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Introduction
When Commercialism Trumps Democracy
This book is about the journalism crisis and the policies we need to confront it. Challenges to our news and information systems have taken on greater urgency in recent years, with concern growing about misinformation and the unaccountable power of platform monopolies. As public attention turns to these media failures, now is an opportune moment to address core weaknesses in US communication infrastructures and push for alternatives. Recent criticism has understandably focused on problems with television news, print journalism, and social media platforms, but too little of this scrutiny recognizes that these are mere symptoms of deeper maladies. To understand what ails our news media and what reforms are needed, we must penetrate to the roots of systemic problems. Toward this aim, Democracy Without Journalism? underscores the structural nature of commercial journalism’s collapse while exploring entirely new models. Ultimately, the goal should be to reinvent journalism. Although my analysis focuses on the United States, where the journalism crisis is most pronounced, similar problems afflict democratic societies to varying degrees around the world.
US News Media Pathologies
Systemic problems typically remain overlooked until shocks to the status quo render them more visible. Donald Trump’s ascendance and the 2016 US presidential election revealed a number of structural pathologies in the US news and information systems, especially toxic commercialism that prioritizes profit over democratic imperatives. From imbalanced, low-quality coverage in traditional news media to the proliferation of misinformation on social media, commercial imperatives drove news organizations to popularize a dangerous politics.
Television coverage exhibited some of the worst of these media malpractices. TV news outlets lavished far more attention on Trump than all other presidential candidates. During a critical period in the primary season, he received nearly three times more coverage than Hillary Clinton and sixteen times more than Bernie Sanders.1 Various estimates show that news outlets gifted Trump billions of dollars’ worth of free advertising in the run-up to the election, often allowing him to simply phone in to their popular news shows.2 Despite constant campaign coverage, content analyses show that our leading news media—including major print outlets such as the New York Times barely covered candidates’ policy positions prior to the election.3 These informational deficits in mainstream news media coincided with torrents of misinformation circulating through social media. However, simplistic explanations that blame Trump’s rise on “fake news” amplified on Facebook are clearly insufficient. While these platforms are now the subject of well-deserved scrutiny for facilitating various kinds of dis/misinformation, traditional news media contributed as much if not more to the lack of high-quality information leading up to the elections.4
These data points paint a depressing portrait of the entire US news media apparatus. Yet they are merely surface-level symptoms of a deeper structural rot in our news and information systems. What is it about the US media system that encourages such socially irresponsible coverage? What are the historical conditions that produced such a system in the United States? What are the policies and ideologies that keep it intact? This book highlights specific media failures and recommends new models.5
“Damn Good for CBS”
Three core media failures helped enable Trump’s election.6 First, the news media’s excessive commercialism—driven by profit imperatives, especially the need to sell advertising—resulted in facile coverage of the election that emphasized entertainment over information. For ratings-driven news outlets, the always-controversial Trump was the ultimate boon. CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker, ever seeking to “maximize the emotional impact of the moment” (as a New York Times article put it), approvingly compared CNN’s election coverage to that of ESPN’s sports commentary. He casually professed, “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.”7 The now-disgraced CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves
admitted that “[Trump’s candidacy] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” He continued: “The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . . this is going to be a very good year for us . . . bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”8
These comments reveal how US news media privilege profits over public service. Although many prominent news outlets have since become more adversarial toward Trump—and more likely to call out his brazen lies and resist his attacks—their coverage continues to focus on his impolitic behavior while giving short shrift to growing income inequality, institutional racism, environmental collapse, and other severe problems exacerbated by his policies. Constantly reporting on the reality-television-like “Trump Show” spikes ratings and ad revenue. Prime-time ratings have more than doubled at CNN and nearly tripled at MSNBC since Trump took office.9 Part of this financial windfall comes from the fact that Trump coverage is cheap to produce: pundits and panels of experts can simply discuss the President’s latest tweets and outrageous comments. This kind of superficial coverage is irresistible for profit-driven commercial news media but detrimental to democratic discourse.
