At an FTC workshop on the future of media entitled, "How will journalism survive the Internet age?" this week, the usual suspects were begging for a hand out, led by Rep. Henry Waxman.
"Government's going to have to be involved, in one way or the other," to save journalism from an ongoing "market failure" that will only worsen without intervention, Waxman said...
"This recent depression in the media sector is not cyclical," Waxman said. "It is structural."
"Congress can't impose a solution" to that structural problem, he said. But the government should partner with the media industry to ensure a sound future for journalism...
"There needs to be a consensus within the media industry and the larger community it serves" before the government acts, Waxman said. "We have to figure out together how to preserve that kind of reporting."
If you're afraid that a liberal press coddled by a big-spending government might just make journalists even more predisposed to think of the federal government as a benign and generous force meant to pry others' "fair share" from stingy Republican hands, stop worrying.
Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of National Public Radio, cited her own organization's history of criticizing the government even though it is federally subsidized.
"No news organization worth its salt is going to accept money with conditions attached," she said. "... If anything the opposite problem is true: 'Oh, they're funding us. Let's look more deeply into them.'"
All the press will be like NPR? Well, then. That's a different story.
On the other hand, the workshop also brought together strange bedfellows Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington, and Jeff Jarvis. All three were refreshingly anti-interventionist. Jarvis blogged about his testimony at the workshop:
And I told Liebowitz that the future of news will be entrepreneurial not institutional; the institutions had and blew their chance. What we need is a level lawn where the tender shoots of these new businesses can grow without government trampling them on its way to try to protect the legacy players.
But the commissioner's title for this "workshop" alone - "How will journalism survive the internet age?" - is prejudicial, a foreshadowing of the results they have already prescribed: it implies saving the legacy players when, as the Knight Foundation's Eric Newton said at the hearings today, journalism doesn't need to be saved, it needs to be created. (The reason I'm not there today is that I am teaching my entrepreneurial journalism course. That's one way to save journalism: build it.) The choice of speakers was itself prejudicial: mostly the old players who played their tiny violins. The questioning was prejudicial: an FTC bureaucrat threw a newspaper exec a soft ball to decry aggregators and suggest how he wanted to get money out of them (not hearing the idea that aggregators who are adding value to the content). Liebowitz's presumptions about the event were prejudicial; in his opening talk, he said he has already scheduled more hearings to talk about copyright (read: changing copyright to favor the dying institutions).
Waxman, NPR, and liberal media non-profits like Free Press want government to "fix" this "market failure" by throwing money at, well, the people Waxman, NPR, and liberal media non-profits think are worthy. But as Jarvis says, this is not a market failure:
It's a market, doing what markets do. Let the market do that.
Simple and truthful though it is, that sentiment is a hard sell during this administration. I'm glad at least a few left-leaning folks are embracing it.
