Tech Won't Save Us - What’s Really Killing the News Media? w/ Victor Pickard

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Victor Pickard to discuss the continued layoffs in news media, and how they are symptomatic of a deeper, structural crisis in journalism.Victor Pickard is Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at University of Pennsylvania. He’s also the author of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation and produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris will be speaking in Christchurch on February 4 and Wellington on February 8.Victor wrote for Niemen Lab about the need to divorce news and capitalism, and argued for public newspapers in the Washington Post.In the US, two-thirds of newspaper jobs, or 43,000 journalists, have been lost since 2005.Robert McChesney and John Nichols propose a Local Journalism Initiative.Police raided a newspaper in Kansas on August 11, 2023, setting off a major scandal that’s now seen the police chief suspended.Support the show

We all learn in school that democracy requires a free and by implication, a functional press system. But now we have the data to show what happens to local communities when they lose their local newspapers. And sure enough, we see that they're less likely to vote, less civically engaged, less likely to run for office. And yet we see higher levels of corruption, higher levels of extremism. So we know it's bad. And we've got to figure out

structural alternatives to these failing commercial models. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Victor Picard. Victor is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the author of Democracy Without Journalism, Confronting the Misinformation Society. democracy without journalism, confronting the misinformation society. If you're in the United States, I'm sure you've seen the stories recently about the layoffs hitting news media, major publications and smaller ones. And this is not a new thing. It's been happening for a long time. A lot of journalists have been losing jobs and this has just been kind of a continual process over many years now. And I'm sure the United States is not unique in this. Canada, of course,

where I live, has seen a lot of layoffs for journalists as well, both recently and in the past number of years. And I'm sure it's the case in many other countries as well. And often this story is told through the lens of technology, right? The internet emerged, it changed the economics of how the news media works. And so it's just because we're all dependent on these platforms now and the platforms are taking the ad revenue that the news media is suffering. But does that really get to the root of the problem? Does that explain why we're deeper problem here that is rooted in the commercial model that so much of the media, especially in the United States, but in many other countries as well, relies on. And if we really want to address this problem about the structural crisis in news and in journalism, then we need to take that head on instead of acting like it's just

the technology's problem or any number of other consequences that come from the way that the media industry and the larger economy has been set up. Until we recognize that the government has a role, that there is a role for public funding and public media to deliver news to people because news is not just a commercial product, but a public service, then we will never be able to address this problem head on. We will never be able to provide the proper local news coverage. We will never be able to provide the proper investigative coverage so that people properly understand what is going on in their communities and their society.

And even broader than that, that we ensure that we try to protect our democratic systems because without well-funded journalism that can actually hold power to account and ensure that we are informed about what's going on in our societies to make sure that, you know, people who hold power are not using it in such a way that they harm everybody else, then we're going to see our democracy slip away, as many countries are seeing right now. So I was really happy to have Victor on the program to really dig into this topic and to provide, I think, a different lens on this than we often hear when we discuss this serious problem. And I think we need to take Victor seriously in considering it through this different lens, this lens of commercialism, not just technology being the problem. Because while I have my problems with Google and Facebook and we need to be taking on their power, just doing that will not solve the crisis in news media. Also, just a reminder that I have events in Christchurch, New Zealand on February 4th

and Wellington, New Zealand on February 8th. You can find more information in the show notes if you want to join me for either of those. And if I do set up an event in Auckland, I will let you know on next week's episode. So with that said, if you enjoy this week's conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast app of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it as well.

And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so we can keep having these in-depth conversations to challenge the broader narratives on these important topics that we all want to see addressed and resolved so we can build a better world, you can join supporters like Hizbeth Radeva in the Netherlands, Damon from Australia, Thomas in Copenhagen, and Alex from the West Coast of Canada by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Victor, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me, Paris.

Really looking forward to the chat today. Obviously, people listening to the show will know that the media industry has been in a really difficult period. By that, I mean news media, of course. For the past number of years, we have heard a lot about layoffs in journalism, people losing their jobs, publications closing. And those stories have continued into this year with major layoffs already at the Los Angeles Times, at Time Magazine, at Business Insider, not to mention the gutting of publications like Pitchfork and Sports Illustrated. I guess just to get us started, what are your immediate thoughts on what's happening in this moment in news media? Thanks, Paris. It's a doom and gloom scenario that we're starting out with here. But my immediate reaction is, in some ways, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, this is just a continuation of what has been a downward death spiral for at least the last

decade or more. And so in some ways, I'm not surprised. But even within that broader context, these latest numbers are pretty startling. We saw just in last week that the LA Times is cutting over 20% of its employees, 115 employees. Just a few weeks ago, the Washington Post eliminated almost 10% of their workforce, 240 positions through buyouts. And these were two of the papers, especially the Washington Post, until recently was seen as one of the success stories coming out of the recent journalism crisis. So this really should give us pause. It's just another sobering reminder that the commercial model for journalism, especially local journalism, the journalism produced by metropolitan newspapers, is really no longer financially sustainable.

