New Public Media

Bob McChesney and John Nichols have called for the government to help promote more quality, “accountability” journalism. So have former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr., and journalism historian Michael Schudson, in their recent Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report.

Many journalists, understandably, are skeptical of government support. As one writer responded to the Downie/Schudson report, “How many independent government-subsidized [or] funded news sources are there in the world? Somewhere between zero and none. Letting the government control the media is the first step toward a dictatorship… .”

But is that true? What happens when government gets involved with the press? Does journalism inevitably lose its critical edge?

Well, actually, no, according to my research just published in the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Newspapers in France have received press subsidies (among the highest in Europe) for many years. These subsidies amount to about 13 percent of newspapers’ total revenues, and yet my research shows that French newspapers are at least as or more critical than their U.S. counterparts.

I selected seven of the leading general interest, popular and financial newspapers in France and eight of their counterparts in the United States, and analyzed their news coverage of the immigration issue between 2002 and 2006. I defined criticism as substantive critical statements, either from the journalist-author or the sources they quote, about government, political parties, businesses and other powerful organizations. These kinds of critical statements perform an important “signaling” function by calling attention to incoherent policy planning, ideological mystification, ineffective administration or misleading information.

In raw terms, French press coverage of immigration offers on average more than twice as many critical statements as U.S. coverage. And even when I controlled for length of news articles, the French press was more critical, offering more criticisms per 1,000 words.

Some French newspapers, such as the Catholic La Croix and the communist L’Humanité (not officially affiliated with the party) receive extra subsidies for “ideological pluralism.” (In the past, the left-leaning Libération and the far-right Présent, the paper sympathetic to Le Pen’s National Front party, have also received these extra subsidies. The justification is that the market alone should not decide which ideas are able to circulate in the public sphere, but that citizens need to have access to a wide range of voices and viewpoints.) Are these extra-subsidized newspapers less critical than other newspapers? In fact, no. L’Humanité is the single most critical newspaper in the study, and there is no statistical difference between La Croix and most other newspapers in France.

This research confirms the findings of a previous study I conducted with political scientist Dan Hallin, comparing a random sample of political news during the 1960s and 1990s in Le Monde and Le Figaro with the New York Times. Using different measures, we found that the French newspapers were as critical as or more critical than the Times.

In another study published last fall, I show that the French press is also more “multiperspectival” than the U.S. press, making room for a wider range of issue frames and institutional perspectives.

Another notable “subsidized” press system is Sweden’s. One recent study compared Swedish and U.S. news coverage of elections and found that whereas the U.S. coverage tended to focus on the “horse race” and political strategies, the Swedish coverage was more “issue-oriented, providing more interpretive reporting.”

Even given these findings, I wouldn’t propose that we run out and start subsidizing all the newspapers. My point is simply that government involvement does not inevitably lead to “dictatorship” -- in fact, far from it!

To my mind, the late Ed Baker, a respected legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, had it right with his idea that any media system should be funded from a variety of sources: audiences, advertisers, foundations and other civic organizations, and government. The more, the better. If public media have their blindspots, so do commercial media. That’s why it’s important to have both. My research shows that government can be a positive part of the mix.

Rodney Benson is associate professor and director of graduate studies in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.