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columbia journalism review
Only Public Funding Can Save Local Journalism--and Thus Democracy
Under our plan—the foundation of the new Local Journalism Initiative—policymakers in Washington would provide a lump sum to every county in the nation annually based on the county’s population to pay for nonprofit journalism within that county.
Dec 01, 2021
Readers of the Columbia Journalism Review are well aware of the importance of local news media; they have been the foundation of the American free press, and political democracy, since 1776. Daily newspapers have traditionally constituted the heart and soul of local news media, and they have provided the lion's share of original reporting upon which all other news media depend. That remains the case in the digital era as much of newspapering has transitioned online.
We need the funding to support independent, competitive, professional local news media. That money must come from the government.
CJR readers are also aware that local journalism as it has been known for 200 years has all but disappeared in most places in the United States over the past two decades. The business model for commercial journalism, based on advertising providing most of the income, is dead. Thanks to the internet, it will never return. All efforts to find a viable new business model for local journalism have failed, and investors have abandoned the field, except for private-equity funds on the lookout for distressed properties they can strip for parts.
The ramifications are increasingly clear, and endlessly depressing. It is not simply that functional self-government is impossible without credible journalism with all that forebodes; it is that local newspapers have provided the social glue that brought communities to life, as places where people see themselves as participating in a joint enterprise with people they know and understand and care about. That is disintegrating.
What remains less appreciated is that the founders of the United States regarded creating a free press a policy issue of the greatest possible importance. The Post Office was established in large part to distribute all newspapers virtually for free, and that is most of what it did the first century of this nation's existence. Likewise, that has been the opinion of the Supreme Court in its major decisions. As Justice Potter Stewart put it, the free press clause of the First Amendment is "a structural provision of the constitution." [his emphasis]
This is the public policy imperative facing the United States regarding journalism in 2021: We need the funding to support independent, competitive, professional local news media. That money must come from the government. It is the only viable option at a point when the market has shown that it cannot begin to sustain existing media, let alone usher in a renewal of bold speak-truth-to-power journalism. Of course, we cannot allow the government to pick and choose who gets the money, or engage in censorship. Any viable policy to support local journalism must allow the people to make of it what they will, and trust them in the process of self-government. It is time to stop pretending that can be done without public funding.
How best can the federal government intervene to produce these outcomes? The answer we provide herein is what we term the Local Journalism Initiative. Under our plan, policymakers in Washington would provide a lump sum to every county in the nation annually based on the county's population to pay for nonprofit journalism within that county.
Once every three years, people over 18 will be given three "votes" on how the county's funds should be distributed to three different LJI candidates based in their county. Why three votes for each person? A main objective of the LJI is to have multiple well-funded news media in every county, so people should get multiple votes. In lightly populated rural areas, several counties can be merged to generate a sufficient population base. Conversely in large metropolitan areas counties can be merged if the residents of the counties so desire. In the most populous counties people may get four or five or votes to guarantee diversity of voices.
How the money will be allocated will be determined by people in each county for qualified applicants. To be a qualified applicant for LJI funds, an enterprise must:
- Be formally identified and understood as non-profit
- Be functioning for six months prior to the election, so voters can see what the applicant actually does
- Be based in the home county with 75 percent of its salaries going to employees based in the home county
- Be completely independent; not a subsidiary of a larger nonprofit group
- Produce and publish original material at least five days per week on its website
Those candidates getting the most votes get a higher percentage of their county's LJI budget. No single applicant can get more than 25 percent of a county's annual budget, regardless of its vote total. An applicant must get at least 1 percent of the vote to qualify, or 0.5 percent of the vote in counties with over 1 million people. Diversity and competition are crucial.
Everything produced by federal funds must be made available immediately to everyone online and for free. In short, the principle is that journalistic organizations will be paid in advance, and what they produce primarily with public monies will be instantly put in the public domain and made available to all for free. The best check on abuses will be popular voting to determine the recipients.