And I'm sure that's going to be a recurring theme throughout our conversation today. But if I would add a third point to those two, which are more dismal, I would say, as I often do, that any time we're looking at this structural crisis for journalism, we also, to use the old cliche, should see this as an opportunity to create structural reform and to imagine entirely different kinds of models. Again, I think that'll be another theme that we'll return to in this hour. So I always try to find a silver lining in the carnage, but I do think we should pause and reflect on how bad things are. And just to put it into a bit of further context, there's a great report that Penny Abernathy at Northwestern

University has been putting out now almost on a yearly basis because she has to update it. And the most recent numbers show that since 2005, the U.S. newspaper industry has lost almost two-thirds of its employees in a third of its newspapers. And these are just such stunning, staggeringly bad numbers. And we should keep in mind that it's not like back in 2005, things were fantastic. So I would argue things were already pretty bad at that point. So we're really sort of at a point of no return right now. And I think we need to start reckoning with that point. So we're really sort of at a point of no return right now. And I think we need to start reckoning with that reality. Absolutely. The difficult thing for me is obviously

I know people who are losing their jobs, which is terrible. But the other thing is seeing hundreds of jobs being lost, knowing how many jobs have already been lost over the past 10 years, 20 years. You just wonder like how much deeper can it actually go, this crisis of journalism and of news media when you're constantly losing more people. And it seems like certainly there are conversations around there being problems and the fact that we're losing so many newspapers and so many journalists, but the kind of structural solutions don't seem to be there. And of course, that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you today.

And so when we talk about this problem, right, when we talk about the reason why the news media is struggling so much to pay journalists, struggling so much to support its operations and to deliver what many would see as a public service, not just as a private good to the public. I feel like the narrative we often receive is the internet than that and looks at a much broader scope of what has happened. So how would you identify the crisis that is actually happening in journalism and in news media right now? Yes, it's an excellent question that we could probably spend the next hour at least drilling down into it. But you're absolutely right. I try to push back against this pretty lazy narrative that the internet is what killed journalism. Of course, there's a grain of truth to that, which we can get to. But I really think that we need to historicize this using the U.S. media system as our case study, go back to the 1800s when the press first dramatically commercialized, when it became inordinately dependent on advertising revenue.

And historians can quibble over exactly when this happened. Of course, it was a gradual process, but there was a structural transformation for when the U.S. press system moved from what's sometimes referred to as a partisan press model. It had a variety of revenue streams, including political parties, including, you know, individual people would pay for the newspapers, some advertising, which at the time was more like classified ads, but also tremendous subsidies, postal subsidies at that time. The postal system in the 1800s served as a newspaper delivery infrastructure, so that by today's money, it amounted to billions of dollars of media subsidies to disseminate newspapers to far-flung communities across the

country. And so this was the business model until they became heavily commercialized and became a big business in terms of drawing in tremendous advertising revenues. This really changed the nature of news content, but it also created this structural vulnerability where up until the end of the last century, advertising made up something like 80% of newspaper revenues, sometimes even higher. And the rest came from subscriptions and newsstand sales and the like. So that's where we really need to begin this advertising revenue-based business model, but also the market structure of newspapers, where newspapers basically enjoyed monopoly positions in their given markets. And so that anyone who wanted to advertise had to go to the newspaper.

So this sort of tees us up for when the internet comes in and really blows up this model. But I really think that we need to begin with the argument that it was this over-reliance, this extreme dependence on advertising revenue, and indeed this extreme commercialization, which I think gets us to the capitalist logics that I'm increasingly trying to foreground in my analyses. I think that often gets overlooked so that then we have these narratives, these sort of technologically determinist narratives that say the internet came along and just killed journalism and the platforms are the main culprits and And therefore, we just need to get

more advertising revenue back to the publishers. That's the narrative I'm trying to push back against. And I think that's an important narrative to challenge because I feel like a lot of the policy prescriptions for how we address this problem deal with that particular part of it, right? That framing that it was Google and Facebook and the internet that took away the revenues of the media. And so we just need to get Google and Facebook to give them back some of those revenues. If we look at kind of what has been happening in Canada and Australia, for example, and the proposals in California and some other places for how to try to get some more money back into the media and kind of revive this. But you're saying that basically the problem is not that the internet arrived and the advertising revenue was eroded, but rather the commercial structures that predated that, that made them reliant on the

advertising revenue to such a significant degree in the first place, I guess. That's exactly right. And of course, you know, we could throw in another villain into the mix, Craigslist, which single-handedly wiped out a major revenue source with three classified ads online. But again, I do think this misdiagnoses the core root of the problem. And therefore, it sets us off down the wrong path in terms of finding a true structural alternative to the failing commercial model. And, you know, I mean, one thought exercise we could do is what would happen if Facebook and Google simply disappeared tomorrow?

Would all of that digital advertising simply go back to the newspapers, to the publishers? That's not how it would work. They've lost that monopolistic position. They're never getting that advertising revenue back. Now, it's not to say that Google and Facebook and other digital giants aren't exacerbating the problem. And I do think we could find creative ways for where they're contributing to a solution. But the Online News Act and the Australian News Media Bargaining Code and the Journalism Competition

Preservation Act here in the United States have all been based on this template, on this analysis that the big bad duopoly of Facebook and Google is the core root of this problem. And so if they just redistribute their ill-gotten digital advertising revenues back to the publishers, who themselves have been complicit in exacerbating this journalism crisis, then all will be fine. And I mean, I know some of my good friends in academics and intellectuals that I highly respect are making the argument, and I really, you know, it deserves a little more respect than I'm giving it right now. You know, they're making the argument that, look, maybe this isn't going to solve the crisis, but at least it will get some money back to journalists. And I think the most generous thing you can say is that there might be this kind of trickle down,

