Font ResizeNo sunshine patriot, President Thomas Jefferson said in 1787 what he believed about journalism -- even in a time with no radio, no TV, no telegraph, no Internet:
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. "
He was talking about privately owned papers. Those small gazettes provided news of what was happening in the fledgling country as well as opinions about what the government was doing and how the colonies were developing.
Today, Jefferson's comments are more important than ever as publishers and editors struggle with how to pay the bills.
Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson have written a report, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism," for Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Downie is vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post and Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Schudson is a professor of communication at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
In their report, they note:
"Independent reporting not only reveals what government or private interests appear to be doing but also what lies behind their actions. This is the watchdog function of the press--reporting that holds government officials accountable to the legal
While the authors do not endorse a government bailout of newspapers, they are not averse to allowing them to be nonprofit entities so they could qualify for grants and contributions.
This is a tempting solution, but it has hidden dangers.
Salt Lake Tribune Editor Nancy Conway read about this report and sees real drawbacks for newspapers if they go this way. Let's say the Utah Jazz organization decides it wants to donate $2 million to the budget of The Tribune. How could the Sports department continue to report and columnists continue to offer opinion on a group that helps to keep the bottom line in the black?
"It's a bad idea," Conway says.
Such donations would make objective reporting difficult -- and, even if the reporting were objective, would readers trust it?
Seth Lipsky wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
"Mr. Downie has stepped onto an exceptionally slippery slope. It's a view I've reached after 20 years working almost constantly to raise private capital for independent, privately owned newspapers. One was the Forward , the weekly newspaper covering the Jewish beat that was launched in the 1990s on the foundation of the famed Yiddish-language broadsheet known as the Jewish Daily Forward . The other was The New York Sun , which was launched in 2002 to try, among other things, to seize the local beat from which the New York Times was retreating as it sought to become a national newspaper.
". . .One thing that kept me going was the prospect that at least some of our competitors, who were also losing money, might crack before we did. The notion that any of them might be sustained by government subsidies strikes me as profoundly contrary to a free press."
Well said, Mr. Lipsky. Even Thomas Jefferson would approve.
If newspapers are not smart enough to find the path again to profitability, they don't deserve to exist. The press is the fourth estate, not part of the first three.
Reader Advocate's number is 801-257-8782. Write to Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, Suite 700, 90 South 400 West, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.