A second failure in the US media system is the tremendous amount of misinformation circulating on social media platforms, especially Facebook. Although many analysts attribute the problems with misinformation to political polarization and foreign interference, commercial incentives facilitate its dissemination. Facebook’s reckless behavior stems from maximizing advertising revenues, and more generally from its unregulated monopoly power. Some observers have downplayed concerns about “fake news” (a deeply problematic term) as little more than moral panic and social hysteria. And skepticism is certainly warranted, especially since much of the criticism is ahistorical, often stemming from a desire for simplistic, mono-causal explanations of Trump’s unexpected election.
Nonetheless, concerns about widespread misinformation deserve serious attention. Some reports suggest that fabricated stories circulated more often than fact-based news during the weeks leading up to the election.10 With Americans—as well as people around the world—increasingly accessing their news through Facebook, concerns about the company’s central position within the entire media system is entirely warranted.11 However, much scrutiny continues to overlook the structural roots of misinformation, especially the commercial motives that accelerate it. Because its business model depends on user engagement, Facebook is not incentivized to address the
problem, opting instead to rely on outside parties, crowdsourcing, and algorithmic tweaks to stem the flow of misinformation.
The rise of misinformation is one more manifestation of the asymmetric relationships stemming from Facebook’s status as a gigantic social media monopoly with profound political-economic power and little independent oversight—all while dodging responsibilities that normally belong to media companies.12 As a global internet platform and an algorithm-driven publisher, Facebook has tremendous gatekeeping power over much of the world’s information system. Yet, unlike “natural monopolies” or public utilities of old, Facebook has avoided close regulatory oversight and shirked any obligation to uphold a social contract with meaningful public interest requirements in exchange for the many benefits that society grants it. As I will discuss in chapter 4, growing media monopoly power—from Facebook and Google to Sinclair and AT&T—is a major threat to the integrity of news and information systems.13
A third systemic failure is the slow-but-sure structural collapse of professional journalism. As market support for news production erodes, the number of working journalists has continued to decline. Print newsrooms have lost more than half of their employees since 2000.14 Yet newspapers still provide the bulk of original reporting, serving as the information feeder for the entire US news media system. Even casual observers will note that television news coverage is typically pegged to issues covered in that day’s newspapers. On leading cable news shows, the host’s routine often consists of essentially reading the headlines of the latest breaking newspaper stories to their viewers. Similarly, news content from social media—where Americans increasingly consume their information—derives largely from professional news organizations.
While it is difficult to see how, exactly, the collapse of professional journalism has affected what is or is not being covered—or how issues are being covered differently—some trends are obvious. In particular, the rise of “news deserts”—entire regions bereft of news media coverage and access to reliable information—is undeniable.15 Furthermore, information scarcity and news deficits are disproportionately harming specific groups and areas, especially communities of color, rural districts, and lower socioeconomic neighborhoods. This phenomenon represents a major failure in US media policy.
Taken together, these structural flaws in the US news media system create the ideal conditions for what I call the “misinformation society”16 an
electorate that is increasingly served sensationalistic news coverage, clickbait, and degraded journalism instead of informative, fact-based, policy-related news. While many demand-side challenges have emerged, including a growing lack of trust and polarization, these and other audience-related problems are intertwined with an increasingly diminishing supply of reliable news and information and proliferating misinformation and low-quality news media. Unless we first address the supply-side problems—especially the commercialism that lies at the center of the system’s maladies—we cannot overcome the other harms plaguing American news media.
Competing Narratives about Journalism
To highlight the structural nature of the journalism crisis, this book will scrutinize the ways that we talk about journalism. Several meta-narratives about journalism emerged after Trump’s election. The first narrative was that news media enabled Trump’s ascendance—especially television news coverage, but the critique also applies to print news. In addition to giving him an inordinate amount of attention, news organizations often overlooked Trump’s troubling history or falsely equated his actions with other candidates’ imperfections. Typical news media coverage also sensationalized and trivialized the elections via “horse-race” coverage that fetishized polling data and personal insults hurled by candidates instead of offering critical analysis of their policy positions.
The second narrative, in tension with the first, is a newfound appreciation for the Fourth Estate. Many people increasingly see news institutions as the last bulwark of civil society, protecting them against everything from fake news to fascism. As Trump attacked the press, public sympathies naturally redounded to news organizations (although the opposite appears true for Trump partisans). One direct result was a “Trump bump,” in which many publishers saw a sudden and dramatic spike in subscriptions shortly after the 2016 election. However, this desperately needed boost in financial support did not solve media organizations’ economic problems and moreover turned out to be short-lived for most outlets.