because all the calculations that I've seen shows the money that would be given back to the publishers from the platforms would disproportionately go to the largest publishers. We're talking the Murdochs. In the States, we go to commercial broadcasters as well as like Sinclair Broadcasting. So it really would not be going to the people who are actually doing journalism. It often cuts out smaller and independent news outlets. Nonetheless, if I saw this as part of a broader, more ambitious project, a package of policy interventions, then I might be more open to, okay, maybe this does more good than harm. But that's not the way it's being discursively constructed here in policy either. And I would just say, you know, since you were talking about those codes, those policy prescriptions, I guess, from these governments, I, you know, I'm also skeptical of what Canada

brought forward. But as soon as Meta said, we are not following this law, that kind of radicalized me in favor of it just to kind of force these tech companies to abide by the rules that we were setting for them, right? I can totally understand that. I mean, Facebook and Google are bad actors in this scenario, and they're causing untold social harms around the world. So I'm all for dinging them and going after them. But the way it gets framed, at least especially here in the US policy discourse, is that this is the silver bullet. This is what will save journalism. This

is the main cause of all these recent layoffs. And that's a dangerous argument to make because it just, it completely diverts our attention from what we really should be focusing on. And that is to try to find non-market means of support for the journalism that democracy requires. I want to pick up on what you were saying when you mentioned that a lot of this money would end up going to Sinclair Broadcasting, you know, the Murdochs, you know, all of these kind of major media empires that have arisen, because I feel like that also plays into what you were talking about, about this commercial model, and the consolidation that has happened, especially in, you know, the latter half of the 20th century, and into the 21st century.

Can you talk about how this commercialism, this treating media as a private business has resulted in this mass consolidation and what that has actually meant for the journalism that people can expect in the way that news media operates? Yeah, I do think this is an important part of our structural analysis and certainly should be included in the critique. Although at a certain point, I'm going to try to move us away from talking about ownership concentration, which again, I don't think is the core root. I keep wanting to go back to, you know, it's capitalism, but of course we can't just scream that and drop the mic. So it is important that we tease this out a bit. And to go back to that historical narrative that I started a bit earlier. So once

newspapers begin to commercialize and become highly profitable enterprises, you quickly saw the kind of a chain ownership model take root as early as the early 1900s. By the late 1900s, this was becoming the dominant model. Whereas you had these massive newspaper corporations that had bought up all these smaller and typically family-owned newspapers. And I should pause here to say, there's often a kind of romanticization of the family-owned newspaper that's sometimes problematic. Oftentimes, these newspapers were owned by local elites. We can think of all kinds of terrible case studies of really poorly owned, poorly operated, family-owned newspapers that

basically disserved local communities. However, there usually was at least some relationship to the local community. There was oftentimes some commitment to serving that community. And when you had the rise of these newspaper chains and this consolidation that you mentioned, now we're talking about absentee owners who are extremely profit-driven, prone to ruthless cost-cutting measures. And I do think that is the story of the later decades of the 20th century. And then beyond that, we have private equity firms. And here, the poster child is Alden Global Capital, which is rightly named a vulture capitalist, which swoops in and immediately begins dismantling the newspaper, selling it off for

parts, selling off real estate, the parking lot, the building, and of course, laying off all the reporters themselves. And this is another example of where many contemporary critics rightly point this out as a major problem. They argue that the vulture capless are the core root of the problem. And again, I would say that these are opportunistic parasites that are settling into an already dying beast. I'm using the worst metaphors here, but you get the idea. This is late stage decay. And again, symptomatic of these deeper structural pathologies,

namely hypercapitalism, that I think we need to draw our analysis to. I think that's really well put, right? And the private equity would not be moving in if there weren't already structural issues that have got it to the point where these businesses were open for these types of people to kind of move in and be able to suck the last bit of kind of profit that they can possibly wring from it. Usually it's kind of distressed industries that these types of companies move into. Exactly. And I mean, another way of putting it is that they are the last

actors on the field that see any sort of profit potential in these dying newspapers. No one else wants to buy them, or I should say almost no one else. Occasionally people with some political agendas want to buy them. But basically, it's another sign of how there really is no commercial future for most kinds of journalism, especially local journalism. And that, again, needs to be, I would argue, our starting point in our analysis. And picking up on that point, I think one of the things that we clearly see in the media landscape right now or, you know, just in society is that there is a decreasing trust of the media, right? You know, some people talk about that being fueled by misinformation, other people by, you know, political actors who are turning people against it. But I think that it's fair to say that part of that is that, you know, news media and that journalism simply isn't delivering the quality

that people expected in the past, right? You know, you can't get this local newspaper that's thick and kind of filled with all the stories that are going on in your community in the way that you would in the past. And instead, you know, you watch these cable news channels that are just constantly commenting on kind of the horse race of the political cycle or something. So what is the effect of these commercial pressures on the quality of the news and the journalism that we receive as a public, especially as the actual business model has been falling apart because of the structural problems that you've been talking about? Yeah, excellent question. As you might imagine, there are

so many terrible negative externalities, as we might want to call them, but just downstream effects of this degraded product that we might refer to as our news media systems producing low quality news and information. And it creates this vicious cycle where people are much less likely to pay for a degraded product. They're not going to see it as an essential public service, which is what we should treat it and see it as for any democratic society. It's absolutely necessary.