The process will be overseen by the U.S. Postal Service, with elections taking place online and with print ballots available at or through the Postal Service. This is a renewal of the Postal Service's historic mission of sustaining independent and competitive journalism--a mission initiated by the founders of the American experiment and encouraged by their successors well into the 20th century.
There will be no content supervision by the government, no monitoring content to ascertain that it is "good journalism," or even journalism at all. The stipulations above will go a long way toward eliminating fraud. And if people elect to have disingenuous local news media? Just like elections in general, that is the possibility in a democracy.
The ultimate goal of the LJI is not simply to equal the optimum performance of the U.S. press system through history but to surpass it. Even at its best, U.S. journalism has reflected the view of large property owners and the well-to-do, and left dispossessed communities underserved, especially communities of color. One almost certain positive development from the LJI will be that communities of color across the nation will be in a position to have local news media that actually cover the issues in their neighborhoods, towns and cities seriously and thoroughly, produced by journalists from those communities. The LJI makes real a fundamental civil right, one at the heart of the American experiment: the right to a free press that gives everyone the information they need to make real the promise of democracy.
The immediate beneficiaries of the LJI will be the numerous local nonprofit news media that have already been formed, often by working journalists, in communities around the nation over the past decade. The LJI will prove to be an oasis for them. It will also make it practical for local journalists to take over dying local news media and convert them to nonprofit status. This is already happening in communities across the country, but often with much difficulty. The LJI would provide encouragement and support for journalists and their communities.
In big cities where historic daily newspapers are struggling to survive, and in smaller towns where weekly papers are shadows of their former selves, LJI could help local journalists and editors buy, sustain and reinvent publications that have withered under chain ownership.
Maintaining an existing publication, which has name recognition and contacts in the community, gives journalists a jumpstart. But they won't have so much of an advantage that other journalists cannot start competing publications. Indeed, we believe that, in short order, there will likely be a body of new non-profit news media engaged in generating local journalism and seeking LJI funds. This is the goal of the LJI.
The LJI is not hostile to the remaining for-profit local news media. We recognize how important it is to stop the bleeding in for-profit newsrooms, even as we build a necessary and more viable noncommercial system. To help make the transition, in its first six years (two terms) of existence, the LJI would allow local for-profit news media to compete for LJI funding in their county elections, providing they set up distinct nonprofit branches and use their LJI funding under the exact same terms as nonprofit LJI recipients. All remaining local for-profit newspapers and news sites are desperately searching for a workable business model, and if this grants them a lifeline to find a new way to operate in the black doing journalism, more power to them. And if profitability eludes them, they will be better positioned to transition to nonprofit status.
After the first six years, commercial news outlets--whether they are legacy media or startups--would close their nonprofit arms and become ineligible for LJI funding, unless they convert to full nonprofit status. This proposal has no interest in creating an army of investors and commercial lobbyists preying permanently on the government to bankroll their ventures.
At any rate, the right for anyone to launch their own news medium, commercial or otherwise, at any time will always be inviolate. Indeed, we can imagine how commercial news media could thrive alongside nonprofit journalism. Commercial firms, like anyone else, will always be able to publish anything produced by non-profit LJI recipients at no cost upon publication.
How much will it cost the taxpayers?
It is imperative that any system to solve the crisis must have a budget sufficient to get the job done and done well. Daily newspapers have been a massive industry in the U.S. economy until the past 15 years. The total revenues of U.S. daily newspapers constituted one percent of GDP as recently as 1960; that would amount to $232 billion in 2021. In 2000 the total revenues accounted for by daily newspapers was just under 0.6 of one percent of GDP. At that rate, the local journalism income for 2021 would be $133 billion. In 2021, the total daily newspaper revenues (including digital) will be less than $20 billion, and every year that number continues to decrease.
