You need only one customer.
I posted back in August about the Canadian federal government’s subsidies to newspapers. I pointed out that this is a threat to press freedom. But it’s beyond a threat. It’s a per se decline in press freedom.
The essence of freedom of the press is that people are free to write what they want using their own resources or the resources of those who voluntarily fund them. But the federal government forcibly takes money from people and uses it to fund newspapers. So freedom of the press is less than if the federal government refrained from doing this.
I’m not the only one who has noticed. About the same government subsidy program I reported on, Peter Menzies, in an article titled “The Growing Number of Canadian Journalists Who Are Funded by the Feds,” C2C Journal, December 11, 2021, writes:
To me, that changes everything. If that’s a story paid for with my (and your) hard-earned tax dollars, and it’s being fed at government expense across the country into the Toronto Star and heaven knows how many other outlets, whether it’s journalism or activism is now my business, your business and probably Coastal GasLink’s business too.
The story he was referring to was this one in a government-subsidized publication called The Narwhal.
Menzies lays out an obvious effect of government funding:
Tom Korski is co-founder of the subscription-based Blacklock’s Reporter, which focuses on digging out exclusive stories of Parliament Hill/federal government behaviour, frequently using Freedom of Information requests. A fierce critic of government journalism funding, Korski sees the issue as straightforward. Such publications will have even less financial incentive to care about what their readers think because henceforth, the veteran reporter says, “You only need one customer and that’s the [federal] Minister of Heritage.” In short, government funding will make publications less integrated with their local communities.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Dec 15 2021 at 4:42am
When discussing antitrust and the possibility of monopolistic, rent-seeking behaviour, we’re very scrupulous to look at the question of whether this behaviour has actually happened. The worry with a monopoly is that company A chases all competitors out of the market and then uses its monopoly power to raise prices and extract more money from consumers. If Amazon has not done so, then there’s no monopoly problem, so the argument on this very site has gone.
Now the argument leveled here against government funding for journalists is the same as the monopoly argument for companies. If the government chases other voices out of the marketplace, and then uses its monopoly power for its own benefit, then there’s a problem. But this piece of writing (the one funded by the government and complained about by Peter Menzies) is explicitly anti-government.
So, I don’t know. I get the argument and the risk. I live in China where state-owned media outcomes have been, let’s say, suboptimal! But I grew up in the UK, home of the world’s most respected state-owned media, and also to one of the world’s liveliest press scenes. So I feel like the dangers of state support for the media are unproven.
Philo
Dec 15 2021 at 12:18pm
This is like the claim that we need more empirical data on the employment effects of higher-minimum-wage laws. It is too skeptical about the force of our experience, in other, analogous arenas, of the effect of changes in incentives. (Admittedly, it is hard to assess the magnitude of an effect by analogous experience alone; I am talking only about the direction.)
Phil H
Dec 19 2021 at 8:40pm
I agree with you that the two are similar. Where we disagree is that you seem to think “the force of our experience” is a voice we should listen to. I think it’s just a way to smuggle your own prejudices into the argument.
(The voice of my experience tells me that minimum wage laws are a big positive: Britain’s first minimum wage law was passed while I was at university. There was massive debate in the media, and the result was a slight uptick in employment. I don’t think this is the “experience” you were talking about, but it is mine! However, I don’t think that this is a good, scientific approach to the question.)
Mark Brophy
Dec 17 2021 at 8:17pm
Bill Gates pays for the newspapers in the United States and Britain so they promote mRNA injections over Ivermectin and other competitors.
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