So there's just this constant turnout of, you know, less and less actual news. And as you noted in your question, it's, you know, especially if we're looking at cable news, but even if we're looking at like clickbait stories online, there's really not much news or informational content in these stories. On cable television, there's virtually no journalism actually happening. It really is just shouting heads on a screen. And so that's where there's a kind of paradox here, because despite how acute the structural crisis is for the newspaper industry, most of our original reporting, most of the original news and information that people are gleaning from social media or from whatever source actually derives back to the beleaguered newspaper industry. So newspapers, even today, serve as this kind of informational feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. I try to remind

folks it isn't really about nostalgia for newspapers or, you know, getting ink-stained fingers from wrestling through the broadsheets. It's really about just making sure that journalism is being produced, that community information needs are being served. And it just so happens that those institutions are the last ones standing. I mean, public media to some extent in the U.S., much more so in most other democratic countries, also serves this role and provides this necessary news and information. And one final point I'll add to all this, and this also gets at some of the social harms that we're talking about, because I sometimes get pushed back by a certain subfield among communication scholars, which is this idea, this argument that we're so concerned about information. It's assuming that news consumers, if we want to call them that, are just these rational actors that require information. And if they're not getting the information, then democracy fails. And obviously, it's not that. And newspapers also serve this important

cultural role where they helped build community, helped build solidarity. And I try to remind my friends on the left that for all of our causes, newspapers are absolutely essential, or at least I want to say local journalism is absolutely essential. So we all have such high stakes in the survival of local journalism. There's so much data to show what we already intuitively know. We all learn in school that democracy requires a free and by implication, a functional press system. But now we have the data to show what happens to local communities when they lose their local newspapers. And sure enough, we see that they're less likely to vote, less civically engaged, less likely to run for office. And yet we see higher levels of corruption, higher levels of extremism. So we know it's bad.

We've got to figure out structural alternatives to these failing commercial models. Just to add to what you're saying, and I'm sure probably a lot of listeners have had this experience as well, but I remember when I was younger, even like in my early teens, we would regularly get the newspaper, right? Like the daily newspaper delivery. And it would be this like, it was like this thick volume, right? That had multiple sections that had a lot on what was going on locally, whether in the city, in the province, you know, in the country, but it was it was this hefty thing that gave you a lot of information about what was happening in the world around you. And then last year, I had a book released. And that newspaper, you know, because

it was my local newspaper wanted to interview me and put it in the newspaper. And I had not seen a copy of this newspaper in a long time, because my family stopped getting it, I guess, because, you know, it was not as useful as it once was. And then I went to the store to get it. And it was like this document like that, that was maybe 15 pages at most, right. And there was nothing in it. And a lot of it was just stories that were brought in from the larger chain that now owns the newspaper. I was just shocked at the degree that it had eroded. And along with that, there were journalists that had lost their jobs. There was less journalism in general kind of happening in the community. And it really made me think about what the kind of impacts were just on my community where I grew up. And I can only imagine how that is replicated across so many communities across North America and the world as this commercial model that so many of these

newspapers relied on has eroded. It's a profound problem. And I mean, what you're describing in some ways, that sounds like a halfway decent newspaper compared to U.S. standards anymore. I mean, increasingly, we have what are referred to as ghost newspapers, where there are literally no humans left working there. And it's just a mix of advertising and syndicated stories. And so we now have another great metaphor that I'm sure you've heard, and it's being applied to Canada and many countries around the world. We have these growing news deserts where you have vast regions where communities have access to no local news media whatsoever. And, you know, again, we're

seeing the data come out on, you know, some of the effects of that. And it's not a pretty sight. Rushing into the vacuum are all manner of propagandistic outlets. People are increasingly turning to cable news and becoming more radicalized, usually in a right-wing extremist fashion. So this is a profound problem. And this is the direct result of a hyper-capitalistic media system where it's no longer profitable to run these news organizations. One final point I'll add to this very depressing scenario. So you may have heard, it was, I believe, last August when there was this Marion County record, this small newspaper in Kansas that was raided by local authorities, where the police came in, shut it down, took out their equipment.

It was this really tragic story. In fact, the owner of the newspaper ultimately died from this incident, from a heart attack, at least indirectly died from it. And so it was really tragic, got a lot of attention. There was a public outcry against this across the country. But when you step back and think about how the market is essentially doing the same thing all the time to our newspapers, it's, you know, summarily firing people, forcing journalists out onto the street, closing down newspapers. And yet we just kind of shrug

our shoulders like it's unfortunate, but there's nothing that can be done. And there's this kind of what my colleague Joe Trow refers to as a sociology of resignation, that we just feel so disempowered to do anything about it. It's seen as like an act of nature or an act of God. And there's no policy intervention that can be made. And that's exactly the wrong way to look at it. This is something that affects all of us. We all should be engaged in trying to change this.

I want to dig into that narrative point and that question of solutions. But before I do that, I want to go back to what you said about democracy, right? Like we can obviously have this conversation about, oh, the news media as an industry is struggling or people are losing their jobs, but there's something bigger here. At least we would imagine and hope and, you know, we live in democracy. So I think it's fair to say that journalism is a really essential piece of, you know, what makes this sort of a culture and this sort of a society possible. So what are the broader kind of societal and political ramifications of having so much of an erosion in the quality of journalism and the availability of local journalism in particular

throughout our societies? And what does that mean for the ability of our democracies to continue being kind of vibrant and thriving and not giving way to the authoritarian pressures that we've certainly been seeing rising in many democratic countries? Yeah, I mean, to start with your last point, which in some ways is the scariest of them all, is that I really think it creates this fertile ground for fascism. We don't have to are all these kind of subtle negative effects that happen, whether, you know, there's no longer local reporters that are covering the local school board or city council or the state legislature. And oftentimes it's kind of the boring stuff. You know, it's the news stories that are not sexy. We're not, you know, it's not clickbait. We're not going to pay for this stuff. And yet we desperately

need it. We need to have this information circulating, even if we're not always consuming it, if our neighbors are consuming it. This is the whole notion of positive externalities that as a society, we need a critical mass of people who are aware of these things going on, like the health of our local bridge or, you know, what's happening to our roads and, you know, railroads and things that, again, are not going to really capture our attention, but still we need to know this stuff. And it goes back to this notion that I mentioned earlier of community information needs, like things around health and voting.

