Monday, July 06, 2009

All the News That's Fit to Subsidize   [Mark Hemingway]

After his employer gets caught trying to peddle influence with the Obama administration, the Washington Post's blogging wunderkind Ezra Klein asks, "Should Newspapers Be Funded by the Government?":

The question, then, is whether we want newspapers (and magazines, and so forth) so agonizingly vulnerable to these pressures. The news, after all, is not a market good. Among other things, it is not profitable to sell it. But we think society needs it. ...

We have public universities and public centers for disease research and public firefighting departments and a public military and public roads. Why should news be different?

You can argue that it must be oppositional to government, of course, and so government funding is a conflict of interest. But many European countries have solved that problem by developing automatic funding structures free of government influence.

So in short: The solution to concern about the Washington Post jumping into bed with the federal government is to encourage the federal government to jump into bed with the Washington Post. Surely, that will take care of conflict of interest concerns . . .

Matt Welch, who's covered this territory before, bluntly dismantles Klein's thinly veiled apologia for his employer's misdeeds. Then Michael Moyihan — a former longtime resident of Sweden who actually knows something about the Swedish and European news subsidies Klein is attempting to praise — queues up to shoot more fish in the barrel.

07/06 11:26 PMShare