Columbia Journalism Review

As local newspapers have closed across the country, more and more communities are left with no daily local news outlet at all. Rural America isn’t the only place local news is disappearing. It’s also drying up in urban areas around the country.

[Commentary] This issue of the Columbia Journalism Review is about what has happened—and likely will happen next—to one of America’s great national institutions, its local press. Just as the local-news financial picture seems more daunting than ever, new energy is building to address the problem. Is it fixable, or are America’s local newsrooms going away for good? What are the implications for open records, for accountability—for our democracy? This issue of CJR is one step toward answering those questions.

[Commentary] The internet in its halcyon days was lauded as a open space that could promote free speech in the US and worldwide, but it is now a realm that has settled into domination by a few companies. As we enter an age in which the internet is fully integrated into our daily lives, the main channel by which we access information, a reconsideration of the values of the First Amendment is required.

This was the motivation for a symposium on May 1 at Columbia University called Disrupted: Speech and Democracy in the Digital Age. Attended by a mix of legal professionals, academics, and journalists, the message was clear: Legal thinking around the First Amendment must renew itself in the new era.

[Nausicaa Renner is editor of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s vertical at Columbia Journalism Review. ]

[Commentary] Not enough public media outsiders seem worried about the constituency that, in my personal experience and according to my reporting, actually does compromise editorial integrity: the organizations that hold stations’ Federal Communications Commission licenses. And there’s no better example of the cause for concern than the recent firing of Jacqui Helbert.

Helbert, a reporter at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s WUTC public radio station, angered some of the state legislators who hold the university’s purse strings. As Helbert pursues a lawsuit against the university, ShameOnUTC.org—a site launched after her termination—has provided jaw-dropping documentation of Helbert’s saga, including her surreptitious audio recordings of meetings with colleagues. The relationship between Helbert, WUTC and the University of Tennessee offers the public a laundry list of everything that can go wrong in a system where universities hold the licenses of—and therefore effectively own—47 percent of the public radio station organizations and 34 percent of the public television orgs. (Figures were provided to me by the Station Resource Group.) In the wake of Helbert’s firing, people across public media are reckoning with a serious ethical hazard that was built into their system—and that may be impossible to fully exorcise.

[Adam Ragusea is a journalist in residence and visiting assistant professor at Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism and hosts Current.org’s podcast The Pub.]

[Commentary] Voice of America still operates under its congressionally-approved 1976 Charter, requiring it to report accurately, objectively, and comprehensively, and reflect a range of opinions. It carries what are called “editorials” reflecting US government positions, written by a special policy office at VOA. Over the decades, VOA has succeeded, to varying degrees, at making the case that its government-paid reporters are no different than those working for commercial media. But any notion that “whole of government” approaches can exclude participation by VOA, challenges common sense.

A recent Washington Post editorial, in support of a new agency TV program that is clearly part of the counter-disinformation effort, said staffs at VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are “made up of professional journalists … [who] do not want to be US propaganda tools.” Good for them. But the fact remains that every two weeks they accept government paychecks. And at the end of the day will be progressively more enmeshed with the national security and foreign policy objectives of the United States. Government-paid journalists can no longer pretend they are just like their friends at CBS, NBC, AP, NPR, Reuters, and others, or expect to be seen as such by those working for non-government media. That’s simply living in delusion.

[Dan Robinson had a nearly 35 year career at the Voice of America, serving most recently as senior White House correspondent from 2010 until 2014, congressional correspondent based in the US House of Representatives from 2002 to 2010, and chief of VOA's broadcasts to Burma from 1997 to 2002.]

The influence of social media platforms and technology companies is having a greater effect on American journalism than even the shift from print to digital. There is a rapid takeover of traditional publishers’ roles by companies including Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and Twitter that shows no sign of slowing, and which raises serious questions over how the costs of journalism will be supported. These companies have evolved beyond their role as distribution channels, and now control what audiences see and who gets paid for their attention, and even what format and type of journalism flourishes.

This report, part of an ongoing study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, charts the convergence between journalism and platform companies. In the span of 20 years, journalism has experienced three significant changes in business and distribution models: the switch from analog to digital, the rise of the social web, and now the dominance of mobile. This last phase has seen large technology companies dominate the markets for attention and advertising and has forced news organizations to rethink their processes and structures.

While public radio stations across the country fret over the threat of federal-level funding cuts, West Virginia Public Broadcasting has its mind on other matters. A state-level proposal to zero out half of its $10 million budget had the network on the defensive this month. In West Virginia, which national media often portray as Trump Country Ground Zero due to its high proportion of Trump voters, you might expect that the rift is ideological. But the $4.6 million cut was proposed by Gov Jim Justice (D-WV) —a billionaire coal operator who coincidentally owes $4.4 million in back taxes to the state—and some Republicans in the legislature have been quick to come to the network’s defense. Instead of partisan rancor, the debate over public broadcasting here comes back to the state’s underlying financial crisis.

[Commentary] Donald Trump was four years old when the word “McCarthyism” first appeared in print as shorthand to describe Senator Joe McCarthy’s penchant for lying, bullying, and trying to stifle dissent. A review of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the ways in which the senator battled important media of his day shows how closely Trump has hewed to the McCarthy playbook in matters of style and substance, using similar tactics to polarize the country, pitting Americans against each other. That may help explain but not excuse the irony of President Trump accusing his predecessor, Barack Obama, of “McCarthyism” when he tweeted, without evidence, that Obama had wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower just before the 2016 election.
[Norman Pearlstine is vice chairman of Time Inc.]

A Q&A with Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, Russian pro-democracy leader, and chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation since 2012.

Asked, "What do you see as the greatest threat to press freedom right now in Russia and the US?" Kasparov said, "As for America, the greatest threat is apathy. Trump may end up saving American journalism for a generation, indirectly of course, much as the resistance to him is already educating Americans about the separation of powers and why participating in politics matters even in the affluent free world. Market forces worked against quality journalism in the US because civic responsibility has been waning for decades. The extremists, the entertainers, and polemicists, were winning that free-market battle because the stakes in quality journalism were seen as very low by a majority of Americans. Suddenly the stakes have been raised very high, and I hope this means US citizens and institutions will continue to react by defending democratic institutions like the free press, and not by polarizing even further. Americans have taken their democracy and their affluence for granted for so long that they were vulnerable to someone like Trump. You can say the same for the media, which is still figuring out how to report on Trump accurately. If they don’t figure it out, Trump will only be the beginning."

The much-discussed President Donald Trump federal budget proposal zeros-out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, both of which also support some public broadcast programming. What not everyone may realize is that the partisan threat to federal funding is at the core of public broadcasting’s origin story a half century ago—and that its first, and unlikely, prime-time stars won fame by allowing the most significant presidential scandal in our history to unfold right in America’s living rooms.

When it was proposed by the 1967 Carnegie Commission, an essential recommendation was that public broadcasting not be subject to the unpredictability and political pressures inherent in the annual congressional budget process. But President Lyndon Johnson'’s decision not to push for a dedicated, politically insulated funding source—like the kind of trust fund supported by an excise tax on television purchases that funded the BBC—meant the creation of a small but highly visible political football that has been kicked around Washington ever since. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established to provide a “heat shield” protecting stations and producers in the system from political pressures that could come with congressional appropriations—an approach that seemed especially wishful after President Richard Nixon took office.

[David M. Stone is executive vice president for communications at Columbia University.]