Post- Election America Needs A Bold, New Plan For Journalism; High Quality News, Information Access
Last edited Sat Oct 31, 2020, 01:37 AM - Edit history (1)
'Post-Election We Need a Bold Plan for Journalism.' Ultimately, the market won't save us. Nor will rich benefactors. We need a systemic fix, a public media option that's dedicated to universal service in its true meaning: all Americans must have access to high quality news & information. By Victor Pickard, Common Dreams, Oct. 30, 2020.
- "Self-government is impossible without a functioning press."
Revitalizing our democracy for what hopefully will be a post-Trump era requires rebuilding core institutions, including news and information systems. Local journalism, which binds communities together and sustains civic health, has been utterly devastated in recent years—a death spiral that has only accelerated during the pandemic.
- "In the post-pandemic future, we can’t simply revert back to the status quo and expect the market to steer us into calmer waters. This old way of thinking is suicidal."
Research shows a broad range of social harms associated with losing local journalism, including more corruption, greater polarization, lower levels of political knowledge, and less voter participation. It also creates a vacuum for partisan-driven misinformation—what some have called “pink slime journalism”—to run rampant. These growing “news divides” disproportionately hurt poor people and vulnerable communities.
With news deserts rapidly expanding across the U.S., it’s increasingly clear that local journalism has no profitable future. But democracy shouldn’t depend on profits. We need a bold recovery plan that doesn’t rely on market solutions. What we need, then, is to build up a public sector for news. What might this look like? Many specific details are for engaged citizens and journalists to determine for themselves, but the baseline goal should be universal: a well-funded, multimedia newsroom in every community.
To ensure independence, these newsrooms should be democratically controlled by journalists (not absentee owners), look like the communities they serve, and be directly accountable to local residents.
How do we get there? A two-pronged approach that I outline in my recent book would first de-commercialize and then democratize our news media. Most immediately, we should rescue good assets from bad owners and unhook journalism from the commercial rat race that’s driving newspapers to their ruin. We could transition dying papers into nonprofit entities, either as part of a broader public media system or as stand-alone independent local institutions—perhaps as municipal newspapers...
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/30/post-election-we-need-bold-plan-journalism
- With local & independent news outlets under threat from all sides, a "reformist vision that recognizes news & information as public goods- vital necessities for our collective welfare that the market can't provide- calls for a holistic approach."
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