So providing the nation with a credible free press costs money, but, thanks to immense cost savings provided by the digital revolution, and being nonprofit, we do not need hundreds of billions of dollars. But we do need tens of billions, because the single most important and indispensable element of journalism remains skilled human labor, in competing newsrooms.
There actually is historical precedent. For much of the 19th century, when nearly all newspapers were delivered well below actual cost by the Post Office, the value of the postal subsidy, according to an 1840s government audit, effectively equaled 0.21 of one percent of GDP, which would amount to over $46 billion in 2021.
To be effective, the LJI would require an annual budget in this range. The best way to do that would be to set the annual budget at 0.15 of one percent of the previous year's GDP. Keeping the budget to this formula would account for economic and population growth, as well as inflation in coming years, and provide stability for planning. So for 2022 the budget would be just over $34 billion. After initial set-up and administration costs, that would leave at least $33.5 billion to go directly toward local news production.
The LJI funds would be distributed at the same rate for every person, so a county's LJI budget would be determined exclusively by its population. An annual budget of $33.5 billion divided by the US population of 333 million people, equals roughly $100 per capita. Therefore, a county of 250,000 people would get $25 million to produce and sustain local journalism. A county of 1 million people would get $100 million.
If people elect not to vote, the amount of the budget is not affected; it only means that fewer people would determine where the money goes.
The response of many when presented with a proposed budget like this is sticker shock, followed by "the cost is too high." The correct response, the one that guided our Founders, is what will the cost be if we don't do it? We can see signs all around us of what that looks like. We can no more lowball having a credible press system as our democracy crumbles than we would lowball military spending in the midst of a foreign invasion. The expenditure we propose is just over 4 percent of the annual cost of maintaining the military-industrial complex.
What are the upsides to this proposed solution?
There remains much to flesh out to make the LJI practical, and any plan must be flexible enough to account for unanticipated problems and issues. But there are some current institutions that will immediately benefit, and a few are are worth noting.
Local PBS, NPR and community media services present a special case for the LJI. The stations all do a variety of programming where journalism is generally a small percentage of the programming produced. Indeed, on these local stations, the journalism that is broadcast tends to be national in character, as opposed to local. LJI support seems appropriate, because it will create more local journalism where little or none existed before.
Therefore, local NPR, PBS and community stations can compete for and receive LJI funding, but it must go to dedicated journalism that is specifically within the home counties of the stations--in other words toward journalism they are not doing much of at present--and it must meet all of the LJI criteria otherwise. Public media will retain its existing budget allocation separate and apart from this legislation. The LJI is a tool for enhancing, as opposed to replacing, existing sources of public funding.
Likewise, there are numerous high schools, colleges and universities with student news media and, often, formal journalism education and departments. These programs are often filled with students eager to enter the field and make their mark, but they have nowhere to get gainful employment. The programs are floundering as the profession of journalism disappears. Now these programs and these students, of which there remain tens of thousands of optimistic participants every year, will have an important purpose again and an institutional basis for existence, much like schools of education.
Then there is Big Tech. Facebook, Google and other Internet platforms have become the main purveyors of journalism to people in the United States. This has led to considerable controversy over these companies' political power and their editorial judgment. With the LJI, Internet platforms will have popularly approved authentic local media to distribute in counties across the United States. The Internet platforms need simply acknowledge the popular news media choices in the counties people reside. This would seem to be in their own best interest. This also means the news produced through the LJI project can become ubiquitous in short order. Think of how Google search was able to help put Wikipedia on the map overnight.
The LJI also will offer philanthropists and foundations a way to effectively promote journalism at the local level. For the past 20 years, the philanthropic community has spent a good deal of money attempting to build up nonprofit journalism all across the nation. Most of these ventures have stagnated or failed because philanthropies seek to launch ventures but are in no position to support them in perpetuity. Now a philanthropy can give a two- or three-year grant to get a local newsroom up and running and, if it is well received, the LJI funds can kick in and take over thereafter.
