Transcript: America’s Three Media Crises and How to Fix Them

That’s not good for diversity. And so most democracies figure out ways to diversify media ownership, to make sure that you have a wide range of voices and views represented in your media. It’s like democratic theory 101, basically.

Bacon: So CBS, NBC, is it that they’re not diversified, or that they’re all owned by corporations, like The Washington Post, the LA Times, the New York Times, CBS, and they’re at this point owned by different corporations and billionaires, is the problem who owns them or the lack of diversity of ownership? Because I feel like we have a diverse group of corporations and billionaires that own them. So is that the problem, the lack of diversity?

Pickard: Yeah, that’s an excellent question and a very thorny one that we could probably spend a couple hours teasing apart. But I’ll start by saying that I think what you’re putting your finger on here is that we often mistake the problems for being just media monopoly problems, when in fact, some of these problems are actually capitalism problems.

Some of these problems are, in fact, that so much of our media is driven by these commercial values and logics. And so even if we break up a couple corporations into two or three, that’s not going to transform our media landscape. So I think that’s also something we try to bring out in our report, especially as we trace this back historically, and this gets back to the public media question as well.

When the U.S. was creating its broadcast media system, we went down a very different path compared to most democracies on the planet at that time that were building out predominantly public media systems. We instead went down this hypercommercialized trajectory. And I would argue, and indeed much of my work shows this, that that’s why we are where we are today.

So, but the thing that’s most visible to people are these big, bad media monopolists, which a problem. That is something we have to wrestle with. But I don’t think that gets at the core root of the problem.

Bacon: And the core root is that we’ve sort of privatized too much our media.

Pickard: That’s right. Not just privatize it, but we’ve stripped away what few public-interest regulations we used to have. So I mean, there are three general ways to design a media system or to prevent concentrated ownership over a media system from harming democratic society.

One is to break up the media monopolies and prevent those monopolies from happening in the first place.

Two is to regulate the media outlets, to apply public interest obligations and protections. We used to have this thing called the Fairness Doctrine that I’m sure many people in your audience have heard of before.

And the third one is to create a public alternative or public alternatives to these commercial, privately owned media outlets.

And of course we’ve failed in all three of those areas, so we’re really reaping the rewards of having the sort of perfect storm, the worst of all worlds here. And that’s something that we have to fix going forward.

Bacon: So the local media problem, I see very clearly. The national media problem I want to probe you a little bit on.

We’re talking on a Substack Live. Heather Cox Richardson is probably more read than most columnists of any newspaper, even The New York Times, at this point. We have The Bulwark, we have a ton of new center-left, left, center-left, particularly outlets that have sprung up.

If you want to get an honest perspective about Donald Trump, even if you think Bari Weiss has taken over CBS and made it something different, there are plenty of other places to go. How do you evaluate this new media, particularly a more pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian media, to sort of come up?

Is that useful? Is that important? I’m sure you’re not going to say it’s useless, but where do—where do you see it fitting into the story you’re telling?

Pickard: Well, there’s a couple of points here. I mean, much of what you’re describing is also a kind of fragmentation of our media system, right? That’s so we can all find our preferred outlets and our preferred political flavors online or wherever. We have our influencers, we have our podcasts. But are they covering what’s happening at the local school board?

Bacon: Obviously not. I agree with that on the local level, obviously not.

Pickard: And are they also asking the questions that we need to have asked? We’re all being drawn to particular persuasions, and it doesn’t guarantee that we actually have a diverse and reliable news and information infrastructure. And so it’s a golden era for discourse and commentary. But for actual journalism, I’m not so sure.

Bacon: That’s a great way to put it. It’s a golden era for commentary and discourse, and not really—because at the end of the day, The New York Times, CNN, CBS are the places that still cover an earthquake or a fire or, a tornado, or the big stories that still come up. Other places have lots of journalists, and that’s still not Substack people’s—that’s what you’re getting at.

Pickard: That’s right. And what are the audiences actually being exposed to? And of course we know that so much of our media—much of our major media outlets—are becoming captured in various ways by whether it’s authoritarian government or, again, this kind of hypercommercialized like, these imperatives. By any measure, we’re not dealing with a healthy media system for a democratic society right now. And that’s exactly what we need to change.

Bacon: So I’m looking—I’m thinking as you talk, though—so you would say the BBC is an example of publicly funded media.

Pickard: The BBC is an exemplar, although my British friends will tell me about all the problems they have. Although, frankly, I wish we had those problems.

Bacon: And the BBC is different from NPR and PBS. Can you explain the difference for the audience here?

Pickard: I would say, first and foremost, because of the funding level.

Bacon: OK. How is it much more funded by the government than ours?

Pickard: That’s right. I mean, there, it’s being funded indirectly by the government through individuals for these licensing fees. And so it’s a way to kind of, essentially, socialize broadcast media. But they’re unrivaled in terms of—especially, like, their international media coverage.