This leads us to a third narrative that predates the election: Despite an increasing need for public service journalism (local, policy-related, and investigative news), it is precisely this kind of reporting that is failing economically. As consumers and advertisers have migrated to the web, where digital
ads pay pennies to the dollar of traditional print ads (with most of that revenue going to Facebook and Google), the 150-year-old advertising revenue model for commercial newspapers is now beyond repair. In many ways, advertising previously served as a subsidy for media organizations, with news and information a kind of byproduct or positive externality resulting from the primary exchange between advertisers and newspapers. Because this advertising revenue model has been around for so long, it appears to be part of the natural order, with alternative models falling beyond our policy discourse and political imagination.
And yet, alternative models are exactly what we should be discussing. With the exception of a brief period in 2008 and 2009, there has been little public discussion, and virtually no policy response; meanwhile, the crisis in US journalism keeps getting worse. Already in 2016 the Pew Research Center— the gold standard for assessing the health of US news industries—warned that “this accelerating decline suggests the industry may be past its point of no return.”17 For Pew to make such a statement speaks volumes about the severity of journalism’s collapse. Such a serious social problem deserves a public conversation proportionate to the scale of what should be seen as a national crisis.
The American Journalism Crisis
How we talk about the demise of journalism matters. Some narrations of the journalism crisis naturalize it as a kind of evolutionary metamorphosis of the “media ecosystem.”18 Others see it as a shift into a “post-industrial” era for the US press system.19 Taking for granted the internet’s role in journalism’s “creative destruction,” many observers typically downplay the commercial news model’s endemic structural vulnerabilities, especially its overreliance on advertising support. Metaphors and phrases such as “perfect storms” and “disruptive innovation” implicitly construct the crisis as something beyond our control and outside the realm of public policy.
While some scholars and pundits view this structural transformation as a tragic loss for democracy and a once-noble profession, for others it has been a source of great excitement. These optimists—albeit a decreasing lot in recent years—argue that new digital start-ups herald a potentially better future for journalism. Such analyses overlook these models’ questionable sustainability and the low number of journalists they employ relative to the tens
of thousands of jobs lost from traditional newsrooms. These more utopian views tend to emphasize digital journalism’s potential for innovation and enabling greater citizen participation, while often neglecting negative externalities such as the proliferation of clickbait and misinformation.
Vexing questions remain about new digital technologies: What is the normative role of journalism in today’s digital age? Should we be concerned about the growing prominence of invasive and deceptive forms of advertising within digital journalism’s business model? What are the social implications as news work becomes increasingly precarious, reliant on free or low-paid labor? What happens as local journalism disappears? What should society do when a functioning press system no longer exists? If this loss amounts to a crisis, what accounts for the absence of any public policy response?
In what follows, I argue that policy discourses about the future of news in the United States are constrained by libertarian assumptions. If we are to break free of this discourse, we must first understand where it comes from. To that end, this book situates the journalism crisis within specific political and historical contexts. Such an analysis can begin to flesh out under-examined assumptions about the normative relationship between the press and the polity. This framework positions the journalism crisis as a social problem that requires a social democratic alternative—namely, a public media option.
Focus of the Book
Democracy Without Journalism? focuses on the structural transformations in US journalism while emphasizing their implications for democracy. Thus far, our social imaginary about the ramifications of journalism’s deinstitutionalization—and what should be done about it—has been outpaced by its material collapse. It is perhaps symptomatic of our neoliberal age that many have looked to charitable and entrepreneurial individuals— and mostly wealthy, white men such as Jeff Bezos—to save journalism. But the crisis requires a deeper conversation about the considerable stakes for local communities, democratic culture, and society writ large. This book intervenes in this debate by pushing normative questions about journalism’s democratic imperatives back to the fore. In doing so, it historicizes seemingly new developments and proposes structural alternatives to today’s failing commercial models. The book also addresses many of the issues facing
today’s digital news media, from the loss of net neutrality to concerns about monopoly power—from Fox News to Facebook.
