Photo from a Citizens for Democracy letter signing campaign in Pakistan, covered by Global Voices blogger, Sana Saleem
Is journalism getting better or worse in the new media landscape? And what does that mean for democracy? During the Arab Spring earlier this year, new media seemed to not only generate unusually multi-faceted news coverage, but also play a role catalyzing the revolutions themselves.
Still, reactions to the state of news today continue to fluctuate between anxiety and elation. On the one hand, the digital age blesses us with access to more information than ever. On the other, the ability of the news infrastructure to serve the public interest seems to be threatened on all sides.
The free press has been long recognized as the life-blood of democracy; informed citizens are necessary for a just and functioning democratic state. But commercial networks are influenced (some would say enslaved) by market interests, and public media is vulnerable to political meddling and funding cuts. The new media is generative, iterative, disruptive, democratizing, and fragmenting all at once.
What’s the average American citizen to do? Where do we put our focus, energy, and money? How do we ensure that we get both the information we want and the information we need to be smart citizens?
I believe that if we want a thriving democracy, we as a citizenry need to rally behind two key agents of the free press: 1) publicly funded media (media that is independent, ethical, and designed to serve the public interest), and 2) small, independent media enterprises.
This is not to say that we should eliminate commercial media, or stop tweeting. In the media ecosystem, all players — including “professional” reporters for major networks, citizen journalists breaking news on YouTube, “aggregators” like The Huffington Post, and even your cousin recommending a link on Twitter — bring both knowledge and blind spots to the table.
A multitude of news sources and perspectives is vital, but public and independent media are the primary producers of the kind of information people need in order to function as empowered citizens. A recent NYU report found that countries with strong public media systems had stronger democracies. As Rodney Benson, associate professor at NYU and co-author of the report, wrote for the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year:
What we discovered is the crucial role of public media in creating informed citizens. In countries with strong public media systems, such as virtually all of Western Europe, public knowledge about government and international affairs is substantially higher than in countries dominated by commercial media, such as the United States. This holds true across a population’s spectrum of education, income, and race and ethnicity.
Benson wrote this as part of an opinion piece defending NPR, which came dangerously close to extinction this March when the House of Representatives voted in favor of stripping it of all federal funding. (According to the NYU report, public media in the United States is already “woefully underfunded,” getting less than four dollars per capita, while 14 other democracies, including Japan, Canada, and France, invest $30 to $134.)
With independent public media under threat or nonexistent in many areas of the globe, we need to support more independent news outlets that give more people a voice. Despite the Internet, 83 percent of the world’s population lives in a society without a free press.
Still, empowered by new media, small media organizations around the world like Global Voices, Just Vision, and Gawaahi have the ability to reach citizens with stories that would never be covered by mainstream commercial outlets.
But it takes more than a laptop and an Internet connection to start a news organization, especially one with the ability to do labor-intensive investigative reporting. It takes funding, too.
There are a few pioneering funds that focus on financing independent news organizations, like Media Development Loan Fund, which helps small media enterprises access capital through “free press bonds.” ResponsAbility Social Investments also provides financing and management consulting to small media enterprises.
According to ResponsAbility, “In many countries, a lack of capital is a greater obstacle to the freedom of the press than official censorship. The media are often co-funded by influential figures in politics and business. This has a negative impact on journalistic independence. Access to independent sources of finance and management know-how is crucial to build successful and stable media without having to make journalistic compromises.”
It’s unknown what kinds of challenges will emerge when a new crew of independent news outlets begins to compete for our headspace. But if we want our democracy to thrive, we need to make room for the stories that really matter.
Global Voices, Just Vision, and Gawaahi are network partners of the Changemakers Citizen Media competition. ResponsAbility Social Investments’ project, rABOP was named a winner in last year’s G20 SME Finance Challenge. |
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