One built-in outcome of the LJI is that it will result in several well-funded journalism outlets in each community, as had been the case for much of American history. By the final decade of the 20th century, this grand tradition of journalists competing to get stories, and to provide distinctive takes on the news, was deep in history's rear-view mirror. One-newspaper towns--with the newspapers increasingly owned by large chains with no particular interest in the community or in journalism--were the order of the day in all but a handful of communities. The LJI will allow for a renewal of the diversity and competitive vigor that is essential for a muscular free press.
We offer this proposal in order to jumpstart a policy debate that is desperately needed. There is no time to lose. To read a longer version of this proposal that includes citations as well as much more material on media economics, the history of journalism, the Constitution and the free press, and important international comparisons, please click here.
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What If We Covered the Climate Emergency Like We Did World War II?
Can we get this story right? Can we tell it whole? Can we connect the dots and inspire people with the possibility of change?
May 22, 2019
The following is an abridged version of remarks by TV newsman Bill Moyers, as prepared for delivery at the "Covering Climate Now" conference co-sponsored by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review on April 30. You can view the video version of the speech here. The "Covering Climate Now" project will bring journalists and news outlets together to dramatically improve how the media covers the climate emergency and its solutions. To learn more, you can reach out to coveringclimatenow@cjr.org.
I have been asked to bring this gathering to a close by summing up how we can do better at covering the possible "collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world," to quote the noted environmentalist David Attenborough, speaking at the recent United Nations climate summit in Poland.
I don't come with a silver bullet. And I'm no expert on the topic. Like you, I am just a journalist whose craft calls for us to explain things we don't understand. There's so much I don't understand that journalism became my continuing course in adult education. The subjects were so fascinating, and the work so fulfilling, that I kept at it "full speed ahead" for half a century, until two years ago, at the age of 83, I yielded finally to the side effects of a long life and retired (more or less). This is the first opportunity I have had since then to be with so many kindred spirits of journalism, and the camaraderie reminds me how much I have missed your company.
Many of us have recognized that our coverage of global warming has fallen short. There's been some excellent reporting by independent journalists and by enterprising reporters and photographers from legacy newspapers and other news outlets. But the Goliaths of the US news media, those with the biggest amplifiers--the corporate broadcast networks--have been shamelessly AWOL, despite their extraordinary profits. The combined coverage of climate change by the three major networks and Fox fell from just 260 minutes in 2017 to a mere 142 minutes in 20l8--a drop of 45 percent, reported the watchdog group Media Matters.
Meanwhile, about 1,300 communities across the United States have totally lost news coverage, many from newspaper mergers and closures, according to the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. Hundreds of others are still standing only as "ghost newspapers." They no longer have resources for even local reporting, much less for climate change. "Online news sites, as well as some TV newsrooms, are working hard to keep local reporting alive, but these are taking root far more slowly than newspapers are dying," observes Tom Stites of Poynter in a report about the study. And, alas, many of the news outlets that are still around have ignored or misreported the climate story and failed to counter the tsunami of deceptive propaganda unleashed by fossil-fuel companies and the mercenaries, ideologues, and politicians who do their bidding.
But events educate, experience instructs, and so much destructive behavior has been caused by climate disruption that more Americans today than ever seem hungry to know what's causing it, what's coming and what can be done about it. We journalists have perhaps our last chance to help people grasp the magnitude of the threat. My friend and journalist-turned-citizen-activist Bill McKibben told me last week that because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a 'climate moment' with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist--"to lock in and consolidate public opinion that's finally beginning to come into focus."
So, while I did not come with a silver bullet--there's no such thing--I do want to share a couple of stories that might help us respond to this daunting task.
I'll begin with how I first heard of global warming--before many of you in this room were born. It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary ("over my dead body," I might add,) I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president's science-advisory committee came by the office. One of them was the famous oceanographer, Roger Revelle. Famous because only a few years earlier he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening.