Given that the ongoing crisis is inextricably bound up with how we think and talk about journalism, this approach requires a critical analysis of contemporary policy discourses. To give one example: First Amendment assumptions that privilege negative-freedom interpretations (concerns about “freedom from” government interference) ultimately protect corporate power, delegitimate government regulation, and impoverish the US regulatory imagination. These factors all contribute to the ongoing policy failures in addressing the journalism crisis. Democracy Without Journalism? interrogates these often-invisible discursive parameters within policy debates, particularly regarding the legitimacy of government intervention into media markets.
Throughout the book, I examine contemporary discourses about what journalism’s public service mission should be in a democratic society—and government’s role in protecting that relationship. I draw from historical materials, policy documents, and industry data to contextualize the journalism crisis. My analysis also incorporates a decade’s worth of participant observations of hearings and meetings about the journalism crisis and numerous conversations with journalists, media analysts, and scholars who are actively engaged in the ongoing debate about journalism’s future.
Over the years, many analysts have tried to make sense of journalism’s structural transformations by focusing on technological and cultural changes among audiences or the practices and routines of journalists themselves. Increasingly, scholars and commentators discern new categories of newsgathering, with much discussion centering on data journalism, hacker journalism, networked journalism, and many other variants. In heralding these purportedly new forms of journalism, many optimists assume that new technological affordances enable journalists and entrepreneurs to produce better journalism with less time and money and in ways that are inherently participatory and democratic. Yet, it remains doubtful that legacy media institutions can innovate themselves out of this crisis, that new digital start-ups can fill the journalism vacuum, or that technology and the market will combine to produce sustainable forms of journalism. Many advocates still hope that some new profit-seeking model will emerge triumphant, despite little evidence that digital models have long-term commercial viability. Others feel that we can rely on media billionaires and foundation-supported news institutions with varying motives to support news outlets. None of
these models is sufficient. By critically examining how they fall short, this book sheds new light on the perilous future of the US press and shows that a public media system is journalism’s last, best hope.
Toward this objective, I underscore the historical and ideological contingency of US press freedoms, the structural contradictions of contemporary news institutions, and potential policy interventions aimed at changing these arrangements. I draw attention to the US media system’s normative foundations, especially as they are historically situated—and often contested—within ongoing policy debates.20 This book operates from the assumption that most democratic theories presuppose the existence of healthy information and communication systems. Without a viable news media system, democracy is reduced to an unattainable ideal.
My theoretical approach to misinformation and the journalism crisis falls within the communication research tradition of political economy. This subfield focuses on how media institutions are organized, owned, and controlled, and how media figure within larger power relationships. For example, political economists look at how concentrated markets perpetuate power hierarchies and foreclose on media’s democratic potentials. In general, this framework scrutinizes how power operates through communication systems, asking questions like: What ideologies are implicitly embedded in a media system’s design? Whose interests are being served? What is the basis for ownership and control, terms of access, production, and dissemination of media? In addressing these structural questions, political economy traditionally has been committed to anti-fascism and progressive social movements.21 With a clear normative vision, it interrogates power structures in the hopes of changing them.22 By challenging dominant assumptions and relationships, such an approach ultimately aims to not just describe the way things are but to denaturalize and ultimately transform the status quo.
Every theoretical framework has strengths and weaknesses that illuminate certain aspects of social phenomena while deemphasizing others. A political economic analysis is an explicitly structural approach to understanding dominant social relationships and institutions. One of its strengths is that it facilitates collective action by ascertaining the big picture—the forest and perhaps not as much the trees. In confronting the journalism crisis, this framework historicizes our problems with misinformation as the culmination of explicit policy choices, always subject to political struggle, with openended possibilities. By framing these challenges as supply-side problems that
all of society must confront—problems that are contingent, not inevitable, and open to human intervention—this analysis situates journalism as susceptible to human agency and social change.
In laying out core concerns about journalism and democracy, the book moves thematically across several broad areas. Chapter 1 focuses on the historical and normative roots of US journalism, with an emphasis on the commercial logics that were internalized early in the press system’s formation. Chapter 2 focuses on the recent history and missed opportunities in contemporary debates about the future of news. Chapter 3 looks at the ongoing degradations of digital news, with an emphasis on potential alternatives. Chapter 4 examines structural threats to journalism, especially the negative impacts that platform monopolies such as Facebook have on journalism. Chapter 5 discusses the roots of “US media exceptionalism” and discusses public alternatives to commercial news in historical and global contexts. The conclusion returns to the big picture and addresses the question: What is to be done?