I mean, those are both recent examples that we saw here in the United States, where there was so much misinformation flowing about vaccines and where to vote and can you mail in your ballot. And these are things that ideally local journalism is covering, right? So those are some of the problems. You have some of the more lofty ideals of things like the fourth estate is supposed to keep a watchful eye on the powerful and to create a forum for diverse views and voices. And I think that's all very true, but it also needs to go where the silences are. Journalists need to bear witness. And I think that's another subtle negative effect that happens when you don't have journalists on the beat, especially for vulnerable communities who are often most at risk to, for example,

state violence and police violence. If you've got journalists on the beat, it's not going to solve all the problems, but at least it's going to create some kind of safeguard, social safety net for folks to make sure there's someone there to bear witness on this. And these are just a few. We can think of so many other problems, but, you know, whatever. There's a famous quip that's sometimes attributed to the former FCC commissioner, Nicholas Johnson, who said, you know, whatever your first political issue is, your second one should be media reform because you're not going to get very far on your first political priority if you have a hostile media system. And so that's another reminder for my friends on the left. Like, you know, if we're worried about the climate crisis, we're worried about ongoing wars and growing inequality, then we need to worry about local journalism as well. I guess on that point as well, one of the things that stood out reading your book, and of course that I've observed over time, is that once the media does become eroded in the way that we have

seen, it does create this opening for right-wing media with a very clear ideological agenda to move into that void because of the funding that is available from wealthy people who hold similar views to be able to move that forward in a way that, say, progressive or left-wing media doesn't have access to those other forms of funding to create kind of a well-resourced publication that can get this degree of traction. And I found it interesting because in your book, you go back through the history, how the transformation from what you called like the partisan press, you know, back in the 1800s to a more commercial press already served a function of weeding out kind of a lot of the working class newspapers and media already just by moving to more of an advertising based model. Can you talk to us a bit about the political dimension of the type of media coverage that we receive with the different kind of

economic models, I guess, that go into how it's funded and created? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a couple different angles we can take of this. One, you just reminded me when you were talking about, again, going back to the bad old days of when the early newspaper barons were pushing out what was then called yellow journalism. I mean, really, that was just clickbait. That was like this excess of an over hyper commercialized media system where they were putting out these sensationalistic news stories. They were trivializing important issues, dramatizing other issues and really causing a lot of social harm to where there was actually a public pushback, a grassroots pushback to some extent, that then led to establishing various professional norms. You know, the one that gets the most critique, of course, is the objectivity norm, but also the idea that news reporting should be fact-based, for example.

I think we want to hold on to that one. These all came out of, you know, what's now been naturalized as just professional journalism really can be traced back to some of these economic shifts and this social turmoil around the normative role of newspapers and news media in general within a democratic society. And that's, I think, an important point to come back to, that that's what we're often fighting over, at least implicitly in these discussions. What is the role of news media in a democratic society? But the other point is that I think something that gets too often overlooked is that there's a kind of market censorship that is driven

by these capitalist logics that do a lot of ideological work. So in many cases, and I try to, you know, when I'm teaching this in class, you always want to push back against this cartoonish notion of like this grand conspiracy where there's a smoky back room and five guys figuring out what are we going to feed the masses and how are we going to keep them diverted from the real things that are going on. I mean, sometimes that does happen. We can point to cases like that throughout history, but usually that doesn't have to happen because the market already does that ideological work. It strings out quite predictable patterns and ensures that certain issues get covered or don't get covered or get covered in particular ways. There are always these patterns of omission and selection and emphasis that over time redound to the benefits of our political elites and our economic elites and really disadvantages everyone else. And especially, you know, there's always a class in racial mapping here where what I think

of as informational redlining, like, you know, poor and communities of color are disproportionately harmed by this media system. They're not getting access to news and information. Their stories are not being heard. They don't engage in media. And so this has always been the case. And that's, again, where I think it's so important to show that these are not new problems. The internet did not just cause this. This isn't just Facebook's fault or meta, sorry. So it's really something that we need again, and I've become a broken record on this, but we need to trace back to the political economy, to the core structural problems that are driving so much of this. And that's where we need to begin to in the book is how there are these kind of libertarian ideas about the press and about speech in American society, but often how we talk about journalism even beyond that, that, you know, kind of limit what we think that the possibilities of kind of policy solutions might be. Can you talk to us a bit about how those libertarian ideas are kind of formulated

and how they have become very influential across society when we think about how the media operates, how it should operate, and the role that the government should have in relation to it? Yes, and I think that's such a major impediment to having even healthy conversations around these issues. There are these discursive blocks on what we can talk about. And largely because libertarians, and here I would characterize them or use the modifier, their market, or I used to call them corporate libertarians, I think just market libertarians, market fundamentalists, whatever you want to call them, their point of view has become so naturalized that, you know, they've been able to capture the discourse in such a way that they don't even have to really defend their positions anymore. weren't quite as settled. And my first book really looked at one of these moments in the 30s and 40s where there really was this clash of paradigms between a more market libertarian framework and what I would probably think of as a social democratic framework here in the United States,

