Should tax dollars support commercial media?

Denver Post op-ed contributor Julian Friedland says, why not?

Media represent an essential service like education and infrastructure. As such, media need to be protected from the corrupting influence of private interest, which has finally grown so massive as to exert a crushing grip on journalistic independence.

Friedland, who blogs on business ethics when he's not teaching at the University of Colorado, cites the BBC as an example of publicly-funded journalism that doesn't compromise. Closer to home, he notes that respected public TV and radio networks PBS and NPR receive federal money via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Would an infusion of no-strings-attached government funding prompt a golden age of investigative journalism? I don't know. But if such a day came to pass, it certainly need not be the end of independent journalism as we know it. A good case could be made that corporate advertisers represent more of a threat to probing journalism than a bit of government money might. The Times and the Post and the WSJ and some others can afford to ignore advertisers, and they have the resources. (WSJ caveat: so far.) But when was the last time you saw a blistering investigative campaign against, say, sales tactics of car dealers or the environmental toll of production homebuilders is a small or medium size daily?

I venture to say that in at least one 100 percent government-funded newsroom in Washington, that of the Voice of America, there is considerably less interference than you might think. True, VOA doesn't do serious investigative work; there's no money for that, nor is it seen as part of the mission. But whether it's reporting on the resignation of President Nixon, the chaotic exodus from Saigon, the incompetence of the (non-) response to Katrina, or the ongoing debacle in Iraq, VOA journalists have generally provided straight reports on news that might be perceived as embarrassing despite — or because — they were and are paid by the people of the United States to do so.

Maybe it’s just that he’s been spending too much time in his secure, undisclosed location?

In April, the Pew Research Center did another one of those civic knowledge surveys. As usual with such polls, the results were shocking, but not surprising.

Despite “news and information revolutions,” the number of people who could name the vice president dropped from 74 percent of respondents in 1989 to 69 percent today. Similar falloffs were found in the number of people who could name their state governor (down from 74 to 66 percent) or the president of Russia (down from 47 to 36 percent).

According to Michael Schudson & Tony Dokoupil at cjr.org (“The Good-Citizen Quiz”), the results are not much different from similar polls taken six decades ago. CJR rightly wonders if these sorts of factoids are a good measure of a well-informed citizenry. It is certainly easy to imagine a voter staking out a position on health care without knowing the name of the secretary of HHS, or choosing sides in a transit vs. highways debate without knowing the name of the governor. But scoring that sort of survey is a lot harder.

Ed Anger, Bat Boy trade dead trees for new cyberlife

Peter Carlson has a long and excellent piece in today's Washington Post (“All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print”) on the demise of the Weekly World News, supermarket tabloid par excellence.

It all began in Lantana, Fla., in 1979, when the National Enquirer, America’s premier tabloid, bought new color presses to replace its old black-and-white presses. The Enquirer's owner, a former CIA agent named Generoso Pope, couldn't bear to leave the old presses idle, so he founded Weekly World News as a sort of poor man’s Enquirer, running celebrity gossip and UFO sightings that didn't quite meet the Enquirer's high standards.

Fortunately, WWN will continue as an online-only publication, highlighting such improbably-overlooked stories as “WHY MOSES WANDERED IN THE DESERT FOR FORTY YEARS: He Lost the Map!
”

“A parchment map was found in a sealed urn not far from the remains of an Egyptian chariot,” said Rabbi Schmotkin-Fisher. “We surmise that Moses dropped it in the rush to get across the Red Sea before the parted waters came back together.

“It was etched by I Am’s own flaming finger, plainly mapping the way to the Promised Land. Remarkably, had they followed the Lord’s route, the trek would have taken the Israelites about a month, tops.”

More faith-based journalism next time....

For want of a nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Four days after the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota, John McQuaid writes in The Washington Post (“The Can’t-Do Nation”) about how America has lost the problem-solving ability to tackle big projects.

Once, this was our specialty. Canal across Central America? No problem! World’s largest office building? Designed and built in 16 months! Man on the Moon? Before this decade is out!

“We're supposed to be an optimistic, problem-solving nation. ... But somehow, can-do America has become a joke, an oxymoron. We’ve become the can’t-do nation, slipping on every banana peel on the global stage,” writes McQuaid.

He says big government has failed in part because much of the people’s business has been outsourced.

For the past quarter-century, more and more government work has been done by contractors. This started under Reagan and has continued, unabated, under Democrats and Republicans alike.

There are more people than ever working at government jobs, but fewer and fewer of them are actual government employees. And contractors show up not just in jobs that were the original outsourcing candidates — office cleaning, IT — but in jobs that scream government: NASA space shuttle launch personnel, Voice of America broadcasters, security forces guarding military personnel in Iraq.

With the contracting comes lack of accountability.

With the demonization of big government comes the political inability to rally support for big government projects like developing sustainable energy, planning for climate change, investing in our public schools, and creating a healthcare system that provides universal care, not to mention the decaying bridges, roads, tunnels, pipelines, dams, and other bits of essential infrastructure that won’t last forever.

Rally support and rally the funding to pay for them. Anyone who has lived abroad knows that our tax burden is near the bottom of comparable industrialized nations. Politicians run from tax increases like the plague. Nobody likes paying taxes, and no one wants their taxes increased. But there is only so much that we can push onto the next generation.

Yes of course, the wealthy should be taxed more. But so should the middle class. Yes, it may mean fewer Lexus sales and fewer McMansions, but if that means better-educated youngsters, fewer women forced to decide between a meal and a mammogram, or one less bridge falling down, I think it is a remarkably good bargain.

(And we should avoid starting unnecessary wars, but that’s another post; this one’s too long already.)

Meanwhile, we are stuck with the infrastructure we have. The New Orleans Times-Picayune today reports (“Corps analysis shows canal's weaknesses”) that parts of the levee system may fail under a surge of as little as 6–7 feet. Officials of the Army Corps of Engineers say the vulnerable areas are now protected by massive storm gates installed after the city was inundated when Hurricane Katrina hit. Readers commenting on the article seem less than reassured. And after the performance of the Corps’ flood protection system in 2005, who can blame them.

When the Airchecker blog launched a few years ago, the intention was to keep a skeptical eye on developments at the Voice of America and the world of international broadcasting in general.

That didn't work out.

To the surprise of everyone here at Airchecker World Headquarters (sponsorship offers welcome), the daily demands of a busy life got in the way.

So we're going to try something “different” this time out: clever comments and thoughtful ripostes on whatever subject happens to catch our eye.

“Different.” From the Latin meaning, just like every other slacker is doing online.

Meanwhile, please give Airchecker another chance. It's kind of a self-esteem thing.