In addressing these concerns and questions, I make seven basic arguments:
1. Commercial journalism has always been in crisis.
2. The nature of this crisis is deeply structural and requires a systemic fix.
3. The journalism crisis is a threat to democracy.
4. This threat amounts to a major social problem that requires public policy interventions.
5. These policies should be founded on a social democratic vision of media.
6. The best hope for public service journalism is a public media option.
7. This crisis is an opportunity; it allows us to reimagine what journalism could be.
By focusing on the ongoing structural collapse of commercial journalism, this book seeks to contextualize the crisis as symptomatic of long-term historical contradictions baked into the heart of the US commercial news media system. In addition to teasing out the various pathologies and social implications of this transformation, this book attempts to reframe the debate about journalism’s future as a public policy problem. I conclude the book with recommendations for systemic reform. In doing so, my hope is to help jump-start a long overdue conversation about the severity of the journalism crisis and what we as a society must do about it. It is time to reenvision what journalism should be.
1 Historical Roots of US Press Freedoms and Failures
Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press. Sanctified by the First Amendment, press freedoms are inviolable in the eyes of most Americans. “Power of the press” narratives loom large in the social imaginary, from the muckrakers of yore to the Pentagon papers of the Nixon era. In recent years, popular films such as Spotlight and The Post have further romanticized the image of the dogged reporter digging for the truth, holding power to account. Our current political moment has ushered in a new-found appreciation for journalism among many Americans—though certainly not all. Yet despite the rhetorical power and emotional pull of these convictions, most Americans do not spend much time thinking about the policies, laws, and institutions that maintain their freedom of the press. Nor do they ask the critical question: freedom of the press for whom?
The US press system is strikingly different from that in other democracies in one key respect: It is extremely commercialized. Far more reliant on advertising revenue than most news industries around the world, US journalism is subjected to unmitigated commercial pressures. This unfettered commercialism has made US journalism exceptional in subtle yet significant ways.1 Since the 1800s, the US press has simultaneously functioned as a business enterprise and a public good. As a commodity, it has been pegged to the capitalist market, generating tremendous profits for a relatively small number of owners and investors. As a public service, it has, at its best, strengthened democracy. Public service journalism typically aspires to inform, enlighten, keep a check on the powerful, and provide a forum for diverse views and voices. However, profit motives drive commercial media to entertain, sell advertising, satisfy shareholders, and make as much money as possible. These two sides of US journalism within a commercial system—the one, a vital public service; the other, a commodity
bought and sold on the market to make profit—have been in conflict since the 1800s.
Ever since the press commercialized, reformers have sought to protect journalism’s public service mission from profit imperatives that threaten democratic objectives. Many of the ideals and codes of professional journalism in the United States developed in direct response to these pressures. The goal was to buffer newsgathering from the anti-democratic and corrosive effects of commercialism, or, at a minimum, to create a veneer of objectivity and social responsibility. Yet in many ways these journalistic ideals are an outgrowth of, rather than protection from, commercial influence. This inherent contradiction has prompted radical criticism, reform efforts, and experimental alternatives from the beginning. For as long as media have been commercialized, social critics and media reformers have risen to challenge it.
This chapter looks at how these long-standing tensions between journalism’s profit-seeking and public-service objectives help explain the contemporary journalism crisis. The collapse of journalism’s business model was not simply caused by new digital technologies; rather, this crisis is the culmination of long-term, systemic problems present since commercial journalism’s birth. Put differently, commercial journalism has always been in crisis. The origins of this crisis trace back to the normative and historical foundations of US journalism, which themselves are bound up with the rise of classical liberalism.
Democratic Principles of the Press
Many of the democratic principles we associate with the press trace back to the emergence of classical liberalism. This ideological formation, which celebrates equality, tolerance, and diversity of views,2 emerged in seventeenth-century Britain and France as a response to state tyranny and infringements on individual freedoms.3 Classical liberals sought to resist censorship, expand freedom of choice, and protect civil liberties under the rule of law.4 John Milton’s foundational text, the Areopagitica, inspired the classical liberal notion that the best idea naturally rises to the fore when diverse views and voices are given their full airing.5 Another seminal work, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, celebrated such individual liberties as freedom of expression and advanced a utilitarian notion that the greatest amount of freedom for individuals, barring harm to others, serves the greater good.6 He
wrote that “unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good.”7 In other words, all voices and views deserve a fair hearing—not just for the sake of free speech and expression, but also to ensure that people have access to diverse information. Liberal thinkers drew from formulations such as these to uphold an ideal of the press that encouraged diversity of ideas and vibrant debate.
