The Federal Trade Commission has been conducting its second workshop on “how do we save traditional media from the Internet?” The reports I’ve read from the event are downright comical. One presenter, University of Illinois professor Robert W. McChesney, really takes the cake for his combination of alarmism and embrace of active government intervention. I’ll reprint some excerpts from his presentation and let y’all have at it in the comments:
- “The starting point for exiting this dead-end street is the recognition that journalism is best understood as increasingly having the attributes of a public good, not a private good. It is like military defense, physical infrastructure, education, public health and basic research in that regard. It is something society requires, and people want, but the market cannot generate in sufficient quantity or quality. It requires government leadership to exist. There may be an important role for the private sector, but with public goods the government plays quarterback or the game never starts.”
- “If the United States federal government devoted the same percentage of GDP to subsidizing journalism today that it did in the 1840s, for example, the expenditure would be around $30 billion. Indeed the one area that distinguished the American government from European governments at the time was its commitment to creating a huge and credible democratic press system.”
- “[G]overnment press subsidies can work, and come with sufficient protection from government meddling. We can have our cake and eat it too.”
- “[W]e should immediately increase funding to public, community and school broadcasting – in my mind, by a factor of at least ten— with the express designation that the funding go toward journalism, especially at the local level.”
- “We should launch a ‘Write for America’ or ‘News AmeriCorps’ type program to subsidize thousands of young journalists for a year or two after college working for news media around the country.”
- “It is imperative that we craft lower postal rates –and soon— for small circulation publications with limited amounts of advertising.”
- “[University of Pennsylvania law professor Edwin] Baker thought the government should, in effect, pay one-half the salary of any employed journalist up to $45,000 per reporter per year. The idea was to dramatically lower the costs of journalism. Ed was convinced fraud could be minimized, although I suspect it would need a great deal of work to make it functional.”
Now for the Pièce de résistance, McChesney’s policy solution:
For sake of discussion I will call it the “Citizenship News Voucher.” The idea is simple: every American adult gets a $200 voucher she can use to donate government money to any nonprofit news medium of her choice. She will indicate her choice on her tax return. If she does not file a tax return, a simple form will be available to use. She can split her $200 among several different qualifying nonprofit media. This program would be purely voluntary, like the tax-form check-offs for funding elections or protecting wildlife. A government agency, possibly operating out of the Internal Revenue Service, can be set up to allocate the funds and to determine eligibility—according to universal standards that err on the side of expanding rather than constraining the number of qualifying media. There will be some overhead and administration for the program, but it will not require a large regulatory body like the FCC.
This proposal borrows from the libertarian movement, in its recognition that vouchers can be used to give greater control over the expenditure of public tax dollars. Its genius, I believe, is to be found in a healthy combination of hostility to government control over news content and a belief in the power of individuals to make their own choices with a recognition of the public good nature of journalism.
Okay, which one of you clowns lent this idea to McChesney? I sure don’t remember coming up with it.
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I may have, but I’m pretty sure I was drunk and kidding at the time.
Skip,
Two points:
1.) It would’ve been SUPER HILARIOUS to see the FTC doing a workshop on how to save the horse-and-buggy from the automobile.
2.) McChesney “wrote the book” on journalism and mass media that I had to use as a textbook in j-school. So, this ape has clout and no doubt his moronitude is being vomited verbatim in journalism ethics classes nationwide, as we speak, as my time in such a class was spent receiving daily lectures about how we, the Few, the Proud, the future-journalistas, were the “Gatekeepers of Society”, we “controlled the flow of information and truth” and that without us, “democracy would fail.”
Weighty stuff for clueless, psychologically immature college undergrads. No wonder we later lost so many to alcoholism and suicide. The responsibility was just… too much.
Thankfully, we have a strong, functioning central government which is more than happy to assist us with our burdens and be responsible for us, in everything, so we don’t have to be! Whoops, happy hour already, gotta go!
Multiply that part of your j-school experience by about 1000 and you have law school.
Where else will you learn that “monopolies are illegal” and “because we’ve been granted a legal monopoly, we must police ourselves diligently (but we don’t actually have the resources to do this, and its probably career suicide to play by the rules for young lawyers, but we can arbitrarily target anyone with some claim to drive them out of our noble profession, lest “lawyers get a bad name”)”
Dude, iawai… I think you wasted a lot of time and money at law school, because I learned all of that stuff, too!
Tough luck, buddy.
I only read the first bullet item. Life is too short to continue.
The Biggest. Fool. Ever.
How dumb is this guy? If he ever loses his job at the U, he could go into government work designing new colors of recycle bins.
“This program would be purely voluntary”
That’s funny. I thought people voluntarily abandoning the dead tree press was the ‘problem’ in the first place.
Shed Plant,
Full transcript reads:
This program would be purely voluntary*.
——-
* = Except for the violence we will threaten you with if you do not comply.
I can see how you’d be confused by the partial quote Skip included.
It’s libertarian to give people a choice between government-certified nonprofits to donate forcibly confiscated monies to? C’mon! All this professor has borrowed from the libertarian movement is its name, which he is using to disguise the coerciveness of his proposal, which will be funded either by means of monies seized forcibly from the American people, or by further watering down of the currency that’s been forced upon Americans. Agh!
