Freedom, the press, and freedom of the press

I recently attended an ICA debate called Paywalls, Ebooks and the Death of Print. It wasn’t so much a debate about whether print was dying, but a discussion about how the institution of news could be saved, and who should save it.

The usual suspects here are industry, technology and philanthropy. But on this occasion, panelist André Schiffrin brought another contender to the table: government. Whoah now. Government?

This was a new one for me, and I spent the first week after the debate thinking it through. Could citizens rely on government to facilitate a free press? Could the state fund a radically restructured news ‘industry’? 

In a sense, the idea was appealing: the government could just fund the industry that’s already in place. No need to invent our way out of this mess, and no worries about members of the Rich List having second thoughts on good deeds and leaving us press-less.

And I’ll admit, as a sleepy-eyed optimist living in relatively checked-and-balanced, free-to-speak London, where maybe, *maybe* such a thing miiiiiight be possible... I kinda, sorta warmed up to the idea.

And then I went to Belgrade and was reminded of the horrific things that can happen when the state controls the press. 

Worst-case scenarios

In the former Yugoslavia, the national television studios (Radio Television Serbia, or RTS) were run by the government. The mainstream press depended on, and was an extension of, the state. Former President Slodoban Milosevic used the press as a political weapon for many years, and on the night of 23 April 1999, as part of a response to the conflict in Kosovo, Nato bombed RTS. Sixteen people were killed.

I don’t want to get too political because that’s not the purpose of this post (so please let’s keep any discussion in the comments on the topic of the news industry, not politics). The reason I share this photo is because it reminds me why the press must remain free to report on governments, politics and wars, and not become entangled in them.

A cultural problem with economic symptoms

The news industry is in crisis because newspapers are so heavily linked to advertising – and that, in turn, is linked to the whole concept of the freedom of the press. In the 1880s, the British press freed itself from stamp duty – this meant newspapers could be free to consumers, as they were paid for via advertising. As Roy Greenslade put it, 

NewsCorp was founded on the belief that the words you read every day would be backed up by advertising.

So the whole profit thing seems a bit misplaced – corporations didn’t see themselves as purveyors of information, but as profitable businesses. The identity we assign the press – performers of a public service – is something it evolved into. And lo, the industry’s identity crisis: the driver of profit, but also the performer of a public service. 

All was fine while advertising revenue kept plenty of publishers in pocket, but as readers and advertisers flocked to the web, profits dropped. The web is taking away the money that once supported newspapers, and newspapers are responding by cutting editorial funding. Fewer journalists means less content... and less content means fewer reasons to buy that particular paper... which brings us back to square one.

For Schiffrin, one question matters:

How do we keep the content? All the questions about how we distribute content are secondary. If the material isn’t there, then it doesn’t matter what the technology does.

What Schiffrin said really stuck with me. How we can continue to have the content that we need in any democracy, when all of these forces – technological, financial, cultural – are working against the process we have always relied upon to generate that content?

So who should fix this?

Schriffrin likes the tax on the machine approach, a la Britain’s TV licence – why not tax Google (surely the kingpin of the digital economy) and direct proceeds to the fourth estate? He also cited the Norwegian approach where every political paper gets government money, and towns with just one newspaper get money towards a second.

But these approaches necessitate governmental involvement, which makes me uncomfortable. What if it all goes wrong, as it has before? 

I’m not missing the point that publishers are often not very different to politicians, and that in many cases (viz, Rupert Murdoch) reading someone’s paper is akin to soaking up their ideology, but the idea of the press so blatantly hopping into bed with the government really makes me squirm.

Greenslade suggested that if we can find an arms-length way to fund broadcasters, as we do with the BBC, perhaps we can do the same for newspapers and books. Perhaps. I’d like to know what others think about this.

I think the best answer to the question of who should fix this is “whoever can”. Google is offering $5 million in grants to encourage digital innovation . Industry can do some things, too – panelist David Roth-Ey pointed out that the book publishing industry has learned from what went wrong with the music industry (ignored digitisation to its peril; now we have a monopoly) and perhaps some of those lessons can be fed back into publishing in general. The Independent has just launched a new daily, i – perhaps putting recent lessons learned into action.

Freedom of the press and cultural diversity

Ultimately, we’re not talking about a pinch in the news industry, but the loss of cultural diversity. We need free discussion and debate. Running out of content would mean an end to meaningful discussion about how we live, which would be catastrophic for our society. In Schiffrin’s words, 

If you don’t have publishers going after the real story, confronting the lies of our government, you’re going to be in real trouble... and if you look at the first US-Iraq war, we were.

I don’t think this would ever happen, but to leave the discussion there would be to miss all three speakers’ central point: the problem of the future of news isn’t a technological problem, nor is it an economic problem. It’s a cultural problem and it very urgently needs to be solved.