Money Changers in the Temple of Democracy: Soft Censorship, Corporate Control, and the Future of American Journalism

Goodman Contest: John W. Connelly

The following is a runner-up in the Paul Goodman Essay Contest.

IT IS not a controversial or particularly original observation that in order to maintain democracy, a society needs what we usually refer to as a “free press.” This ideal has never been an easy one to uphold, and in our era of market mentality and technologically driven impermanence, American journalism is particularly distressed. We already know what this means for the public sphere: fewer voices available to the populace, the desires of moneyed interests left unchallenged, newspapers around the country closing or facing bankruptcy, public broadcasting threatened, and the information needed to cultivate healthy civic debate no longer readily available. To put it bluntly, the crisis facing American journalism needs to be rectified if our system of government is to continue to function.

The Founders saw the presence of a strong, independent press as a necessity for self-governance. Not only is respect for the ideal of a free press apparent in the straightforward language of the First Amendment, it is also evident in early American legislation. Early newspapers were favored with low mailing rates, allowing them to flourish. Thomas Jefferson famously stated, he would “rather have newspapers without a government than government without newspapers.” This makes a lot of sense. Jeffersonian democracy is, above all, a series of experiments dealing with how a government should be run. The press simply ensures that the findings of those experiments are a matter of public record, and that the experiments themselves are conducted ethically.

This is not to say, of course, that the history of free press in the United States is an untarnished one. Journalistic institutions have never been completely safe from government coercion; in 1798, for instance, John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts that made criticism of government officials illegal. Throughout the history of the United States, newsrooms have been raided, editors arrested, and journalists harassed by the state. However, although it is true that holding dissenting beliefs or asking inconvenient questions have never been completely safe pursuits, recently, a more troubling form of censorship has emerged. Unlike “hard censorship,” which can be fought in the courts of law and public opinion, “soft censorship,” that is, censorship in the form of financial pressures from both corporate and governmental interests, affects the field in unseen ways.

Political theorist Sheldon Wolin speaks in his book Democracy Incorporated of “inverted totalitarianism.” Whereas traditional totalitarianism accomplished its goals through coercion and intimidation, inverted totalitarianism is much more subtle, stemming from corporate takeover of the state. This process requires a press much like our current one, in which the pursuit of profits has trumped the pursuit of truth and in which constant fear of economic failure prevents news media from fulfilling the role of journalism as a public good. As Wolin writes, “our government need not pursue a policy of stamping out dissidence—the uniformity imposed on opinion by ‘private’ media conglomerates performs the job efficiently.” This effect is apparent in, for instance, the illegal and unethical conduct of former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson in attempting to manipulate the politics behind PBS broadcasting, or in Wolin’s example of Federal Communications Commission influence affecting the tone of a made-for-television movie about Ronald Reagan. However, soft censorship is not applied only by governments. In fact, in our society, the perpetrators of soft censorship are most likely representatives of corporate and not governmental interests. Much has been made of the failure of journalists to ask crucial questions in the lead up to the war in Iraq. This failure had much more to do with a desire on behalf of corporate owners not to appear unpatriotic, a surefire way to lose advertisers and viewers or readers in the hyper-patriotic fever following the September 11, 2001 attacks. This example may be the rule rather than the exception.

However, even if we were to solve the dilemma of soft censorship, it is still only a part of a much larger problem. We have lost the understanding of journalism as a public good in this country. The Fourth Estate has been divided up between ever-expanding corporate mega-conglomerates. The results have not been pretty in American newsrooms. The transformation of newspapers from tools of the democratic process to profit-driven vehicles has resulted in their decline. This decline cannot be blamed, as conventional wisdom tells us, on the rise of the Internet; its roots reach back at least to the postwar period. It simply is more profitable for the companies who own newspapers to cover fewer stories, and to treat those stories that they do cover with less attention then they deserve.

