Is journalism a merit good?

Obviously the very concept of a nation-state having an official news agency, let alone a government-run news outlet, literally screams propaganda, and of course I therefore take with a grain of salt news broadcasts from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) or BBC, or the shortwave-radio-like offerings from DW (Germany) and NHK (Japan) seen on the PBS-adjacent World Channel. While I don’t think of them as unbiased, I nevertheless find it refreshing to watch these broadcasts. It’s like watching commercial TV news, but minus the breaking news klaxon, the promo content dressed up as news stories, the celebrinews, the “human interest” and other clickbaity “stories,” and of course the furniture store commercials designed to turn my television into a strobe light.

table showing different categories of goods
A Table to show the features of different types of goods
Crazyjungle@wikibooks, public domain

Bringing news to other media such as the Internet presents similar challenges. Virtually all online news outlets, whether or not they also have a “legacy” media presence, are playing the clickbait game and the chum game, and are also very heavy users of aggressive adware and spyware (compared to commercial websites whose purpose is not journalistic).

I’ve become more convinced with each passing year that journalism, especially serious journalism, is a merit good, virtually destined to be under-supplied by any market. You can paywall it, but you’d have to distribute it with a non-disclosure agreement in order to enforce a no-freebies policy when it comes to the simple dignity of being reasonably informed about current events. There’s no monetization model for that (so far, knock on wood). Government-sponsored news outlets, as I said above, have production values I much prefer, as well as a more appropriate (IMO) sense of what is and isn’t newsworthy, but of course can’t reasonably be said to be “independent.”

Science fiction writer David Brin, in his novel Earth, envisioned a sort of “individual mandate” for news, where each citizen was obligated to have a subscription to some news service (of which there were >1 available, for antitrust’s sake I guess). I don’t like the “individual mandate” (i.e. Romneycare) concept very much, but one thing you want from a news outlet is independence, so perhaps better to create the formality of the news outlet creating a product for sale, while also creating the assured existence of a paying audience to go after a share of.

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