And yet they’re not perfect. I mean, one point that sometimes I forget to make really clear is that it’s not just about decommercializing our media and publicly funding it, but it’s also about democratizing our media. And the BBC … I think the legitimate critique there is that it is still very elitist. It’s still too close to government, although it’s often more adversarial than many of our commercial outlets here in the U.S. towards our government.

But there are certainly things that we would want to change if we were to adopt a … I’d like to see a BBC model radically democratized and basically funded much more—BBC on steroids, basically, here.

Bacon: I’ve been following the BBC a little bit because Trump is a—and it seems like the BBC is very vulnerable to this. You’re too far left, and Trump is attacking you, and you’re getting—there’s sort of a purging. It seems like the BBC, while funded differently, seems to have the same ethos as The New York Times, of “We must tell you how neutral we are,” which leaves you vulnerable to these Republicans.

When you say democratize it, you don’t mean make it evenly balanced between the two parties according to the parties’ leaders, right? What do you mean when you say that?

Pickard: That’s right. That’s spot on. What I’m really talking about is bringing it down to the local level in many cases. I mean, there are certain media outlets where that won’t make sense.

But I think for many of our media outlets, we should be bringing it down to local levels of accountability and oversight, and that makes sure that we all have a voice. It’s been so naturalized in the United States that how our media is being designed is being figured out behind closed doors in the public’s name, but without our consent—it’s like so many chips being traded back and forth among some oligarchs. And that’s absurd for any democratic society worthy of the name.

Bacon: So as you’re talking, I’m concerned about the sort of—having worked with The Washington Post recently—the sort of billionaire and corporation ownership of the media seems bad. I don’t see public funding anytime soon.

Your job is to put out ideas. I get that. I agree with that. What do we do? Right now we’re in this middle course. Like, is it useful to try to build up this sort of niche nonprofit, maybe the good billionaires fund some things? Like, what do we do in this period where we’re facing these oligarchs, anti-authoritarian oligarchs, and Trump trying to take over the media?

We just defunded public media. What do we do when we’re running this middle? What should we be trying to support right now if we don’t have the support from the public but the good guys on the corporate side have become bad?

Pickard: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. We have to face immediate threats and do whatever we can. Yes. And that includes funding. Like, all of us as individuals should be donating to our local public broadcasting stations, subscribing to reliable, fact-based news organizations, supporting journalists.

However we can—they are doing God’s work; we must help them. But there are also things that we can do even at the policy level—I’d say at the state and local levels. So for example, here in Pennsylvania, they’ve recently introduced these two bills that would support local journalism.

One is based on a civic information consortium model, which has been operating in New Jersey for a number of years now, where government basically gives public grants to local media institutions. And this is a tried-and-true proof of concept. And it’s something that a number of states are considering right now. So we can do that. We can even do things at the city level, where we have advertising subsidies, where city governments have to allocate a certain amount of their funding—advertising—towards community and ethnic newspapers.

That’s what they’ve been doing in New York City for several years now. So there are things that we could be doing, even these kinds of media vouchers that they’ve been discussing in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, Washington, where people are given a certain amount of money that they can allocate towards a local media institution of their choice. That’s another example of something we could be doing at the local level.

Bacon: So if anybody—any politician—says, I’m for democracy—which a lot of politicians, particularly a lot of Democrats, do—we should be asking them, what is your agenda on journalism?

Because that’s—if you want to defend democracy—that’s what you’re getting at. Blue states—I’ll use the term blue states. Blue cities should certainly be doing this stuff, because that’s what they claim they’re for: defending democracy, right?

Pickard: A thousand percent. We have to make sure that a media agenda is central to this pro-democracy project. And if there’s any silver lining here, it is that during the Trump years, we’re seeing all these institutions being hollowed out, but it means that we must rebuild.

And we must be thinking about rebuilding now. We have to have our plans and projects in place now so that when the time comes, we’re ready to rebuild these kinds of democratic infrastructures that we need.

Bacon: As you’re talking, I’m thinking that there are some media outlets that are doing well, that are making money right now. That are on the left, that are pro-democracy, let’s say. But I think probably part of your point, though, is that we should not overcelebrate.

A media company that makes profits is good for that company. But we don’t necessarily want to tie the success of media and journalism to profits, and therefore to the sense that, Oh, this outlet did not get enough of an audience, they lost money, therefore they should die. We don’t want to apply the principles of sports teams or banks to the media. That’s what you’re getting at as a big point here, right?

Pickard: That’s right. That’s a huge part of the problem—that we think that the market is the best democratic arbiter of, you know, which media institutions should survive or die. And that’s what we’ve been doing for decades now, and we really have to have this kind of paradigm shift where we think of our news media, especially local journalism, the same way that we think of our public education.

We talked about libraries before, public parks—there are these public goods that we would never leave entirely up to the market. And that’s the kind of market fundamentalism that we need to move away from. In fact, I think it has thoroughly discredited itself by this point. So I think we’re ready. We’re in a good position now to reimagine what journalism could and should be.

Bacon: And it’s a great place to end on. Victor, thank you for joining me.

Pickard: Thank you, Perry. Great to see you. Bye-bye.