Americans only began to think of newspapers in terms of profit in the last century. Advertising had, by the late nineteenth century, started to provide the bulk of the funding for journalistic endeavors. However, advertisers needed to court newspapers less and less in the past century, and the money has slowly moved away from the newspaper industry. Broadcast journalism is not in a much better state; it is much more cost efficient for networks to run “reality” programming or to focus on “soft news” puff pieces than it is to fund quality investigative reporting.

These problems were not always present in American society. Early Americans, besides simply creating different mailing rates for news publications, spent a great deal of money in order to create subsidies to keep publications running. As John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney wrote in the Nation, “press subsidies may well have been the second greatest expense of the federal budget of the early Republic, following the military. This commitment to nurturing and sustaining a free press was what was truly distinctive about America compared with European nations.” The Founders did not just guarantee a free press in theory, they guaranteed one in practice.

Of course, saving modern journalism requires more than a simple return to early-nineteenth-century subsidies, but subsidies do represent a good starting point. As Paul Starr of Princeton University said in testimony before Congress,

Democratic governments elsewhere, notably in northern Europe, have successfully used subsidies to maintain competition and diversity in the press without limiting its freedom…Today those countries in northern Europe that have invested public funds in news have higher levels of newspaper readership and civic literacy than we do in the United States.

Subsidies, of course, would have to be viewpoint neutral and should not favor one medium or source above another.

Perhaps Starr’s most interesting suggestion is that we should grant newspapers a special tax-exempt status. We would not be able to give newspapers nonprofit status under current laws without requiring them to avoid making political endorsements. Requiring publications to sacrifice this longstanding tradition is not in line with the ideal of the free press. Starr proposes the creation of a new kind of tax-exempt nonprofit specifically for news media, one that is allowed to express political views.

I am not denying that these measures will be difficult to manage. Saving journalism will require a substantial change to our tax system as well as millions spent to maintain institutions no longer considered important by many. We would also be required to create a strong, independent committee free from political manipulation in order to distribute public funds; it does us no good to be free of soft censorship at the hands of corporate entities only to become subject to soft censorship at the hands of government. Such solutions may seem utopian, but this does not negate their importance. Paul Goodman once wrote that Americans had “lost the spirit of their pragmatic philosophy…we pay a good deal of attention to ‘methods’ in solving of problems…but the right method has ceased to be the particular solving of the concrete problem.” We must, then, find ways to make the rather modest proposals of McChesney, Nichols, and Starr politically practical. The media reform movement is making great strides in this regard. But it is worth noting that the movement itself is not perfect. David Greenberg, who teaches journalism and media studies and history at Rutgers University, and has written for Dissent, warns that we must keep a skeptical eye on such a movement, and that although some of what is being recommended by media reform groups is certainly laudable, some of their concerns may be misplaced. Even so, we cannot afford to deny the need for quality public sector journalism. PBS is a great example of what public financed journalism can accomplish. When many broadcast journalists failed to question the claims of the Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War, shows like Now with Bill Moyers did just that. While much of the mainstream media carried confusing or convoluted reports on the economic meltdown of 2008, Frontline turned out high-quality, easy-to-understand reporting. These examples are the best counter argument to anyone who would claim that public funding of journalism leads to governmental control of the news; the opposite, in fact, seems to be true.

It is important here to stress that I am not suggesting a regulation of corporate media. I am a First Amendment purist. It would not be worth protecting the American free press if it meant protecting certain presses. If a media conglomerate wishes to refuse subsidies or continue to operate without nonprofit status it should be permitted to do so. I believe that there is a place for corporate media within democracy, as long as it is balanced by media not motivated solely by profit.

Perhaps not every idea discussed above will work, but these ideas do deserve a fair hearing. In fact, it is imperative that they have it, while it is still possible to save American journalism. The newsroom always has been, and always will be, the temple of democracy. I believe that this offers an important metaphor. After all, churches have long had a tax exempt status in the United States, and this practice is very rarely deemed controversial.

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John W. Connelly is an undergraduate student at Rutgers University, where he is enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program and in the Educational Opportunity Fund Program.