and the latter one being more aligned with the New Deal project. And actually, it had a moment where it was ascended. It know, it was not foreordained that the U.S. would go down such a libertarian path. And, you know, we could have had a much more public-oriented media system compared to the one that we inherited here in the United States. But what the libertarians have been able to do is not only naturalize this hyper-capitalistic media system and to assume that the market is always the best arbiter of what our media should look like, but they were also able to capture the First Amendment, something that we're very proud of here in the United States that enshrines our freedom of press, freedom of speech. And they were able to weaponize it in a way to where any sort of intervention

into the, especially the media marketplace is seen as a illegitimate foray into, you know, what really is the natural order of things like the government should never get involved. Well, of course, that's a libertarian fantasy. The government is always involved. The question is, how should it be involved? And, you know, should it be serving our interests in democratic society's interests, or should it be in serving the handful of, you know, wealthy white men? And that's typically, you know, the latter is what it's been doing for many decades now to where our entire regulatory apparatus, the Federal Communications Commission in particular, is sort of a textbook case of regulatory capture,

right? So the market libertarians have really been able to dominate these discussions and make it seem like there was no alternative. You know, this kind of capitalist realism has settled in, and that's some of the discursive and ideological work that we have to undo before we can really begin to imagine a truly democratic media system. When I was reading this in the book, I felt that there were a lot of overlaps between what you talked about in relation to these libertarian ideas around the media and the free press, and also what we hear around technology, right?

Where there are these very clear ideas around the commercial nature of technology and how there can't be kind of a public alternative or any kind of public solution. And that if the government tries to regulate, then all of a sudden, like if it tries to regulate social media companies or something like that, then that's a breach of people's freedom of speech because they might not be able to post whatever they want on these platforms or things like that. I wonder if you see these kind of libertarian ideas that have become so ascendant and that have affected, you know, media and technology being related in any particular ways and having any kind of historical connections. Absolutely. And, you know, oftentimes discussions around, for example, the future of

the internet and the future of journalism are conducted as like two separate discursive spheres. And I think if not in the same sentence, they should at least be in the same paragraph. Like we should be talking about all of our, you know, these are all intertwined. And indeed, when I'm thinking about this utopian future that I envision for our media system. It's really, you know, talking about journalism and, you know, access to broadband internet is really, this is one in the same conversation. But certainly in some ways, it becomes even more glaring when we talk about what's happened to the internet here in the United States. So use one example. And here, as I'm sure you know, and I know that you had Ben Tarnoff on the show not too terribly long ago, and he really nailed this in his last book.

But basically, you know, we have what my colleagues and I refer to as a broadband cartel here in the U.S. that provides most of our Internet services. see these kinds of technological determinants, but very much libertarian arguments that there's no role for regulation in, for example, the provision of broadband services. That's actually a radical break from telecommunications and how that sector developed here in the United States. There was always at least a public interest requirement. You know, you couldn't redline communities. You couldn't discriminate against particular groups. There was actually rate regulation, which is now, you were not allowed to even utter that phrase in the American public policy discourse. It's like our current, you know, FCC will bend over backwards and say, we will never regulate rates. And that should go along with any sort of, you sort of telecommunications service. So that's maybe a little bit tangential from what you were getting at. But I would argue that this libertarian framework has very much shaped how technology and of course, I mean, and you know better than anyone, whenever we're talking about this kind of Silicon Valley ethos of what the internet should look like, you know, how did we get to this place where we have these monstrosities?

This came directly out of this kind of techno libertarian orientation. And we're all much for the worse because of it. reading the book was how the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which of course was central to setting a lot of the kind of groundwork for internet regulations and how the internet is treated by the American federal government, was also a bill that contained a lot of kind of further deregulatory measures or, you know, re-regulatory in favor of corporations that also changed kind of the media and news media landscape as well to take some of the few remaining restrictions or protections we might say away so that they could continue to consolidate and entrench this commercial model right yeah you're absolutely right i mean the

telecom act was a real tragedy in so many ways but ironically as you're noting it really arguably did the most damage or as much damage with our broadcast media because it threw out caps on how many stations one corporation can own. And we immediately ended up with these giant media conglomerates that, you know, like Clear Channel owned, you know, hundreds and hundreds of radio stations across the country. And immediately, you know, this is where media ownership really does matter, immediately began firing local broadcasters, local journalists, had less local culture on the stations and really became this kind of cookie cutter format that was meant to

just maximize, again, advertising revenues and profits. So this is where that logic takes us if we don't place these regulatory safeguards. And there's an argument to be had. I just had this argument the other day with some friends who, whenever we're looking at the role of the regulatory state, how much can regulation do, really? And I'm certainly not willing to throw it all out, but I do think a regulatory approach to some of these predictable social harms will only get us so far. And I do think a regulatory approach to some of these predictable social harms will only get us so far. And I think, again, points to this argument that we need structural alternatives, right? Where as long as this is going to be under a capitalist system, it's fairly predictable.

