Journalism's frayed relationship
ADEQUATE HEALTH insurance is widely seen as a good thing for everyone to have. But private health insurers don't offer adequate coverage to all at affordable prices. This is a case of something close to what economists call market failure: Something is deemed important, but there isn't enough of an incentive for the private sector - the market - to provide it on a broadly democratic basis. Such failures include those to provide grade schools and high schools, roads and highways, national parks and national defense. These have been fixed by a familiar remedy for market failures, the use of the government. The job of extending health coverage is done by programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Children's Health Insurance.
What may be emerging today, however, is a serious case of market failure that can't be - and must not be - fixed by government intervention: the failure of the private sector to provide broadly inclusive journalism that is both comprehensive and reliable enough to meet the needs of a democracy.
In the United States, the chief source of financial support for journalism has been advertising. For print journalism, this has been true for a long time. For the journalism done by television's broadcast networks, it became true more recently, after news divisions were told by higher-ups to become self-supporting. For the journalism done by national cable news channels, it has been the reality all along.
The relationship between journalism and advertising hasn't always been happy. Frustrations have boiled on both sides of it. But mutuality has held it together. Journalism has built audiences for ads. Ads have provided journalism with the bulk of its revenues. But the relationship is looser than it was. On one side, advertisers are pulling away. On the other, journalists don't yet know how to make up for lost revenue.
Of the several reasons why advertisers are straying, one of the largest rests on a disparity between journalism and advertising. The sources of revenue for journalism are few, but the number of vehicles available for advertisers' use is many, and needn't be limited to newspapers, magazines, and newscasts. Yes, advertisers have long had such alternatives: "Wheel of Fortune" rather than a local TV newscast. In radio days, Jack Benny's comedy show rather than Lowell Thomas's news show. Before radio, a slogan on the side of a barn rather than a notice in the town weekly. But there has been huge growth, some of it gradual and some abrupt, in the number and reach of such vehicles.
It's not just that cups and T-shirts and hats and race cars and scores of other objects now display logos, or that product placement has become a way of life, or that ads have made the jump onto YouTube and into text messages and podcasts. It's also that advertisers have been quick to colonize the ethereal realm of cyberspace, where they use a new type of advertising, search ads, and a new form of an old type, online classifieds. And there's the tactic of inserting ad content into video games.
If there is a market failure to provide an adequate supply of journalism, there can't be a public remedy for it. If one were proposed, Amy Goodman and Rush Limbaugh would have to link arms to block it. For it would mean government control of journalism. But journalism can't serve government and democracy. Better for it to serve democracy. But it can't if its pockets keep getting shallower.
Nobody has a solution. It will require trial and error to get one. Meanwhile, we know that journalism comes in different strains and, if its overall level of ad revenue falls, two strains of it will fade more than the rest.
One is watchdog journalism at the local level, notably investigative reporting. It is costly to do well. In a time of cost-cutting, its costs could be among those that get cut.
The other is fading already. It is journalism that both captures the interest of people locked into the bottom half of the income distribution - and, at the same time, serves their best interests. For many advertisers, this group is less attractive as customers. So, for some journalistic enterprises, they are less attractive as an audience. Theirs is the worst of two worlds: Underserved by journalism, but preyed on by advertisers - subprime mortgage firms, payday lenders, shifty credit card companies - that do want their business.
Ralph Whitehead Jr., a guest columnist, is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 