People reject today’s newsmedia mouthpieces for the government – if the government were to actively subsidize the media, they’d soon enjoy the popularity of the US Postal Service. Duh.
We could rename these government-approved organs Pravda 1, Pravda 2, and so forth, in the name of truth-in-advertising. New motto: all the truth we are allowed to print.
To All,
A good exercise for people like McChesney to engage in is to take these outlandish declarations they make and ad-lib them a bit: manipulate amounts up and down (when he talks about salaries, make the salaries $5,000,0000, when he talks about magnitudes of expansion, change them to 1,000X), change the industry (finance, nuclear engineering, grocers) and change the roles and titles (prostitutes, physicists, meatpackers).
Then, decide if these claims suddenly sound arbitrary and preferential/interest-group based.
I love it… better yet, put in your own industry and see how much sense he starts to make (oh wait… he still makes no sense)
Sounds like Cass Sunstien’s throwing around policy ideas again, while trying to call himself a Libertarian.
“We let the people do what they want with the govt’s money, we just make sure that we collect a cut up front to pay for our unnecessary bureaucracies and popularity contests, hand-pick the “options” we present to citizens, and maintain complete records of who supported which options.”
The perversions away from the free market solution here are absolutely atrocious, and when compared to the consistent libertarian free market solution they can really be seen for what they are: violently supported protectionist cartels in business areas that sense a coming market failure (in its true meaning, i.e., that the products or services being provided aren’t worth the costs of producing them).
I can just hear the whining protestations in their only possible form: “But we can’t just let news (or cars, or the hand-loom, or passenger rail, ad nauseum) disappear, or be run by those people without our interests at heart. There must be some central force to prop up what the majority and/or the power elite wants and beat down any competitors.”
Sounds like a horrid system.
“This proposal borrows from the libertarian movement, in its recognition that vouchers can be used to give greater control over the expenditure of public tax dollars. Its genius, I believe, is to be found in a healthy combination of hostility to government control over news content and a belief in the power of individuals to make their own choices with a recognition of the public good nature of journalism.”
Ha ha ha! Grimly hilarious. War is Peace.
Frightening doublespeak and ignorance…that said, NOTHING upsets me more than a botched sports analogy:
“with public goods the government plays quarterback or the game never starts.”
Okay, the quarterback does NOT start a football game. You could either try out the government playing kicker (not sexy), who’s foot into a ball actually starts the game, or you could go with Team Captain (sexy) who calls the coin flip at the beginning of the game. This little sports analogy mix up says it all — it’s as wrong as everything else this guy thinks.
At any rate, isn’t *at best* the government just supposed to be the Referee?
“[G]overnment press subsidies can work, and come with sufficient protection from government meddling. We can have our cake and eat it too.”
… doesn’t jibe with…
“We should launch a ‘Write for America’ or ‘News AmeriCorps’ type program to subsidize thousands of young journalists for a year or two after college working for news media around the country.”
The government meddling is the college, or, if you prefer, the college is the government meddling. Look, I am a writer. I am also a high school dropout and an individual who has didaskaleinophobically shunned the very notion of pursuing secondary education. I’d like to think that my prose is crisp, my exegesis thorough but not superfluous, and that my appreciation simultaneously for both absurdity and profundity might stand out in the grimy milieu in which I so often traffic. I had no instructor to imprint his or her wisdom upon my nascent intellect and while it is true that it couldn’t hurt me to be more disciplined in my writing routine I am not entirely certain that the intervention of any professor could be of any assistance in this regard.
In any case, the point that I am trying to make is that it stands to reason that people such as myself wouldn’t fare too well in the new paradigm (not that people such as myself fare all too well in the current paradigm either). Prospective journalists would flock to the subsidies and employers would no doubt be reluctant to take a chance on a journalist or writer who has eschewed the proper path to accreditation. The days where a Mencken or a Hazlitt could pester a newspaper into hiring them are long gone, this is true; this legislative fiat would ensure that the jelly becomes cement.
We’re all aware here of how the intersection of government and science has had perverse consequences, rendering the direction that scientific inquiry takes a political animal, led by political expediency and pressure in directions most unscientific. Government already largely shapes the curriculum in the collegiate system and this initiative would not be unaffected by or independent from other initiatives by those individuals and blocs clamoring for the government to take charge. By this I mean all of the popular initiatives for government to spur “new industries” (usually “green”) for a “21st Century economy”.
Nothing surprising, guys. What you’re discussing is (part of) the reason I haven’t read a newspaper (or newsmagazine) for quite awhile–30 years now, just a few days ago. The only surprising thing (to me) is that I didn’t shit-can ‘em much earlier. I took awhile longer dropping TV news but it’ll be 20 years next year.
Lemme see if I have this ‘libertarian’ solution straight:
The proposal is that government collects taxes from citizens, then dishes them out to the citizens, so that those citizens can choose who to give them to.
Yup. Barking mad. Job creation scheme for bureaucrats.
PS: Can anybody send him a copy of Basitat’s candlemaker’s petition to the good professor? Or that Mises daily article last year about saving the piano industry, perhaps. think he might learn something in both.
@article?This news really disturbed me on some deep level. Not sure why it did.. but it did none the less…
And also, this sounds like it would create another bubble… Like the housing bubble, the internet bubble, and welfare bubble, Social Security bubble, and so on…
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