New Media, New Politics?

It is a bewitching thought the public will assemble itself. The idea is analogous to the perfect free market, and there is no question that by drastically reducing transaction costs, electronic communication and exchange have created new possibilities for both markets and publics. But law and therefore politics, as well as the unequal distribution of resources in society, shape the kind of markets and publics that develop. The contrasting fortunes of niche and public-service journalism illustrate that point. Those who follow trade publications can afford to pay top prices, and they can also usually write off their subscriptions as a business expense, whereas most subscribers to daily newspapers and political magazines bear the full price. Public policy in the United States didn’t always put the public press at a relative disadvantage. Beginning in the 1790s, when most papers were partisan, Congress subsidized their development through postal policy. The postal rates for sending newspapers through the mail were set below cost, and editors could exchange copies with one another at no charge. Congress also refrained from taxing newspapers, a legacy of colonial opposition to Britain’s Stamp Act. These postal and tax policies — unlike the subsidies that the president and other officials gave their own party papers through printing contracts and government advertising — benefited newspapers across the board. In the language of modern First Amendment law, the postal subsidies were “viewpoint-neutral.” As Madison and other founders envisaged, they didn’t just promote newspapers; they also helped to knit together the young republic and sustain its political life. By the Civil War, newspapers had gained a firm footing in the market, and as advertising grew, more papers became wholly independent of the patronage of political parties. Until recently, that framework — commercial and nonpartisan — has been the norm not just for newspapers, but for the broadcast news media that developed in the twentieth century.

Now that pattern has begun to change. On radio, original reporting has virtually disappeared from commercial stations, and a split pattern has emerged. Public radio has become the last refuge of journalism on the dial, while commercially sponsored talk radio is intensely ideological. On television, the decline of network news and the rise of cable have brought a shift toward a fiercely partisan journalism, and on the Internet as well, ideologically oriented news sites on both the right and the left have assumed a central role.

Partisan journalism has a legitimate role to play in news and public controversy. When the press was partisan in the early nineteenth century, the United States had a vibrant democratic life, and the return of partisanship to the news may be stimulating more interest in politics today. After decades of falling political participation, voter turnout increased sharply in 2004 and 2008. Though widely bemoaned, the partisan edge of contemporary politics and journalism may well have contributed to that upturn.

But while partisan journalism has a legitimate place, we also need sources of reported news that can be widely trusted. The Internet allows access to a diversity of opinion, but it hasn’t yet provided the economic basis for financing the professional reporting of news on anything like the scale of newspapers. This problem is especially acute at the state and local level because of the difficulty of aggregating a large enough public and thereby generating sufficient revenue from advertising, charges to readers, syndication, or some combination of sources.