CounterSpin interview with Victor Pickard on the crisis of journalism
Janine Jackson interviewed U Penn's Victor Pickard about the crisis of journalism for the March 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The fact that every news program is peppered with advertising, even on public broadcasting; that the newspaper you hope will give a fair accounting of, for example, economic inequality, will bring you that story next to an ad for $2,000 shoes; the fact that the cost of learning about the world means sifting through mountains of media designed to get you to buy stuff, via outlets that are themselves owned by massive, profit-driven corporations—well, for many of us, that's just how it is.
But it isn't how it is everywhere, or how it's always been, or how it has to be. Changing things isn't just a matter of policy or law, but of reimagining the role of journalism in our public life.
Victor Pickard: Thanks so much for having me, Janine.
JJ: I guess I'll ask you to start by just outlining what you see as the core troubles with what we've got now, the current media landscape. What sets it on a course that runs afoul of democracy, or democratic aspirations, as I say?
VP: There are so many troubling signs right now. It's difficult to know exactly what to focus on, but to speak in really broad strokes, I would point to the massive recent layoffs, especially in our newspaper industry. The LA Times recently cut over 22% of its newsroom. Before that, the Washington Post had cut about 10% of its employees.
And these, of course, are both billionaire-owned newspapers. Until recently, they were considered the success stories in our new, very challenging digital age for journalism.
But I think this all points to a bigger picture. In many ways, what we're seeing are the continuing death throes of an industry that's reached a point of no return. And if we turn back to 2005—and of course at that point, it's not as if we were living through a perfect golden age for journalism—but since 2005, we've seen about two-thirds of our newspaper journalists and about a third of newspapers disappear. And this is creating vast and expanding news deserts, where tens of millions of Americans have access to little or no local news media whatsoever. And it's creating all kinds of problems for any semblance of democratic self-governance.
And, of course, when we're talking about the newspaper industry, it's not as if it's just about nostalgia, but it happens to be the primary source for most original news and information and original reporting that permeates through our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose newspapers, we lose local journalism, and that's a tragedy for all of us.
JJ: I think many folks might think, “Oh, I don't even read the newspaper.” But the work that newspapers do then shows up on television and on radio, and maybe it's the behind-the-scenes investigation, the actual reporting, and you think, “Well, I don't read the paper, so it doesn't affect me.” But, of course, it obviously affects the whole climate of what we know, what we know about what the government is doing, what we know about what is happening around the world, right? So you don't have to read a paper to be affected by this.
VP: Exactly. I mean, even hearing word-of-mouth information from our neighbors, or gleaning commentary from various social media feeds, or looking at cable television, if you listen closely, most of the original news information still traces back to the beleaguered newspaper industry. And, of course, things like what's happening with the local school board or city hall or our state legislatures, these are all beats that traditionally and historically have been covered by newspaper reporters, and those beats are rapidly disappearing.
JJ: I do think that folks can see, if they're looking, the layoffs and the closing of outlets, and as you mentioned, lots of people live in kind of flyover towns, where they can get news from the nearest big city, hundreds of miles away, but there's nothing local and serious. In a recent piece with NYU's Rodney Benson, you take issue, though, with what some folks have presented as the savior, as a way forward, namely benevolent billionaires.
VP: That's right. And there's long been this kind of wishful thinking that, OK, if the advertising model for supporting journalism is no longer viable, and if people aren't paying enough for their news and information, then maybe we can look to these so-called benevolent billionaires to swoop in and save the day.
And, at best, they were always expected to maybe save a newspaper here and there. But even those hopes are proving to be ill-founded, and even billionaires face various kinds of sticker shock when they're losing tens of millions of dollars a year on their pet projects. So I don't think, and this was never a systemic fix to begin with, but I don't think that they can even save some of our major newspapers, as was previously hoped.
JJ: Let's turn to the forward-looking, I guess. You talk about non-reformist reforms, which, I love that language, and I'll ask you to kind of say what you mean there, but I also wanted to just kind of throw in there, are there lessons or models from other countries that could be meaningful here?
VP: I do think it's always useful to look internationally, and also historically, at some of our own experiments that we've tried here in the US, to expand our imagination about what's possible, to glean best practices. And I think, at the very least, we can point to some, actually many, democracies, most democracies around the planet fund robust public broadcasting systems, public media systems, which I think is always a good conversation starter, to at least begin imagining what might our public media system look like if we start living up to global norms, and actually funding our systems accordingly.
