Journalistic macroethics

I’ve been toying for a while with the idea of macroethics in journalism. What I mean by this is not the sort of day-to-day ethics we associate with individual journalists, but the larger ethics of the journalistic industry. In an era where information is freely dispensed over the Internet, public understanding of important realities continues to be dominated by large news organizations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Although I have a high opinion of many Internet-only sites, and I consider them at least as authoritative as major news outlets, there is definitely still a place for organizations like the New York Times, if for no reason other than accountability. Large editorial structures can be beneficial in holding individual journalists to high ethical standards.

Arguably, the fact that a productive political discourse existed before the Internet is pretty good evidence that however useful the internet is, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the large-organization model. But there is an aspect of that model that I think is a problem in the age of the internet: its profitability. News organizations have been for-profit entities for a long time, but they’re now competing with a host of other sources for airtime. I’d argue that this is why they’ve turned to increasingly showy (and increasingly less substantive) programming (I’m focusing mainly on TV news here).

Certainly the internet is not “the problem.” In its ideal form, it is a forum for sharing ideas democratically (Twitter probably represents this better than any other technology). But it would be naive to assume that the whole picture is so rosy. Media organizations who used to have a stranglehold on (and whose editorial processes at least attempted to assure the quality of) information are forced to find different ways to make money. Showier advertisements, more appealing programming. In short, selling out. They have to cover what people will pay to watch, giving journalistic discretion a lower priority.

One idea I’ve tossed around as a potential solution would be requiring news agencies to be nonprofit. Obviously nonprofits are still responsible for revenue, because they have to pay the people who work in them, but they’re not beholden to any shareholders, and no one enters them to get rich. In an ideal world, a nonprofit functions as a way for people to do something they enjoy and be paid enough to live on while doing it. This would appear to fit quite well with the goals of an idealized journalistic institution. The question is how to apply it. I’ve thought about a law mandating that news organizations be nonprofit, but this creates all sorts of new problems. How would you define what is and is not a news organization (Fox comes to mind)? What about bloggers?

It would be nice to just leave it up to citizens to create their own nonprofit news organization (such things exist). Clearly, however, companies like CNN and Fox are way too big to be taken down by such an upstart. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that citizens would have any interest in switching to a new media organization. The idealized free-market model that predicts that the consumer will go where the best value is requires that they actually know how to judge value.

Short of such a large-scale government intervention, however, I’ve been unable to come up with any idea on how the national discourse in this country can improve as long as the media keeps on doing what it’s doing.