though I’m not sure I learned anything of substance, and it was more polarizing than ever. Of course, my expectations were never high. I share the view of the media scholar Victor Pickard, who wrote in Democracy Without Journalism?:

The United States has essentially conducted a hundred and fifty-year experiment in commercial journalism by treating news as both a commodity and a public service. With the latter function driven into the ground by the market, this experiment has largely failed.

In the past thirty years, we have seen the full flowering of this for-profit media regime. Like the frog in the pot of heating water, though, it is not easy for us to notice the dangerous change. To put it into perspective before describing my next proposal, let’s review some of the media regime’s features and recent developments.

An intrinsic limitation of commercial news is that, while the most important affairs in our country usually are complex, slow-developing ones that unfold over months, years, or even decades, news organizations must publish new stuff to capture audiences’ attention every day. Lance Bennett identifies four information biases in news content: focus on the visible people instead of the issues; dramatic angles; self-contained (no time for context); and politics as a game.

Moreover, what we get is limited by what news organizations are willing to provide. From media theory, we’ve long known that news production is filtered by several structural and economic factors: the owners’ interests; avoidance of lawsuits and “flak”; dependence on the favors of key news sources; consistent ideological allegiance; and ensuring that advertisers are happy.

Since advertising revenue to news outlets has diverted to social media, the battle for eyeballs has become desperate, and the total number of journalists continues to shrink steadily because of the financial pressures. Articles are more and more derivative from other sources, contain less first hand investigation, and are more suffused with opinion. News has bifurcated into two separate, partisan ecosystems, with each side retaining attention via outrage and flattery of its target audiences. Andrey Mir has argued effectively that polarization is now permanently baked into the news business as a condition of its survival.

“Horse race” journalism has become dominant. Politics has become an eagerly-followed sport, with the presidential election as the championship. Journalists obsess over polls rather than analyzing issues or comparing the pros and cons of alternative policy positions. News organizations even create news by running and publishing their own polls—a practice considered improper until recently. The horse race is turbocharged by the endless campaigning that US politicians must do to secure donor money.

All of it has gotten worse with the advent of cable news and social media, which propaganda machines have eagerly exploited. The accelerated pace of content output, along with the decreasing number of journalists, has resulted in what Dean Starkman called the “Hamster Wheel,” where quantity replaces quality, and many stories are relatively vacuous.

The Proposal

My proposal is to eliminate for-profit political news media completely, and to replace it with a publicly funded system.

Although this proposal is I think compelling on the merits, there is zero chance of enactment as long as we have our current Supreme Court. However, it is important to take the time to at least visualize it, because it forces us to recognize how unsuitable our for-profit political media system is for the needs of our democracy. Further, visualizing it can help motivate our ambitions to do now whatever smaller things we can do to correct our current system’s failures.

There are many different ways that “de-privatization” of political media could be done. But here are the four points of my own proposal, described in more detail in my book:

1. For-profit, out. No for-profit news organization may report on national political affairs. Period. They may still have all other kinds of non-political news; naturally, the bright red lines would need to be thoughtfully defined. But since corporate political media is doing much harm (polarization, easy manipulation by politicians and parties) and little good (informing the public about policy and governance) it would be replaced wholesale by public and publicly-subsidized media.



(As I’ll discuss, constitutional press freedom would absolutely be at issue here. Again, suspend your disbelief, if only for a moment.)

2. The Democratic Information Agency. A large, new, politically-independent, federal “information bureau” would be instituted to report on government affairs. It would build upon current elements such as the Office of Inspector General, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Office of Management and Budget, but it would be more journalistic in nature, continually developing materials suitable for external consumption.

An absurd implication would be that this Agency should produce thousands of new reports detailing every nook of government in impenetrable bureaucratese. Certainly not. Instead, a comprehensive new theory of operation would be developed, factoring in considerations like:

• What kinds of information would be most useful, important, and interesting to citizens? In what forms would it best be presented?
• What information would be most valuable to other stakeholders, e.g. businesses, state governments, interest groups?
• What special kinds of circumstances would merit heightened DIA attention and resources, e.g. failures, crises, legislation, major achievements?

3. Nonprofit media funding. A multi-billion-dollar funding scheme is instituted to support nonprofit news organizations. Some of the new funding is allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The remainder goes to a system that allocates funding to nonpartisan, non-profit journalism, in order to facilitate competition and diversity, and to ensure that the public’s varied needs are addressed. More local and regional journalism would be intentionally supported.

4. Election coverage limitations. No news organizations may report on federal elections at all, except in the 60 days prior to the election date. This would apply for both primaries and the general elections. (Most developed countries, it should be noted, put even stricter limits on campaigns.)

This would not mean that information about elections would be secret. Governments at all levels would continue to publish election information at any time, including lists of candidates who have registered, voting rules/locations, and so on. Candidates and parties could post information on their own websites. These simply would not get the spotlight of national news coverage until the 60-day period begins.

In this world, national politics would be a much, much smaller part of citizens’ lives. With the “politics as sports contest” approach gone, national political polarization would melt away. Public discourse about national affairs would have a heavier emphasis on issues, governance, and planning. The pace of news production would decrease drastically; a larger number of citizens undoubtedly would not tune into it at all. State and local affairs might, though, become a more substantial portion of their news diets.

How Crazy Is This?

In contrast with the printing shops of 1789, today’s Fourth Estate is big business, with demanding shareholders. As I discussed in two earlier articles in this series (here and here), Congress is timid about regulating it, in part because of uncertainties surrounding the First Amendment, but also because of deference to the idea that free markets will always produce the optimal solution.

But that is simply not true, and our Congress often corrects market failures by imposing regulations that impinge on individuals’ and corporations’ freedoms: preventing monopolies, imposing speed limits, regulating tobacco, prohibiting false advertising, and so on.

Certainly, capitalism has a critical role, and the public sector should not be any bigger than it needs to be. And certain public needs, admittedly, are harder to explain to voters than others. But government can and must step in when critical public goods are not provided by the private sector. Information about public affairs is critical for functional democracy, and the market is doing a terrible job of it. Our nation needs a news sphere that helps citizens understand what their government is doing and what the real issues are, rather than one that spreads partisan propaganda and provides titillating sound bites about celebrity personalities.

Again, the new regime I’ve proposed would be more dull. Fewer citizens would tune in, and perhaps fewer would vote in elections. That may seem like a cause for concern, but I argue that everyone would be better off. There would still be plenty of entertaining fare in the public sphere, and I suspect many citizens would be happy to leave most “oversight” of our government to the citizens with the most time, interest, and knowledge.

As I’ve indicated, there are many different ways that a publicly-funded Fourth Estate could be implemented. One possibility—advocated by Pickard—is to allow commercial media to continue as it is, while simultaneously providing massive federal funding for not-for-profit journalism that could provide the types of substantive information I described in my proposal above. But I believe in this scenario the for-profit news would simply “drown out” the less exciting not-for-profit news, which is why I believe complete de-privatization of national political news would be preferable.

But de-privatization of political news media would be unconstitutional. That issue is taken up in my sixth and final proposal, in the next article.

Read the rest of the series: