Suffice it to say that the journalism we need to save in order to preserve democracy is not fluff or advertorials but, instead, what Alex S. Jones (not the infamous talk show host) called in his 2009 book Losing the News the “iron core” of reporting on politics, government, business, the economy, the environment, and other things that citizens need to know about.
Then there’s the more than $15 billion a year that our telecom companies are raking in from internet service provision at profit margins approaching 50 percent.
As Bill Birnbauer noted in his 2019 book The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States, “investigative stories costing thousands of dollars can deliver millions of dollars of benefits to society through policy changes and social returns.”
The 2021 book News Hole crunched mountains of data to find a causal relationship between reduced coverage of local politics and lowered levels of civic engagement in the US. While two-thirds of registered voters in Los Angeles regularly turned out to vote in local elections during the 1980s, only 18 to 23 percent have voted more recently, in a trend seen across the country and highlighted by the dismal 6 percent turnout in Dallas in 2015. Civic knowledge has also plunged: while 70 percent of American voters could name their city’s mayor in 1966, that was down to less than 40 percent in 2016.
News media are different from other industries, however, as they are considered so vital to political discourse and community life in Canada that they enjoy a Charter guarantee of freedom from government interference. Media owners, who increasingly included private equity firms and US hedge funds, soon learned that they could monetize this guarantee by framing it as their right to a continuous stream of government handouts.
Tons of gems in this lengthy piece