These texts prefigured the “marketplace of ideas” motif, which did not crystalize until much later. US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in a famous dissenting opinion in 1919 that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”8 Subsequently, the “competition of the market” became the “marketplace of ideas,” a phrase that connotes an open domain for freeflowing information and expression. Few metaphors have held such power in describing a democratic ideal.9 Invoking the “market” made the phrase even more poignant—and also problematic. As the historian Sam Lebovic notes, there were “deep ironies” in the fact that this concept ascended at the very moment that the market was corrupting media institutions to become more concentrated, consumer-based, and commercialized—and less hospitable to a teeming marketplace of diverse voices and views.10 Nonetheless, the “Milton-Holmes” approach to press freedom laid the foundations for what became known as the “libertarian theory of the press,” with the “marketplace of ideas” serving as its apt slogan.11 Indeed, in key respects, liberal and libertarian press theories are interchangeable, as each focuses on individual freedoms and a general deference to the market.
Classical liberalism’s contradictions come into focus when we scrutinize news media’s underlying—and often-unexamined—normative ideals. For example, the “marketplace of ideas” model suggests that the commercial media system is a meritocracy in which the best idea wins public approval, with the implication that capitalist competition best serves democratic communication. Emphasizing fairness and equality of opportunity, this metaphor assumes a relatively level playing field that naturally encourages egalitarianism. However, liberal constructions, including the very notion of “public spheres,” often suffer from blind spots when it comes to structural inequities. This is especially true regarding inequalities that emerge from the actual capitalist market, which liberalism often treats as a neutral arbiter. Liberalism’s inability to effectively address structural exclusions—such as
racism, classism, and sexism—renders it less compatible with more radical conceptions of redistributive justice.12
Liberalism also privileges individuals’ private property rights over the collective needs of society. In media policy, this prioritization has historically led to a laissez-faire arrangement that treats media as private commodities whose value is dictated by the market. Such an approach does not privilege diverse voices, representations, and perspectives. Nor does it guarantee media access for all communities and social groups. While liberalism/libertarianism is quick to recognize government censorship as a serious problem for a free press, it tends to ignore recurring omissions and constraints caused by “market censorship.”13
Liberalism’s abiding faith in the market as the best vehicle for a democratic media system has spurred radical criticism in the United States since the 1800s. Liberal/libertarian theories of the press, in other words, primarily focus on protecting the press from government intervention rather than ensuring that people have access to the press. The imperfect dichotomy of positive (freedom to) and negative (freedom from) liberties brings into focus how traditional liberals typically worry about protecting individual freedom from government tyranny, but often have less to say about enhancing positive liberties. The latter might include broadening media ownership, expanding the breadth of views and voices represented in news media, and opening up access to communication systems and infrastructures to include more members of society, especially those groups who are most often marginalized. These tensions between liberal ideals for what the press should do in a democratic society and the structural constraints imposed by the market have existed since the early republic.
Normative Foundations of the US Press
In foundational narratives of the US press, few individuals figure as prominently as Thomas Jefferson. His well-known aphorisms about the vital necessity of newspapers for a self-governing society comprise a “greatest hits” playlist for why democracy depends on a well-informed populace. In one of his most famous statements about the press, Jefferson reasoned:
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether
we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. (Emphasis added.)14
The last part of this quote, which emphasizes the need for access to—and not simply the existence of—the press, is often conveniently forgotten. However, Jefferson emphasized the importance of an institutionally supported and accessible press because he saw the maintenance of a free and open media system as an essential prerequisite for democratic society.15
Other founders of the US republic generally shared Jefferson’s view that self-governance was predicated on society having access to reliable information, which in turn was predicated on a vibrant news media system. For example, James Madison famously said that “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both” (emphasis added).16 Both Jefferson and Madison emphasized the necessary condition of ensuring access to information. Understood in this way, the press provides an essential infrastructure for democratic society.