Now, he said, humans have begun a "vast geophysical experiment." We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth's temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth's coastal regions.
President Johnson took scientists seriously; as vice president, he had been chosen by President Kennedy to chair the intergovernmental committee overseeing NASA's charge to put a man on the moon. So Revelle and his colleagues got the green light, and by the fall of 1965 they produced the first official report to any government anywhere on the possible threat to humanity from rising CO2 levels. On November 6, Lyndon Johnson became the first president to mention the threat in a message to Congress.
President Johnson urged us to circulate the report widely throughout the government and to the public, despite its controversial emphasis on the need for "economic incentives" to discourage pollution, including--shudder!--taxes levied against polluters. (You can go online to "Restoring the Quality of Our Environment--1965," and read the entire 23-page section, headlined Appendix Y4--Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.)
This was in 1965! Nearly six decades ago! The future in plain sight.
But we failed the moment. One year later, largely preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, the president grew distracted, budgets for other priorities were squeezed, and the nation was fast polarizing. We flunked that first chance to confront global warming. Our failure to act--and the failure of administrations that followed us--metastasized into the crisis of today, the crisis journalists must figure out how to cover as if life on earth depends on it, which it does.
Which brings me to the second story I hope will be helpful in confronting this daunting challenge.
It's about the Murrow Boys: Edward R. Murrow and the young men, none of them yet famous, Murrow hired to staff CBS Radio in Europe on the eve of the Second World War.
I was a kid of about six in Marshall, Texas, when my parents bought a used console radio so they could listen to Franklin Roosevelt's speeches and I could follow the Saturday serials--especially "The Green Hornet," my favorite masked vigilante. That's how we discovered the Murrow Boys, by listening to the news every evening on CBS. Although I didn't yet know what to make of the events being reported, I showed up faithfully to sit on the floor between my parents in their chairs, all of us listening together.
I can still hear the voices coming from that stained brown console in the corner of our living room; still see the pictures their words painted in my mind's eye. Their names, hardly known when they started, became hallowed in the annals of journalism. Murrow of course, Eric Sevareid, William L. Shirer, Larry LeSeuer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, William Randall Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, Winston Burdett, Cecil Brown, Thomas Grandin, and the one woman among them, Mary Marvin Breckinridge. You can read about them in The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism, a superb book by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson.
These reporters spread across Europe as the "phony war" of 1939-40 played out, much like the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming plays out in our time. They saw the threat posed by the Nazis, and they struggled to get the attention of an American public back home exhausted and drained by the Great Depression.
In September of 1939, with Europe hours away from going up in flames, the powers at CBS in New York ordered Murrow and Shirer to feature an entertainment broadcast spotlighting dance music from nightspots in London, Paris, and Hamburg. Here's the account from Cloud and Olson:
They say there's so much bad news out of Europe, they want some good news," Murrow [in London] snapped to Shirer [in Berlin] over the phone. The show, scheduled to be broadcast just as Germany was about to rape Poland, would be called 'Europe Dances' ... Finally, Murrow decreed, "The hell with those bastards in New York. It may cost us our jobs, but we're just not going to do it.
And they didn't. They defied the bosses--and gave CBS one of the biggest stories of the 20th century, the invasion of Poland.
And still the powers in New York resisted. Through the rest of 1939 and into the spring of 1940, Hitler hunched on the borders of France and the Low Countries, his Panzers idling, poised to strike. Shirer fumed, "My God! Here was the old continent on the brink of war...and the network was most reluctant to provide five minutes a day from here to report it." Just as the networks and cable channels provide practically no coverage today of global warming.
In time I would meet Ed Murrow and follow him as senior correspondent for the documentary series he created after the war with Fred Friendly. Eric Sevareid became a mentor, before and after I succeeded him as commentator on The CBS Evening News. Howard K. Smith and I frequently corresponded and traded books. And I had casual conversations with Charles Collingwood at the little French cafe he frequented near our office on West 57th street. These men rarely talked details of the past. But I will never forget my debt as a journalist to their work, or what they did for our country.