But then, also, to look at how countries like Norway and Sweden, some of the Western and Northern European countries, are directly funding their newspaper industries, or at least indirectly subsidizing them. And I think these are all things that we could start thinking about, especially as it's so clear that there simply is not a commercial future for many kinds of journalism, especially local journalism. So we have to start thinking outside of the market, and really pushing for a paradigm shift, when we see journalism as not just a commodity whose worth is determined by its profitability on the market, but rather as a public service upon which democracy depends.
JJ: What do you mean when you talk about reforms as being non-reformist? What are you getting at there?
VP: It's kind of a wonky phrase, but what I'm really trying to get at is, we've often heard of this dichotomy between reform versus revolution: Can we radically change our core systems overnight, or is this more of a gradual reformist process that we make small tweaks as we can? And there's actually a middle road, where I think we can focus on these structural reforms in the short term, with an eye towards a more radical distant horizon, where we're really seeking to transform the system.
And this is sounding a little bit abstract, but to give a few examples, if we today recognize that we need to salvage the journalism that's still being practiced, so we would try to transition these failing commercial models into nonprofit or at least low-profit institutions, with an eye towards a more ambitious project, where we really try to build out a new public media system, so a system that's not reliant on benevolent billionaires or other forms of private capital, but instead is reliant on public financing, that's federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled and governed.
And I think that's what we need to place on the horizon, to have this sort of long-term, might-take-decades-to-get-there, but to really have that as our north star, instead of constantly reacting to whatever problem is arising at the moment.
JJ: I like that you mentioned that you don't have to only look overseas. You can also look to our own history. Some people may remember that public broadcasting in this country began with some lovely language about providing "a forum for controversy and debate," and for including voices that would "otherwise be unheard," specifically that commercial networks didn't want to air.
So, in other words, public media weren't intended to be a more edumacated version, a less shouty version, of the same perspectives we got from commercial media. They didn't write the Public Broadcasting Act so we could get Masterpiece Theater.
But we know it lost its way with a congressional short leash for funding. So now we have PBS programs bringing us stories about weapons while being sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
You've already started to tell us about your vision of what public media could look like. I’d ask you to expand on that, but also, we know that, as Americans, we're told to hate the government; private is always better. As soon as you talk about government funding or state funding for broadcasting, people talk about state censorship, as though there were no such thing as corporate censorship. But talk a little bit more about what your vision of public media could be.
Victor Pickard: "The government is always involved in our news information systems. But the question is, how should it be involved?"
VP: That's right. And to get there, I will hit on a couple of points you just mentioned in passing, which is this notion that the government isn't involved in our media system. It's a libertarian fantasy. The government is always involved in our news information systems. But the question is, how should it be involved? Should it be serving corporate interests, or should it be serving public interest? And that's really, as a democratic society, a question we should always be grappling with, in trying to design our news information systems, so that they are privileging democracy over profit imperatives.
And if you look at our history, public media subsidies are as American as apple pie. Going back to the postal system, which initially was primarily a newspaper delivery infrastructure that we heavily subsidized. In today's dollars, it would be tens of billions of dollars towards disseminating news and information to far-flung communities across the country.
The same was true for broadcasting, for the internet: that came about through massive public subsidies. And certainly looking at our lost promise of public broadcasting, that was always meant to be an alternative, a structural alternative, to the commercial system, to this systemic market failure that's always there with commercial media outlets.
So I think we need to recover that initial ideal, and really try to not just build out and redesign our public infrastructures, but entirely reimagine them. We could be using post offices, libraries, public broadcasting stations, these all could be outlets to serve as these public media centers where every community across the country would have its own anchor institution of newsrooms that look like the communities they purportedly serve, to make sure they're owned and controlled by journalists and community members themselves.
So this is the kind of non-reformist reform vision that I think we should be working towards. Again, it's not happening tomorrow, or even next year, but that's something we need to work towards.
JJ: It's interesting, the idea that government somehow is not involved in the media that we have. I seem to remember Bob McChesney saying something like, when the government gives out broadcast licenses, they aren't setting rules; they're picking winners.
VP: That's right. Yeah, I mean, those licenses are essentially monopolistic privileges for these corporations to use the public airwaves. And that's a tremendously valuable public resource that we all should be able to benefit from. And this is just one example of where we really need to take media out of the market. We need to separate capitalism and journalism, which was always a very troubling union, to say the least.