These sentiments are even enshrined in the US Constitution, which provides special consideration and inalienable protections to news institutions, the only industry to receive such treatment. The First Amendment to the Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Legal theorists and historians have long debated the intended meaning of the “or of the press” clause, which seems to distinguish it from “freedom of speech.”17 The leading First Amendment scholar, Steven Shiffrin, notes that while the Supreme Court has denied that the press clause confers special privileges on the press, existing jurisprudence and case law suggests otherwise. Shiffrin points out that “the New York Times is not a fertilizer factory” and should not be treated as if it were an ordinary business. Moreover, some historical analyses suggest that, by the time the First Amendment was adopted, the founders saw the press as an autonomous institution whose need for special protections exceeded individual speech freedoms.18
This interpretation again underscores the need for institutional support of the press, as well as the importance of public access to it. Key figures of the early American Republic, including Benjamin Franklin, suggested that individuals should have a positive right to express themselves in the press,
that viewpoint diversity and equality in the press were important, and that newspapers were communal goods, not simply private property.19 This position represents what the historian Robert Martin refers to as the “open press doctrine,” which extended well beyond simply preventing state interference in news media to consider the press’s obligations to society, such as providing diverse sources of information.20 When the founders drafted the First Amendment, Martin observes, such normative ideals were as much “in the air” as were libertarian concerns about governmental overreach.21
The belief that Americans must have access to reliable and diverse information—and that the government had an affirmative duty to help provide it—justified the US government’s investment in the country’s first major communications network: the postal system. In its early days, this system served primarily as a news-delivery infrastructure—private letters were secondary. As much as 70 percent of mail delivered in the 1790s, and 95 percent in the 1830s, consisted of newspapers.22 In the first major US media policy debate, the founders of the US government argued decisively that the postal system should not have to pay for itself—a rejection of what the historian Richard John terms a “fiscal rationale.”23 Rather, these visionaries privileged the postal system’s educational purpose over economic considerations, and thus determined to heavily subsidize it.24 Given the postal system’s vital function in society as a core communication infrastructure, these early political leaders regarded the notion that it should be self-supporting as nonsensical.25
These debates, so timely for today’s discussion about the proper relationship between media and government, show that the founders were not in thrall to market fundamentalism. Because the postal system served a higher civic purpose as a news and information infrastructure upon which a self-governing populace depended, policymakers determined that the state would directly subsidize the dissemination of newspapers with low postal rates. Remarkably, the debate on postal policy ranged between those (such as George Washington) who believed postal fees should be entirely waived for all news material and those (such as James Madison) who thought the system should just be heavily subsidized. The latter position ultimately prevailed and was inscribed into law with the Post Office Act of 1792.26 This governmentfunded infrastructure—including a vast network of postal roads—would quickly expand to become the largest employer in the United States.27 As one popular history of the post office described it, the newly created “postal commons” served as the “central nervous system to circulate news throughout
the new body politic.”28 This system depended on massive government subsidies worth billions of dollars today.
Despite its long history of investing in communication systems, many assume that the US government has no legitimate role in subsidizing such infrastructure. In part, this belief stems from the misconception that state tyranny is the primary impediment to actualizing democratic ideals rather than the private tyranny of concentrated corporate power. In the classical liberal conception of the press, we need only worry about government infringing on our First Amendment rights. But as the press became highly commercialized, broader and subtler structural impediments to the free press emerged. These constraints continue to haunt US news media today. A longer historical view helps bring into focus such structural contradictions—as well as the radical criticism that arose to confront them.
