Robert W. McChesney, Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, opened the second day of the 2011 Future of Journalism conference with an argument against optimism. Picking up from Emily Bell’s keynote the day before, he accepted that interesting experiments were running in the United States and said flatly that they would not be enough. There was no shortage of talent, only of institutions and resources.
His first target was professional journalism itself. Separating the business side from the editorial side had not stopped reporters relying on people in power to set the range of legitimate debate, US foreign policy being his example, and at those moments “our journalism at times like that tends to be propaganda.” Business journalists had missed the great scandals and bubbles of the preceding years, as if sports reporters had missed the World Cup. The growth of inequality was “barely a news story”, and the voices of the poor went unheard: 85 per cent of high earners voted in presidential elections against about 20 per cent of the poorest.
His second point was funding. Even if every start-up succeeded they would amount to “a piss in the ocean”. Journalism, in his view, is a public good that the market cannot supply in sufficient quantity or quality, and “a public good needs public funding.” The freest press systems, he noted, were also the most heavily subsidised. He described the American political system as a “dollarcracy” in which four PR people worked for every journalist.