DEMOCRACY
Paywalling is Yet Another Neoliberal Answer to a Structural Question
If newspapers are a public good, we must treat them as such
My very first job was as an intern at my hometown newspaper bureau, the American Press in Lake Charles, LA. There were many curious aspects of that job, all of which I would share in an effort to regale the reader if space (and time) permitted, but one thing in particular that always stood out was the sheer number of advertisements plastered across the front page of that newspaper.
Of course, there is nothing particularly novel about advertisements being printed within a daily circulation. Open up any major newspaper — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal — and you will be met with advertisements on just about every page.
Except for the front page.
Notably, most newspapers — to provide at least a veneer of objectivity by erecting a buffer between the facts and the fictions sold by advertising agencies — have made the front page free of such commercial spectacle.
But not this one.
In retrospect, it’s apparent that there was at least one clear reason why this particular newspaper elected to print advertisements on its front page, a violation of journalistic norms be damned: the owners needed the money. And front-page ads were one means to that end.
Indeed, newspapers do need money. Lots of it.
As many have explained — including the always-hilarious John Oliver, in a biting, though somewhat misguided sketch (I’ll explain later) — the revenue that has, for the past century, served as the economic engine for the propagation of news, ad revenue, has largely disappeared in recent decades. Many peg the rise of the internet and advertising agencies’ decision to “follow the money” — in this case, consumers who have gravitated to the world wide web — as the chief reason commercial agencies have fled newspaper outlets, taking their dollars with them along the way. And though many outlets have elected to paywall many of their stories in hopes that loyal readers will pay to consume what they once did, such a revenue model has proven to be inconsistent at best and a downright disaster at worst.
The result of all of this is that many newspapers bureaus have either shuttered altogether or have allowed themselves to fall to the mercy of corporate power, as The Washington Post did when it allowed Jeff Bezos, the founder and (former) CEO of Amazon, to become its chief owner. And even when the latter has happened, readers — or, as they are more aptly described given that we do not have a language to discuss many issues without relying on capitalistic grammar, “consumers” — are still expected to front at least some of the bill, as evidenced by the paywall. That is, if they do not want democracy to “die in darkness,” as The Washington Post propagandized in the wake of the Trump presidency, then they must pay up.
This brings me why I decided to write this piece. Just recently, Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — arguably one of, if not the most well-known journalists of our time — tweeted the following:
Of course, her tweet set off a siren within the Twitterverse, as just about anything can, especially when you’re someone of her stature. To wit, one user replied to her tweet by asking,
Hannah-Jones then responded by saying,
After which the user to whom she was replying stated,
To which Hannah-Jones retorted, somewhat flippantly,
First, I’d like to thank ‘my_chelle’ for raising what I believe is a critical point that Hannah-Jones missed, which is that leaving newspapers at the mercy of the market— in other words, evacuating any notion of the newspaper as a “public” good — is foolhardy. For information should not and cannot be considered a commodity. Treating it as such while expecting individuals to behave in kind is both a nonstarter and an implicit endorsement of neoliberal rationality, which has set out to destroy any semblance of the public good while ridding us of a language to discuss solutions to any structural issue that does subscribe to market-based, individualistic ideologies.
To explain why, it is worthwhile visiting Walter Lippman’s seminal text, Public Opinion, first published in 1922 and during what might be considered the birth of the modern, professionalized press. Lippman is a fascinating figure. A skeptic of democracy and individuals’ capacity to do the work required to make democracy, Lippman often lamented what he perceived to be pervasive ignorance among the masses. As such, Lippman repeatedly endorsed — both explicitly and implicitly — a technocratic view of government, which meant that the republic should be run by the best and brightest rather than being left to the whims of “the bewildered herd” — i.e., the masses.
Whatever one’s feelings about Lippman the political figure, Lippman the journalist often had great insights worth engaging. One, in particular, is his observation about the peculiar role of the press in American society, which is worth quoting at length. In Public Opinion, Lippman states that:
Nobody thinks for a moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contact, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him. Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.
This uniqueness, Lippman argues, means that the newspaper cannot be compared to other institutions, especially those which are businesses and, thus, rely on the profit-motive as a method of sustainability. More specifically, he contends that
This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it and it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or institution. It is not a business pure and simple, partly because the product is regularly sold below cost, and chiefly because the community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to trade or manufacture. Ethnically a newspaper is judged as if it were a church or a school. But if you try to compare it with these you fail; the taxpayer pays for the school, the private school is endowed or supported by tuition fees, there are subsidies and collections for the church. You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays for the service. A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away.
But the moral gravitas that newspapers exude or, perhaps more accurately, have ascribed to them by a mass public means that:
The information must come naturally, that is to say gratis, if not out of the heart of the citizen, then gratis out of the newspaper. The citizen will pay for his telephone, his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openly for his news.
How, then, do we address this quagmire — a free press which, under a neoliberal capitalist economy, is expected to operate as a business, but which the masses do not interpret as a business; in turn, rendering obsolete that which companies rely upon for survival: profit?
The answer is in the question: We must recognize that a “free press” and a neoliberal capitalist economy are incompatible. As such, we must have the capacity to imagine a world in which newspapers are, once again, public goods and, as a matter of course, available to all regardless of their ability (or unwillingness) to pay. I say once again because there is nothing natural about our current model. As scholars, like Chris Hedges, have shown, the current model of the press is a product of history, not of nature. It is the result of years of political struggle and efforts by an aggressive power elite that frankly does not desire democracy and has been steadfast in its efforts to attack the very foundation of democracy: A knowledgeable, well-informed citizenry.
Let me hasten to add that the press is not without its issues. As scholars have forcefully argued, the modern press has often served as an accomplice to America’s power elite through its naturalization of capitalism, imperial endeavors, inequality, and so forth, all under the auspices of “objectivity.” Nothing about this, however, is inevitable.
Nonetheless, blaming individuals for their reluctance to pay for the news, as Hannah-Jones and Oliver do, is not the solution. Such a strategy plays right into the hands of the neoliberal capitalists who would like nothing more than the complete transmogrification of the press from a public to a private (i.e., corporate) good while also getting to blame its demise on a cheap public.
Anyone who believes in the primacy of a free, independent press, and not this corporate, profit-centric disaster that it has become, must not allow this to happen.
