The New Journalism

Free Press: The president of Columbia University, home of the nation's most prestigious journalism school, has an idea to counter the decline of the mainstream press: more state-controlled media. We aren't making this up.

In a 3,811-word screed published in this month's Columbia Journalism Review, Lee Bollinger proposes that the U.S. fund an "American World Service." This would ostensibly be modeled on news agencies such as the BBC World Service and, we kid you not, Xinhua News Service and Al-Jazeera.

Why? Because they're all state-controlled media with a global reach, which he sees as the wave of the future. "Global media outlets are proliferating," he says. So America has to get one, too.

It's the only way, Bollinger believes, to "realize the enormous potential of globalization" and "channel it, regulate it and encourage it in the right way."

More to the point, it's needed because newspapers are no longer competitive as a medium and Fox News is giving CNN real competition.

"The loss of domestic audience share to more explicitly ideological competitors on the right and left have caused CNN's international news coverage to become more reactive and less committed to sustained in-depth reporting," Bollinger says.

This has left American journalism up a creek. "Here in the U.S.," in Bollinger's opinion, "we do not really have the capacity for high-quality, professional journalism on a global scale."

That's quite an admission coming from the ultimate boss of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and administrator of the Pulitzer Prize. But Bollinger's real beef is with capitalism and citizen choices.

"While the market is a powerful system for a strong free press and must be the dominant model," he says, "there is no reason in experience to conclude that a free market alone will yield the press we need." State agencies, he explains, are subject to less market pressure, and less market pressure produces better journalism.

But a look at Bollinger's particular favorite, the BBC World Service, tells a different story. Shielded from capitalism and competition, that agency hasn't been immune to budget cuts, politicization or even foreign influence — ills Bollinger says state sponsorship will cure.

Last March, the cash-strapped BBC reportedly applied for a grant from the U.S. State Department for an anti-jamming program because it was out of money. Shortly before that, it made $72 million in budget cuts and laid off 650 people before it came to the U.S. with its hand out. A year earlier it got a $320 million loan from the European Union, and, according to a March 23 story published on the BBC's own Web site, ended up reporting with a pro-EU bias.

There are legitimate uses of government money for battered news agencies. The CIA's 1970s funding of beleaguered El Mercurio during the Allende dictatorship in Chile comes to mind. But none is applicable to BBC.

Citing National Public Radio and Voice of America, Bollinger notes that the U.S. has been in the media business before. But he dismisses those enterprises as being too small (NPR) or having too narrow a mission (VOA).

Fact is, they show how government ownership of media presents even more problems for a free press than free markets.

What Bollinger really means when he says we don't produce quality global journalism is that we're not producing the kind of journalism he wants. But Bollinger can have any kind of news on his PC each morning as long as he's willing to pay for it.

The real problem is that not everyone wants the same news he does. Many prefer Fox News and other "ideological" rivals, as well as blogs, the British and Latin American press, and other sources of news that present a nonleftist or at least detached point of view instead of the pablum that much of his J-school puts out.

Bollinger's proposal for a global press controlled by a government elite sounds like something on which George Soros would look kindly. Come to think of it, Soros has become one of the Columbia journalism school's most generous patrons.