Bollinger, the 19th president of Columbia University
His specious logic rests on the fact that Americans — “ironically,” in a misuse of the word — already consume state-supported news in the form of PBS and NPR here, and the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV abroad and that all is well with that arrangement. It’s near impossible to get past the holding up of an official Chinese news source as an example of a flourishing press, but there’s more if you can control your laughter…
Bollinger points to how BP’s ad budget supports newspapers and has done little to influence coverage as if that matter were an a priori fact, and not worth talking about. And he points to public universities and government-funded research as unproblematic examples of public involvement working well in intellectual pursuits and thus evidence that we should be looking at some sort of American version of the BBC.
It’s a flimsy argument anyway you cut it, but what bothered me in particular is his ignoring the question of how such a rough beast would be fielded. Bollinger doesn’t express precisely what kind of government-funded news operation would take shape, but his hints are troubling. It feels like we’d end up with some sort of sprawling redux of the sprawling operations that are now having so many problems precisely because of their sprawl. The assumption seems to be that if tax dollars were to pay for journalism, that what they’d buy is yet another massive, inefficient operation that tries to do everything but does nothing well.
Bollinger points to the fact that there are “only a few dozen full-time correspondents” covering China these days. Ok, let’s assume that’s too few. How many do you need? And how should they be covering China: sitting in a Beijing press club or living in the rural provinces? More importantly, is the problem more one of quality or quantity? Is it a people problem or is it a tech problem? Do we need more generalist types or specialists who may not be “full-time” correspondents but business people or human-right practicioners or urban planners or environmental experts who can write with greater depth and urgency about the most important issues facing the country. Maybe the money spent on Columbia graduates would actually be better spent on a technology platform that would allow those people in rural area that are so hard to cover to speak for themselves.
It’s probably not fair to pick on Bollinger for an example that might have been off the top of his head, but the point is this: The problem in journalism today is not simply or necessarily that there’s not enough journalists running around. There’s also a fundamental confusion about what news is and what its role in our society and culture should be.
These are questions that shouldn’t be sorted out by the government. Instead, it should be up to journalists and news consumers to work it out for themselves. That means listening to your audience, creating cost-effective staffs and innovating until the content and its delivery make sense.
In my mind, the form can’t be separated from the funding source.