JJ: And then, of course, in an election year, when you start to see those election ads, you have to remember that this is politicians and political parties just dumping money into media outlets for political advertising.
VP: That's right. It's essentially a payola system, pay to play. And we're constantly being bombarded with these kinds of corporate messages, when we're not discussing the climate crisis, we're not discussing growing inequality, and so many crises facing us today. And that's ideally what a publicly owned and controlled—so not just public in name only, but actually serving the public—a system based on those logics, I think, could try to live up to these democratic ideals.
JJ: I so appreciate projects like the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, that shift the focus, as we're talking about, from shoring up existing outlets toward asking whether the community's information needs are being met. I love that language means something, and that is a categorically different project.
VP: Yeah, that's exactly how it should be framed: based on needs, not the profit imperatives of a small number of investors and advertisers and media owners.
And I'm glad that you mentioned the New Jersey project, because this is a proof of concept that we're seeing replicated in other states as well, similar programs taking off in California, most recently, Wisconsin and Illinois. DC is looking at a news voucher program.
So there are all these exciting projects and experiments that show that government can indeed play a very productive role in guaranteeing the level of news and information that all members of society should have access to. It's a way of empowering local communities, and I really think we need to see more of this, but, of course, we also need to scale it up beyond just state governments, to a federal government level that can really guarantee that sort of universal service ethic to all members of society.
JJ: And I would encourage folks to go back and listen to an interview that I did, with Mike Rispoli from Free Press, specifically about that New Jersey project. It wasn't like a foundation coming in and saying, “Let's do this.” It involved early, formative input from a whole range of community groups. It really is a bottom-up conversation.
And I think that also reflects a recognition that it's the already marginalized, economically and otherwise marginalized, that suffer currently the most from media distortions, and from the problems we're discussing with media. So this way forward is not just—and I appreciate that you're saying that it takes time—but it's not just an end goal. The process itself is something good, I think.
VP: That's absolutely right. And Mike Rispoli knows better than anyone I'm aware of that this really needs to begin with community organizing. It must be a grassroots effort. It can't be dropped in. As important as the foundations are in trying to feed this growing nonprofit sector, we really have to make sure we're not just decommercializing media, but we're also democratizing media. And I think those kinds of efforts that begin with local communities, making sure that they're involved at the ground floor, is so key. And I'm cautiously optimistic we're going to be seeing more of these experiments take root across the country.
JJ: And then, once you see it working—as you say, proof of concept—there's an imagination effort that needs to happen. And I think people are tired and beleaguered and have other things to do. So to have a project happen and see, “Oh yeah, that can happen,” that is a tremendous addition of energy towards making it happen in other places and other times, because people see that it is genuinely possible, and they won't be throwing their energy down a hole.
VP: That's so true. And so much of this is, as you say, about really expanding our imagination about what is possible. We've been so conditioned to think that if the market doesn't support something, that it's just going to have to wither away, as unfortunate as that might be. And these kinds of experiments show there is something we can do about it. We do have agency, we can intervene. These are political choices, and we can choose to have a much more democratic media system that serves us all.
JJ: Let me ask you, finally, it might sound a little bit afield, but I don't think so. The subhead on the book is Confronting the Misinformation Society, and we sometimes say at FAIR that if our purpose was to make the New York Times suddenly much better, well then we would just pull up the covers, because that's not happening. But we do think that we help people understand how to read the New York Times, and not to be affected or influenced by it in exactly the same way that they might have.
And so I just wanted to ask you, where does media literacy fit into this? It's not a no/but, it's a yes/and, because at the same time, we need to be helping folks navigate the system that we've got, so that they can see the omissions and the need for better.
VP: That's exactly right. It needs to always be an essential tool in our toolbox for really trying to decipher the predictable patterns in our heavily commercialized media system. And I think that is a way of building up agency. It's not going to structurally transform the entire system, but I think if we understand the structural critique, that we see the political economy behind these news outlets, we understand what are the commercial logics that are driving them to tell these kinds of stories and not others, to talk to these people and not other people, I do think that that is so important for us to do, and that's certainly what I've dedicated my career to doing, and I'll continue doing my best to try to really cultivate this critical consumption of our news media.
JJ: We've been speaking with Victor Pickard. The book Democracy Without Journalism? is available from Oxford University Press, and you can find the piece “Saving the News Media Means Moving Beyond the Benevolence of Billionaires” on TheConversation.com, as well as Common Dreams and various other places. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
VP: Thank you, Janine. It was so great talking to you.