We're going to see a tendency towards monopoly or at least oligopolies, and it's going to affect the content that we can access in our media system. So yeah, a lot of problems stemming from all this. And I guess talking about ways to address this, and I'm going to get into kind of the broader question of public media in just a second, but I feel like one of the narratives that we've had in the past few years is, okay, the traditional media industry is struggling, but we have these digital media startups that are taking off and they are going to revolutionize everything and really address this problem by

delivering news in a different way that's more oriented toward the internet and the way that we do things now. And then I feel like more recently, we've also had this slightly different argument where the kind of the sub stack models and the subscription models to independent publications have been growing. And we've been getting this, you know, somewhat similar argument where, okay, maybe it's not the digital news startups that are getting all this venture capital money or whatnot in order to grow, but rather it's going to be these independent publications that get these individual subscribers. And that is going to kind of fill these voids that we have in the news media. I wonder what you make of those arguments that these are the ways that we're going to address this problem, you know, without needing kind of

government intervention. Yes, well, you won't be surprised to hear that I'm pretty skeptical of those kinds of proposals. I mean, it's obviously a very kind of neoliberal approach, this idea that we have these individual talents out there that we just need to give them their platforms and that individuals are going to pay for this content. I mean, we have so much data now to show that very few people end up paying and those who do tend to be whiter and wealthier households. And, you know, it just disenfranchises people. Now, that doesn't mean there's not a place for some of these types of media.

But if, again, if we're beginning from the premise that there are certain information needs and other needs that democratic societies require from their news, their information communication systems, then this simply is not a systemic fix to these very deep structural problems. And again, and I feel like this is also kind of part of the libertarian approach to all these problems that don't see a role for policy intervention, don't see these as like collective action problems that society must grapple with. And instead, we're going to find some new app, some new whiz-bang business model, or these amazing saviors. And I am cautiously optimistic. Being in these debates for many years now, there has been some progress. I don't have to argue over some of the same things I used to have to argue on. So I actually tend to be fairly weirdly optimistic at the end of the day about all this. But certainly, unfortunately,

most of the proposals that are being brought forth today are still not penetrating to the structural roots of these problems before us. Yeah, I agree with what you're saying, obviously. I think, obviously, there are journalists who are trying to do what they can in the media ecosystem available to them. And I think that makes complete sense. There have been some cool independent publications launched in the past year, some people who've been on the show, of course, but that's not a solution to these broader kind of structural problems in the media industry. If we want journalism that is actually going to provide the local news that people need, the investigative journalism that people need, the things that are going to give people a real picture of what is

going on in their communities, in their wider society. And so to that point, you know, we've been talking a lot about public media without actually digging into it. What would a public media system look like? And how does this start to address some of these crises that we've been talking about through the course of this conversation? Yeah, I'm so glad you're raising this question. So oftentimes in these discussions, we never quite get to the what's to be done part of the entertainment hour. So public media is an important starting point. I want to say from the beginning, though, that oftentimes, especially in the U.S. context, when people hear me say public media, they immediately think NPR or PBS.

And that's not where I'm going with this. That's not how I think we should be looking at this public media potential. It's rather that if we agree that the problems afflicting journalism and our media system writ large today stem from these capitalistic logics, these profit imperatives, and that it's deeply systemic and it's a structural problem. We need to find structural alternatives, and we need to create a system that's not so reliant on these market mechanisms. And so that takes us to either a nonprofit model or a public media model. The nonprofit model, and here in the U.S., we're going through what seems like a new golden age of nonprofit experimentation. There's some fantastic stuff going on. I think we can simultaneously

celebrate that and also be crystal clear that that is not a systemic fix, that we can't rely on private capital for this. This is not going to deal with the news deserts problem. It's only going to be a public media system that can be dedicated to a universal service mission. And that's why I suggest that that's what we begin with. The system that we have here in the U.S. is really a misnomer to even call it public media. It's really a hybrid system. It gets much of its funding from, again, private capital, from corporations. So we don't have a truly public system here. Nonetheless, I think in the U.S., we can look at public broadcasting along

with public post offices, public libraries. We can imagine and see this public infrastructure that can be leveraged to create an entirely alternative media system. And in most other democratic countries, they already have a stronger, robust public broadcasting system. The CBC puts ours to shame. You've probably seen the graphs, and I think I have one in my book, that shows that the U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public broadcasting system. It comes out, it might be just a tad bit more this coming year, but for many years, it comes out to about $1.40 per person per year, right? They compare that to like the Brits are paying about $100 per year for the BBC, the Nordic countries are paying much more than that. And this also, not surprisingly,

correlates with stronger democracies. The US is now considered a flawed democracy. So that's always been this one element of the libertarian framework that we didn't mention earlier, is that there's always this assumption that as soon as a government gets involved, it's a slippery slope towards totalitarianism. And I think we have so much evidence to undercut those claims. So a long way of saying that I do think we should begin looking at our public systems, our already existing public systems, and then think about how do we expand, repurpose, restructure those so that they can rise to these challenges and guarantee that all members of society have access to not only access to news and information, but are also able to create their own media and tell their own stories. I think it's a really good point. And it's interesting you bring up Canada, right? Because

up here, you know, obviously we can look down and see the lack of public media or relative lack of public media in the United States. But then we look across the sea to Europe, for example, and see that, you know, Canada only spends about $30 per person, I think it is on public media compared to, as you say, the much higher numbers in many European countries. And it's clear that so much more can be done. But even though we have a large public broadcaster like the CBC, these libertarian narratives that you're talking about around the threat that public funding for media presents is still very present, right? We've been having a lot of debates in the past few years around funding private media with journalist subsidies. And of course, through the Online News Act that you were talking about, where we get Google and Facebook to pay the media. But there's still really strong arguments being made in society that if the government does public

