If You Don't Trust Media Now, Wait Until It's Government-Funded

Subsidies for journalism will divorce reporters from the need to even try to win readers and viewers.

In May, the New York State government agreed to subsidize news media. With audiences declining for news reports, many Very Concerned People have called on governments to Do Something to prop up outlets failing to win enough public support to keep the lights on. That something comes in the form of money unlikely to win back an indifferent public but that stabilizes employment prospects for reporters. The result may be that journalists will cater to state officials rather than woo readers and viewers.

New York's Welfare for Journalists

"With the passage of this bill, New York is now the first state in the nation to incentivize hiring and retaining local journalists," trumpeted Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D–Manhattan), who pushed the idea as separate legislation before getting it incorporated into the state's massive 2025 budget.

Specifically, the legislation allows tax credits for up to half of journalists' salaries.

"The Local Journalism Sustainability Act was included in New York's recently passed state budget, setting aside $90 million to subsidize local news for the next three years," reported Cameron Joseph of the Columbia Journalism Review. "Eligible outlets can apply to receive a refundable tax credit of up to $25,000 for the first $50,000 worth of employees' salaries, with a per-company cap of $300,000. That's a lot of money for a small newsroom, and could help stave off further layoffs and outlet closures."

Not every outlet can write off employment costs. Excluded, maybe accidentally, are nonprofit operations as well as those owned by publicly traded companies, which means most of the state's TV and radio stations are out of luck. Despite years of lobbying and repeated attempts to introduce media subsidies as stand-alone bills, the proposal was incorporated into the state budget in "a last-minute scramble," according to Jon Campbell of Gothamist. That left legislators unsure about what was in the bill and confused about its application to organizations the tax code treats in different ways.

"The law doesn't try to police the viewpoints of eligible media outlets," adds Campbell. "But the law allows the state's economic development agency to 'list certain types of establishments as ineligible' — a broad phrasing that gives the agency a huge amount of leeway as it crafts regulations in the coming months."

When Government Officials Become the Intended Audience

That could be a problem if it turns into an overt effort to regulate media content at a time when governments have tried to penalize political foes and suppress dissenting views. But using tax dollars to underwrite media operations that are shedding readers and viewers is a problem as well. If a massive chunk of journalists' income comes from one reliable source—government coffers—they'll inevitably treat government as the audience to please rather than locals who've proven difficult to court and who distrust the press.

Under such subsidies, the future of local media could be one of well-funded media outlets ignored by their nominal communities as they produce reports tailored for the tastes of bureaucrats with funding power. That's been an ongoing problem with publicly funded journalism.

"In Europe, we have seen governments harm the reputation and independence of public media to the point of limiting their citizens' access to differing points of view," Freedom House research analyst Jessica White wrote last month. "Reversing years of political pressure on weakened or totally co-opted outlets is a tall order. But newly elected governments in Europe are seizing the opportunity to do just that."

White places much blame on authoritarian regimes, such as Viktor Orbán's self-described "illiberal" democracy in Hungary. But she concedes one of her supposed champions of reform, Poland's Donald Tusk, "raised eyebrows within the legal community" when he bypassed parliament to gain control of public media from partisans of the previous populist government. Now public media is "criticized for favoring Tusk's government." In fact, alleged champions of liberal democracy have been poor custodians of free expression across much of the world.

Government Is No Champion of Free Expression

In December, a report from The Future of Free Speech, an independent think tank at Vanderbilt University, warned, "the global landscape for freedom of expression has faced severe challenges in 2023. Even open democracies have implemented restrictive measures." The report documented how obsession with "hate speech," "terrorist content," and "disinformation" are wielded as bludgeons by officials against critics of government officials and their policies.

Those "newly elected" reformist governments in which Freedom House's Jessica White places so much faith may not be riding to the rescue.

The problem probed by The Future of Free Speech report isn't confined to public media, but rather features holistic attacks on expression by government officials grown intolerant of dissent. It's worse, though, when outlets are directly controlled by the state—or even when they're just tax-funded.

Uri Berliner, then of NPR, described in April how the public broadcaster came to be dominated by "the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population." The broadcaster has been shedding audience, but its finances remain stable—backed heavily (though not exclusively) by public funds.

That's not a function of government censorship, but of an institutional culture pleasing its participants, and its patrons, in the absence of pressure to court listeners from the general public. In a country with a multitude of alternatives, that's less dangerous than cause for changing the station. But if government gets in the habit of subsidizing media outlets that are struggling to find audiences, government officials will become the only audience that matters to a growing number of newspapers and broadcasters.

And New York isn't alone. Last year, Catherine Buni of NiemanReports found "state-level experiments designed to support local journalism as a crucial public service are expanding, from New Jersey to California, New Mexico to Wisconsin, Illinois to Washington, and beyond." None are yet as ambitious as the New York effort, but all represent a move toward divorcing journalism outlets from a need to serve readers and listeners to remain financially afloat.

Maybe Control Is the Whole Point

To some, that's a feature. Media activists Robert McChesney and John Nichols have long favored government funding of news media. They also believe "the urgency to assert public control over the media system has never been greater." It's easy to see state subsidies leading to their desired control.

Americans are fleeing traditional news media now over trust issues and concerns about bias. But they can still seek out competitors with different takes. Just wait until the real audience is government.