A recent article by Chris Hedges about the demise of American journalism and its implications for our democracy, Lies Become Truths: The Demise of the Newspaper Leaves Americans Dumber, Blinder and Prone to Ideological Manipulation, provides a particularly grim account of the collapsing business model that for more than a century provided citizens with the information necessary for democracy to be credible.

He argues that the old business model, despite the routine interference of careerist managers striking compromises with powerful commercial and political interests to mute or ignore certain critical facts, nonetheless provided a modicum of substantive, quality journalism. That business model used to make enough money by connecting sellers with buyers to employ the critical mass of reporters and editors capable of ferreting out unwelcome facts and issues.

That business model is rapidly dying, and with it the level of reputable journalism citizens in a true democracy depend on.  As Hedges suggests, the ability of unimaginably wealthy special interests to create realities which suit their needs, increasingly out of whole cloth, now dominate our political process.  We have government of, by and for the special interests, reflected starkly in the growing number of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions siding with corporate and private wealth.

In a recent discussion about his new book chronicling the decline of American newspapers, author James O’Shea said he does not believe a non-profit model will ever be capable of sustaining the journalism our society needs, and expressed the hope a new internet-based business model for journalism will eventually be found.

It is hard for seasoned journalists like O’Shea, much less average Americans, to believe journalism in the public interest can possibly be supported on a subsidized basis, even if profit-seeking.  Successful public-private hybrids like The Guardian in the UK and the St. Petersburg Times in the US are exceptions and not well known or understood.

MFA believes the solution to this critically vexed issue is to persuade enough citizens that public funding of both journalism and elections is the best hope for overcoming the growing manipulation of American society by monied special interests that is creating ever greater inequality of wealth and opportunity.  A pragmatic approach is best articulated by Wick Rowland on the media side and Larry Lessig on the political elections side.

All fair-minded citizens need to be enlisted in this cause. The challenge is how best to make this happen. MFA proposes aggregating the most compelling voices, both inside and outside the US, who share this view to steadily expand American grassroots support for substantial public funding of independent journalism and political elections at all levels.  The most promising approach is a series of conferences and townhall meetings which present and debate strategies for achieving these related objectives, and extend these on-going, robust discussions on line with business, cultural and political leaders from the US and around the world.

On June 9, the FCC released a major study on the Information Needs of Communities providing an in-depth snapshot of the current state of U.S. media and policy recommendations based on an analysis of more than 600 interviews, thousands of public comments, and several workshops and site visits – available here.

Yesterday Steve Coll, President of the New America Foundation, asked FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and ABC broadcast news veteran Ted Koppel to reflect on the findings of the report and address the question: Is the Public Interest Bargain Dying? Video of their remarks is available here.

In his prepared remarks, Commissioner Copps recalled the largely forgotten history that radio and TV broadcast licenses were once seriously considered to be public trusteeships with public interest obligations to cover controversial issues and foreign affairs whether or not they made a profit in the process. Before broadcast licenses could be renewed the FCC used to assess whether that public interest obligation was being met, with authority backed up by the Supreme Court because the scarcity of available broadcast spectrum severely restricted the number of licenses. Broadcasters were required to “serve the public interest, convenience and necessity” because, unlike the print media, the freedom to broadcast was not available to everyone.

Copps argued that the public interest obligations of licensed broadcasters should not be abandoned despite arguments that spectrum scarcity is less of an issue and that the marketplace will provide the quantity and quality of public interest journalism citizens require in a democracy. The full text of his remarks are here.

Ted Koppel recalled that the public interest obligations of broadcasters were taken very seriously when he started working at ABC in 1963, and that all of the network news divisions then operated at a loss because making a profit was not associated with producing broadcast journalism. With the advent of 60 Minutes at CBS in 1968, that began to change because it demonstrated that money could be made covering the news. Nightline, the late-night news program Koppel hosted for 25 years, was highly profitable for ABC.

Both Copps and Koppel were disappointed the FCC report, though describing the marked decline in public interest journalism across the nation, was largely silent about what might be done to restore the public interest obligations of media. This is an issue American citizens should learn more about and express their views to their congressional representatives and the FCC.

Current attacks on funding for NPR and PBS require new strategies for defending and expanding American public service media based on a critical analysis of the American commercial media – political election complex that undermines effective democratic government and is steadily spreading to other countries.

The growing failure of market driven media to challenge special interest domination of our political process, made worse by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited and undisclosed campaign funding, makes support for non-commercial, public interest media vital to the restoration of our democracy – but public awareness of this critical issue is diffuse and unorganized, and demands much greater visibility and discussion.

Just as the balance of state and federal authority originally established by the Articles of Confederation were revised by our Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention in 1786, the gross imbalance of commercial and public interest media which increasingly subverts the informed political debate democracy requires needs to be addressed and debated in a series of local, regional, national and international fora.

Media For America was founded by John Boyer and Henry Kroll at the first National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) convened by Free Press in Madison, Wisconsin in 2003. Both have decades of experience working to strengthen public service media in America.  At the third NCMR in Memphis in 2007, they were joined by Patrick Reilly, President of the IP Society based in Silicon Valley, in their efforts to enlist new media technorati, institutions of higher education, media educators and grassroots activists to develop much more robust public interest, non-commercial media necessary for restoring American democracy.

The best framework for re-structuring the role of American media in democratic elections and on-going civic discourse comes from the historical process that generated our Constitution.  We must begin by acknowledging that the current media system established by the Communications Act of 1934 has given too much power to private commercial media interests, in stark contrast to the advanced industrial nations of Europe, the British Commonwealth and Japan.  Few Americans realize how grossly underfunded and de-centralized public service broadcast media are in the United States compared to these nations, or why media education is virtually a foreign concept here, yet systematically taught abroad.

Not only do these countries provide much greater subsidies for a robust mix of independent media, they also have in place stronger institutions to address citizen complaints about media bias. Genuine reform of mainstream media overwhelmingly dominated by commercial special interests begins with raising public awareness of how central this problem is to our dysfunctional political process which citizens can and must do something about.

Media For America is organizing a series of conferences to raise much needed public awareness of this issue, link it to the Fix Congress First Campaign lead by Lawrence Lessig, and encourage greater grassroots organization and activism to realize substantive changes in our dysfunctional media system that is weakening our democracy.