The Commercialization of the US Press
The 1800s witnessed a gradual structural transformation of the press as the “partisan press” model began to fade. In its place emerged commercialized papers largely dependent on advertising revenue. The press historian Gerald Baldasty notes that the profound shift in the underlying logic of news production to a profit motive not only altered newspaper content but also changed how newspaper publishers and editors saw their own role in society and their relationship to readers. Whereas previously they saw their readers as essentially voters, by the end of the nineteenth century, they saw them primarily as consumers. This vision of the “commercialized reader” became central to news production.29
This shift to an advertising revenue model ultimately shrank the ideological range of opinion published in newspapers. The media historian John Nerone describes the “depoliticizing effect of commercialism” in both the US and British press systems as they became more reliant on advertising.30 Even though the newly commercialized newspapers depended on a larger readership, advertisers had no desire to promote working-class political and economic interests. Instead, as Nerone observes, it “became common for mass-circulation media to simultaneously attract working-class audiences and promote reactionary politics,” via trivial, sensational, and even untrue reporting.31 These strategies of attracting audience attention for advertisers worked to promote a particular view of society and mobilized audiences
according to specific affects and allegiances that often worked against progressive narratives of working class solidarity, the ravages of capitalism, and wealth redistribution. The media scholars James Curran and Jane Seaton have noted a similar ideological shift after the British press commercialized. Driven by the profit motive and concomitant need to expand and reach larger audiences, the market achieved what no government could by ensuring the demise of radical newspapers who could not afford the rising costs of production.32 Tracing similar ideological policing, C. Edwin Baker argued that advertisers provided a “subsidy” for journalism while simultaneously acting as the “most consistent and the most pernicious ‘censors’ of media content.”33
These structural changes unfolded differently and unevenly across newspapers, but general patterns emerged. While party patronage and partisanship did not disappear all at once, a creeping commercial logic changed the nature of news in profound ways, replacing party loyalty with economic imperatives. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, profitseeking publishers and investors sought to expand their readership to entice advertisers. These efforts led to what we might call “clickbait” today: an emphasis on the sensational, the dramatic, and the garish. Newspapers increasingly filled their column inches with various kinds of “lowbrow” entertainment, such as crime stories and pictures of scantily clad women, and reporting that tended toward exaggerated and even fabricated accounts—a style that would become known as “yellow journalism.”
By the late 1800s, such commercial excesses had become more pronounced as publishers sought ever-larger readerships that appealed to advertisers. Although publishers hoped to generate handsome sums of money, competition was fierce. One historian of this period has noted that media markets were “oversaturated; revenues were down; pay [for journalists] was poor; and publishers were locked in circulation battles, working to one-up one another for more subscribers—even if it meant engaging in some unsavory practices.” Under these conditions, reporters internalized publisher’s commercial logic and adhered to one rule: “do whatever it takes to get the story—even if it meant making things up.”34
These trends were especially pronounced in some of the country’s most successful newspapers. For example, in their 1898 coverage of the USS Maine, a US Navy battleship that exploded off the coast of Havana, Cuba, killing more than 250 Americans, both Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst New York Journal immediately attributed the act to the Spanish and ginned up support for military action with
“Remember the Maine” sloganeering. Although their role in instigating the Spanish American War is often overblown, newspaper coverage was typically reactionary and lurid.35
This style of reportage, however, would begin to backfire. The rise of yellow journalism incited public reaction against the news media’s commercial excesses. Initially, the greatest outcry came from the elite professional press, but growing disgust toward sensationalist papers soon spread among the broader public, especially as journalists began to target their own industry for malfeasance. Some public libraries and civic associations even threatened boycotts against the worst culprits, including the aforementioned New York World and New York Journal 36 Against this rising tide of press criticism, the newspaper industry began to adopt professional norms to help inoculate the press against more structural interventions, especially government regulation. But this process of professionalization would come only after decades of pressure from the public and from news workers themselves.
Early Radical Criticism of a Commercialized Press
The first wave of twentieth-century media criticism reacted against the many commercial excesses of advertising-driven newspapers.37 This criticism came from a number of sources, especially the radical press, which was experiencing its high-water mark of popularity. In 1910, the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason enjoyed an astounding readership of 750,000. Combined with other smaller outlets, the overall readership of radical newspapers at that time was approximately two million people.38 These outlets ruthlessly critiqued the commercial press for its profit-driven venality and for serving as a capitalist mouthpiece.
These conflicts at times escaped the printed page. Objectivity in the early 1900s was still far from a standard journalistic norm, and many commercial newspapers openly espoused strong ideological positions.39 In the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Times unremittingly editorialized against labor unions, the push for an eight-hour workday, and the closed shop.40 “This city is unique in having driven to bay the snarling pack of union labor wolves that have infested many other cities of the land and have snapped their redseeking jaws over the fallen form of industrial freedom,” asserted one editorial.41 The Los Angeles Times publisher, Harrison Gray Otis (referred to as “General Otis” due to his military background) saw himself leading an all-out
