If freedom of the press is vital, should the market determine what form of journalism prospers?

This much we can be assured of: for most tech bloggers and journalists, government intervention is about as popular as an endoscopy or Windows Vista. So it is hardly surprising to read the reaction to Columbia University president Lee Bollinger’s remarks that we should consider government funding of long-form journalism.

Mathew Ingram suggests that this amounts to a hand-out and a step to unnecessarily sustain an outdated business model, and I think that pretty much sums up the tech blogosphere’s reaction. So fine – what’s being argued is that the market is changing in response to the new cultural conditions of the web and that there is no need to preserve the past. But Michael Arrington’s response goes a step further and links the argument to free speech – that you cannot have the powers-that-be controlling the dissemination of information through society or imposing a particular form of speech when the public doesn’t want it. Fair enough right?

But let’s be a little skeptical – hopefully without descending into leftist paranoia. What is interesting to me are the three articles of faith that underpin Arrington and Ingram’s unease: 1) first, that the press operates as an ideological counterbalance to the government, something that is not as clear-cut as it appears; 2) that freedom of speech is at stake when the government sponsors the press but, curiously, is not so when that sponsor is a business entity; 3) and that the market is the best criterion to determine what form of journalism should prosper.

It is not difficult to point out numerous moments when the press reigned in the government and this is inarguably a good thing. But why is it that government sponsored media is a threat to free speech but that media supported by large corporations – some of whom have annual revenues larger than Canada’s GDP – is not? Given the amount of power held by large corporations, I think we would want balances on their influence too. And what of the effects of a market-driven response to journalism, particularly the long-form kind? It seems that what’s being dressed up in fancy language is that news should sell – if it doesn’t, its social import is of lesser importance. But I would argue that long-form journalism – the sort that engages broad, complex, difficult questions – needs to exist even if it is unpopular. It is vital that somebody think about the news instead of only reporting it.

And isn’t this the advantage of publicly funded media – that it can be assigned a budget and then act ‘in the pubic interest’? I’m not suggesting that state-run media is a solution to all our problems. But to me it seems that if we are looking for checks and balances in media, a mix of both privately- and publicly-funded media is a step in the right direction. Marketability cannot be the only criterion by which we determine what sort of journalism is popular. A journalist’s responsibility is not only to report the news but also to critique and analyse the contemporary situation. If journalism is a business like any other then how can it do anything but be caught up in economics and ideas of business? While governments are hardly ‘neutral’, their benefit is that they do not have to always be concerned with profit and marketability. There is, on rare occasion, a space for more than just money.

The solution, I think, is to make public news sites and companies the home of long-form journalism. Sustain the CBC, BBC and institutions like them with soap-operas, reality tv and music shows – do whatever you have to do to create a space for critique that isn’t owned by Disney or GE. While Mr. Ingram suggests that “if people want long-form, investigative journalism then I assume they will indicate that desire in the traditional way: by reading it, and in some cases even paying for it”, I think abandoning the dissemination of information to the market is akin to asking business interests to dictate the flow of information through society. To wit, just because people don’t want it, doesn’t mean they don’t need it.