Never in my own long career have I been as tested as they were. Or as you will be. Our own global warming "phony war" is over. The hot war is here.
My colleague and co-writer, Glenn Scherer, compares global disruption to a repeat hit-and-run driver: anonymous, deadly, and requiring tireless investigation to identify the perpetrator. There are long stretches of nothing, then suddenly Houston is inundated and Paradise burns. San Juan blows away and salt water creeps into the subways of New York. The networks put their reporters out in raincoats or standing behind police barriers as flames consume far hills. Yet we rarely hear the words "global warming" or "climate disruption" in their reports. The big backstory of rising CO2 levels, escalating drought, collateral damage, cause and effect, and politicians on the take from fossil-fuel companies? Forget all that. Not good for ratings, say network executives.
But last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientifically conservative body, gave us 12 years to make massive changes to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and to net zero by 2050. On his indispensable site, TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt writes that humanity is now on a suicide watch.
Soon, some of you will be traveling to the ends of the earth to report on this Great Disruption. To Indonesia, where oil-palm growers and commodities companies are stripping away forests vital to carbon storage. To the Amazon, where President Bolsonaro's government plans to open indigenous reserves to industrial exploitation, threatening the lungs of the Earth. To India, where President Modi pretends to be an environmentalist even as he embraces destructive development. To China, where President Xi's Belt and Road initiative, the biggest transportation-infrastructure program in the history of the world, threatens disaster for earth systems. You will go to the Arctic and the Antarctic to report on melting ice, and to the shores of African cities, Pacific atolls, and poor Miami neighborhoods being swallowed by rising oceans. And to Nebraska, and Iowa, and Kansas, and Missouri, where this spring's crop is despair as farmers and their families grieve their losses.
And some of you will go to Washington, to report on the madness--yes, I said madness--of a US government that scorns reality as fake news, denies the truths of nature, and embraces a theocratic theology that welcomes catastrophe as a sign of the returning Messiah.
Madness! Superstition! Destruction and death.
Can we get this story right? Can we tell it whole? Can we connect the dots and inspire people with the possibility of change?
What's journalism for? Really, in the war, what was journalism for, except to awaken the world to the catastrophe looming ahead of it?
Here's the good news: While describing David Wallace-Wells's stunning new book The Uninhabitable Earth as a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet, The New York Times reports it also offers hope. Wallace-Wells says that "We have all the tools we need...to aggressively phase out dirty energy..."; [cut] global emissions...[and] scrub carbon from the atmosphere.... [There are] 'obvious' and 'available,' [if costly,] solutions."
What we need, he adds, is the "acceptance of responsibility."
Our responsibility as journalists is to tell the story so people get it.
I wish I could go there with you to tell it. This is a very exciting time for journalism, despite our beleaguered newsrooms, our diminished ranks, and the power arrayed against truth. And I really do think this project (Covering Climate Now) could be the beginning of our redemption.
Over my long life I've seen things change quickly. After the Birmingham bombing. After Selma. Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate. The Berlin Wall. The pendulum can swing suddenly. The public can change its mind.
Which brings us back to the Murrow Boys. Late 1940. The start of the Blitz, with bombs blasting London to bits. A Gallup poll that September found that a mere 16 percent of Americans supported sending US aid to beleaguered Britain. Olson and Cloud tell us that, "One month later, as bombs fell on London, and Murrow and the Boys brought the reality of it into American living rooms, 52 percent thought more aid should be sent."
Americans had taken one step toward defeating fascism, and the Murrow Boys helped us take it. Of course, the journalists were only part of the cast, and I don't want to overrate their importance. But they were there. On the right side. At the right time. In the right way--reporting on the biggest story of all, the fight for freedom. For life itself.
