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Today, even an increasing proportion of the local news that remains available to Americans is slanted by political donors and activists who’ve made strategic investments in the media. The Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, which spent the Trump administration pushing White House and Republican talking points, is the second-largest television station operator in the country with nearly 200 stations across 89 media markets nationwide. Elsewhere, journalism is being shaped more subtly but no less consequentially by the hedge funds who’ve spent the decade hoovering up newspapers or the tech companies responsible for crippling the industry in the first place.
Early in the pandemic, Facebook and Google gave millions in emergency funds to newsrooms—calculating, no doubt, that buying some goodwill will be cheaper for them in the long run than the possibility that Americans might consider the taxes and revenue-sharing mandates already being contemplated or enacted in Europe and Australia. Most of the industry won’t be won over so easily. Earlier this year, HD Media, the owner of West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the opioid epidemic before declaring bankruptcy the next year, filed a first-of-its-kind antitrust lawsuit against Facebook and Google, arguing that their control of digital advertising will make it hard for outlets to survive no matter how much money they deign to toss in newspapers’ direction.
But newspapers and other outlets do need more money, preferably from sources likely to keep the public interest first in mind. The United States spends notoriously little on public funding for the media. In 2014, we spent just $3 per capita on public broadcasting compared to nearly $90 on average across much of the developed world. Many ideas on how we might be brought to par with our peer countries have been offered over the years, some more ambitious than others. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Andrew Yang proposed a fellowship program pairing journalists with local newsrooms in every state, as well as the establishment of a federal “Local Journalism Fund” that would offer $1 billion in grants to help local outlets transition into new and sustainable business models or nonprofit status. This would be a good start.
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