Journalism Is in Crisis. Only Public Funding Can Save It.
For the Left, it’s easy to hate the media, with its entrenched centrist biases and loyalty to the status quo. But a world without high-quality news is a world where meaningful democracy is impossible. That’s the message of media scholar Victor Pickard, who argues for a transformation of our media system away from the model of commercial news and toward a “public option.”
All Americans should have access to a baseline level of news and information. To make that happen, we not only need regulatory interventions when it comes to the big media conglomerates, but journalism should be universally and publicly provisioned. (Yaoyu Chen / Unsplash)
Most of the Left’s media critiques focus on the mainstream media’s blatant ideological defense of the status quo. This emphasis is understandable since we frequently find ourselves either ignored or absurdly demonized by mainstream news outlets — recall MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid bringing on a bogus “body language expert” to confirm that Bernie Sanders hates women, or Chris Matthews comparing Sanders’s victory in Nevada to the Nazi invasion of France.
What gets less attention on the Left is the prospect of building a media system that isn’t so inclined to advance the interests of those in power. In other words: there’s something terribly wrong with our media, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with media in the abstract. On the contrary, access to timely, factual, high-quality journalism is a social good and one that the Left should seek to secure for all people by waging the fight to establish public media alternatives.
In his new book Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, Victor Pickard explains why our commercialized media system is so dysfunctional and disliked and why the Left should make it a priority to build a better one. Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Jacobin’s Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht spoke to him for an episode of the podcast The Vast Majority. That conversation has been excerpted and condensed below.
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