Reporting the truth is always the basis for any moral authority we can claim as journalists. Reporting the truth about climate disruption, and its solutions, could be contagious. Our gathering today could be a turning point for American journalism.
With no silver bullet, what do we do? We cooperate as kindred spirits on a mission of public service. We create partnerships to share resources. We challenge media owners and investors to act in the public interest. We keep the whole picture in our heads--how melting ice sheets in the Arctic can create devastation in the Midwest--and connect the dots for our readers, viewers, and listeners. We look every day at photographs of our children and grandchildren, to be reminded of the stakes. And we tell the liars, deniers, and do-nothings to shove off: There's no future in naysaying.
As some of you know, I am president of the Schumann Media Center, a small nonprofit devoted to the support of independent journalism. The Center is the progeny of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, founded in Montclair, NJ, in l961 by a civic-minded couple whose offspring were brought up with a strong commitment to democratic values. Their support of my journalism on public television led us to join forces, which is how I became president of the foundation and now of the center. The family resolved to give away their wealth in their lifetime, and we are just about there; our resources are modest now, and we're almost done.
One of our last major gifts will be a million dollars to launch the Covering Climate Now project of Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation and to get the project through the first year. Other foundations and individual philanthropists will then have to step up to the challenge, and I believe they will.
This has been a good day of talking and thinking--now must come action. My colleagues at the Schumann Media Center wish all of you and all of those you represent--in newspapers, radio stations, local news, and major corporations--we wish all of you, because it will take all of you, every success.
I am grateful to the veteran environmental journalist Glenn Scherer for the research and ideas he contributed to this speech. His own impressive work can be found at MongaBay.org.
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Howard Schultz and the Media's Unlearned Lesson
The fact CNN chose Schultz for its second town hall of the season—ahead of a raft of serious candidates or potential candidates on both sides of the aisle—is yet another bad sign that the requisite lessons have not been learned
Feb 12, 2019
A BILLIONAIRE FLIRTS with a run for president and gets grossly disproportionate free airtime. We all know the punchline. Howard Schultz, the running-but-not-yet-running former CEO of Starbucks, has attracted intense media interest over the past two and a half weeks, sitting for a string of newspaper and broadcast interviews, including a profile on 60 Minutes. Last night, he became the second potential 2020 candidate, after Kamala Harris, to get CNN's town-hall treatment. In the run-up, prominent media-watchers criticized the network's decision to offer Schultz such an elevated platform; CNN's own polls, they pointed out, have Schultz way down. "These decisions can have a big effect on a candidacy," Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, told The Daily Beast. "But there's no coherent logic to them."
As had been the case in his recent interview round, Schultz offered little of substance last night: he repeatedly bashed "far left" and "far right" bogeymen without proposing specific, distinctive solutions of his own. It took 10 minutes of biographical soft soap to get to a policy question at all. When one came, on immigration, Schultz's answer was cliched and contradictory--"We should be building bridges and allow people in," but also securing the border to "not allow bad people in"--yet no request for clarification was made. Much later in proceedings, Poppy Harlow, CNN's moderator for the night, did start asking for details. When she pushed him, however, Schultz simply sidestepped, and the conversation moved on. "What would you do to fix it?" Harlow asked on veterans' healthcare. "You have to put the quality people in charge," Schultz replied.
Schultz faced tougher scrutiny over his personal finances and record in business. Occasionally, this overlapped with policy: after Schultz admitted he should pay more tax, Harlow pushed, repeatedly, for a percentage figure (she didn't get one). Otherwise, these questions felt wildly hypothetical. Do we really need to know what President Schultz would do with his Starbucks shares when the odds of that scenario are basically nil? Rich business people merit scrutiny, of course. But scrutiny is weakened when the forum in which it's administered confers a clear judgment of political legitimacy.