funding for media, then that threatens the objectivity of all of the media, not just arguments coming from the right wing, which is quite concerning for me because you would think that having a large public broadcaster, you would see that does not distort the media ecosystem or like the ability of the press, the whole power to account. You're absolutely right. And of course, this comes up invariably in all these discussions. It often serves as a conversation stopper. You know, as soon as you let public subsidies get involved, public media subsidies, basically the media will become a mouthpiece for the state. And we have so much evidence to cut against this. We can look at so many case studies around the world where a robust public media system is, if anything, enriching democracy. There's also growing bodies of evidence to show that countries that have stronger public media systems also have less extremism, higher levels of political knowledge. Now, again, we don't need to say this is going to solve all of our problems. But I think certainly in the context of crumbling print media industry, growing news deserts, growing monopoly power in the media institutions that remain, we need to have a profit, that's actually trying to enrich

discourses and make sure that all members of society are well-informed. But again, beyond that, too, and this gets to the second part of what I think should be our grand proposal for change. Step one, it's really a two-pronged approach. Step one is to decommercialize our media system. But step two needs to be to radically democratize it. And I think this gets into some of the critiques of, say, the BBC, which tends to be very elitist. And my British friends have beaten out of me any sort of romanticism that I still,

you know, that I may have once had towards the BBC and similarly towards the CBC. I mean, when I listen to your programs, I'm just like, I wish we had your problems. You know, like we have nothing like this in the U.S. But nonetheless, I think there's a legitimate critique that's leveled, especially in the BBC case, where it's an establishment media institution. It tends to privilege the status quo. It's not adequately diverse. And so there is a fix. You know, this can be fixed. I mean, we can structurally remodel it so that more people are making decisions and

then the governance is brought down to local levels. And that's really what I, you know, call for in all of my work is that we really need to make sure that these public media centers, this is getting into my utopian plan, but basically that every community across the country should have this new anchor institution known as, I'm calling it a public media center that is federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled. And there are various schemes that we could deploy to make all of this work. We could have elections for local media bureaus, or we could have it randomly selected like we do for jury duty. But we can make sure that governance is devolved to

the local level and that those newsrooms not only look like the communities that they serve, but are actually owned and governed and operated by those members of the community. So there are problems with this model as well, but I think we can start imagining a different system that's not driven by these profit imperatives, that does not rise and fall with market fluctuations and actually guarantees a baseline level of news and information for all members of society. I'm such a big fan of reinvesting in public infrastructure

like the post office in order to have it provide other kind of public goods that we basically want our governments to be able to provide to make our societies better, more thriving, richer, what have you. I wonder, as a final question, I guess, how do you see this form of public subsidy working in practice, right? How does this actually reach journalists or media publications? Do you think that there would be restrictions on the amount of this funding that say for-profit media institutions would be able to receive? And do you think that

there needs to be consideration of how to ensure that this funding doesn't go into right-wing organizations that we've seen popping up in recent years that, you know, aren't really committed to journalism, but more to particular ideological pursuits and things like that? Yeah, that's an excellent and daunting question. And there's a couple of pieces to it there that I'll quickly try to tease out a bit. So as far as like, along with preventing this new public media system from becoming captured by the state, a second question that always comes up is how do you pay for it?

And I'd say a third one is how do you make sure that people actually engage with it? And so this second and third one, I think are sort of part of the same, or at least my answer would address both of them, which is, first of all, we have to make sure that this money is completely firewalled against any kind of state meddling. So there's a federal guarantee to make sure that this money is completely firewalled against any kind of state meddling. So there's a federal guarantee that makes sure that the money's there. It has to be some kind of trust that's not tied to these annual or biannual appropriations, which is the current system we have in the U.S., which is just a terrible system and opens the door to all kinds of political interference. So the money has to be there. Then it has to be devolved in the U.S. It would be devolved to state

and then local levels. There are various formulas we can use to make sure, for example, every county gets a certain amount of money. But as soon as we begin devolving that money, we need to make sure that state and local communities are involved in the allocation. And there's some precedent for this. I mean, sometimes block grants are mentioned. I don't think that's the best example. But I look to something that the LBJ administration did in the 60s, which had these community action programs for their anti-poverty measures, where the money would go to these local communities, but then members of the community had to be involved in allocating the money. So I think that's one way of doing it.

A different scheme that in some ways is even more bottom-up and grassroots-driven is proposed by my friend and mentor, Robert McChesney. It's called the Local Journalism Initiative, which I think is also a name of the program that you all have in Canada. But this is a different kind of program whereby people would actually vote on how their money gets allocated. So, again, every county gets a certain amount of money, but then people get to vote on, say, their top three choices of where that money goes. Now, to your last point about how do we make sure that this money never funds right-wing news outlets, I mean, in some ways we do have to roll the dice with these universal service programs. I do think that there are structural safeguards we can put into place to make sure that certain ethical guidelines are followed to get the money, but we want to make sure they don't fall into the hands of QAnon

conspiracists or whatever. So we've got to work out a few of these details. But some of these details, I think, intentionally should be left open for local communities to work out. Like, I don't think we should have this all figured out. First of all, it's going to require a lot of experimentation. But I don't think we should have a blueprint that we just slap down from up on high and say, you know, this is how it's going to go. This really also has to be from the ground up. We need to supply the resources that are necessary for all these flowers to bloom. But I do think this needs to be a community driven, you know, initiative. And I think that's how we can create a true structural alternative that actually serves democracy. That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, obviously the media and journalism is in a really tough place right now, as we've been seeing in

recent weeks with these stories. But it's been great to speak with you, Victor, to learn a bit more about the roots of these problems and how we might think about actually addressing them in a sustainable way that's good for democracy and good for the journalism that we expect. So thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you, Paris. It's so great talking to you. Let's do it again sometime. Absolutely. I'd love that.

Victor Picard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Democracy Without Journalism, Confronting the Misinformation Society. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening, and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.