CNN does not deserve praise for grilling Schultz on his wealth when Schultz's wealth is the only reason he was on CNN. As Vox's Ezra Klein writes, "in American politics, money is a shortcut to legitimacy." Shutting out uber-wealthy candidates, or at least waiting a minute until they've proven they're serious, isn't censorship or bias--it's the media's responsibility to conserve a level political playing field, organized around substantive issues of concern to the voting public.
But as political scientist Lee Drutman tells Klein, "the media uses ability to spend money as a proxy for seriousness of campaign. And when the media bestows seriousness on a candidate, the public follows along." We're not passive stenographers of candidates' movements; our coverage choices can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Much ink has been spilled lately on how the media as a whole can do better going into 2020. The fact CNN chose Schultz for its second town hall of the season--ahead of a raft of serious candidates or potential candidates on both sides of the aisle--is yet another bad sign that the requisite lessons have not been learned. Maybe Schultz will find his policy stride, and a serious constituency that embraces it. Until he does, networks should save their airtime for candidates who already reached that point.
At the very least, town halls could be saved for candidates who are actually running. Whenever he was asked a tough, personal question last night, Schultz looked at Harlow with a furrowed brow and protested that he couldn't say as he wasn't running yet. "I think we're getting way premature!" he exclaimed at one point. For once, he had a point.
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If the President Writes It, Should USA Today Publish?
On Wednesday, USA Today handed over a section of its opinion pages to the president, allowing him to publish a piece “In which almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.”
Oct 12, 2018
News outlets have long held to the principle that when the president speaks, his words are newsworthy. President Trump, whose frequent lies and misleading claims are a feature of his communications strategy, has challenged that maxim during the 2016 campaign and since taking office. Instant fact checks, quick analysis, and contextual reporting have become vital strategies for any organization attempting to accurately cover Trump's words. But on Wednesday, USA Today handed over a section of its opinion pages to the president, allowing him to publish a piece "in which almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood," according to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler. Fact checks of the piece from the Associated Press, NPR, and numerous others soon followed.
The target of Trump's op-ed was the Democratic Party's plans for healthcare and immigration, which the president cast as a "radical agenda" that "would destroy American prosperity." As soon as the piece hit the Web, its publication was met with disbelief from journalists. "USA Today not only published a White House press release disguised as an 'op-ed by Donald Trump,' it is using its Twitter account to blast out the article's lies to 3.6 million followers," lamented the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale. "Opinions and interpretations are NOT the same as straight up LIES. And that is what @realDonaldTrump did in @USATODAY" tweeted MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle.
USA Today Editorial Page Editor Bill Sternberg pushed back against criticism, writing on Twitter that "there was considerable back and forth about particular factual assertions in the original submission. The degree of fact-checking is also apparent in the many hyperlinks in the digital version." Many of those links led to information that directly contradicted what the op-ed claimed (including two links to previous WaPo fact checks), so it's unclear why the paper didn't simply demand a correction to the piece before publishing. And readers of the print edition, of course, wouldn't have access to those links.
Opinion columns generally aren't subject to the same rigorous vetting that hard news stories receive, but they're also not supposed to be fact-free propaganda. Sternberg issued a statement claiming the piece, "was treated like other column submissions; we check factual assertions while allowing authors wide leeway to express their opinions." But given that health insurance premiums are rising, not "coming down," that Medicare is already a government-run program so Trump's scare tactic about bureaucrats controlling the program is absurd, and that Democrats generally have pushed to expand Social Security benefits, not "slash" them, whatever fact checking went on was obviously insufficient.
Throughout the 2016 campaign and continuing into the president's recent flood of rallies, news outlets have debated whether to run Trump's speeches live, given that he is prone to spout outright falsehoods with abandon. Responsible organizations have concluded that there are reasonable steps that can be taken to contextualize the false claims. But in providing a print platform for similarly mendacious puffery of the president's own actions, USA Today chose to ignore the lessons that should have been learned by now, and it deserves the scrutiny and criticism it has received.
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