The Civic Strategy in Media Policy

Since mid-19th century, the institutions in charge of providing citizens with the information they needed to understand public issues have been, mostly, commercial news media. Commercial media made their business by offering (supposedly) quality journalism, which attracted citizens’ attention, and then selling citizens’ attention to advertisers. However, with the digital revolution new sources proliferated, audiences fragmented, and consequently advertisers fled towards new, non-journalistic but more profitable formats, such as social media. As a result, the funds democratic societies invest in journalism are plummeting: Traditional news media are cutting production costs, hence offering worse informative services, while digital news media impose paywalls, which makes it difficult for low-income citizens to get properly informed. These symptoms suggest that the commercial model of the press is collapsing, and that contemporary democracies face the challenge of finding new ways to ensure that quality news are produced and equally available to all. But how? So far, the two main strategies in media policy have been the restrictive strategy—which aims to deter the spread of misinformation by sanctioning the existing (social and news) media when they circulate misinformative contents—and the public media strategy—which focuses on creating public news media. In this article I explore a third, largely neglected way, which I call the civic strategy in media policy. In a nutshell, the civic strategy consists in financing quality private news media with public funds, which are to be distributed through democratic allocation mechanisms. Part 1 describes the civic strategy, explaining its key traits, contextualizing it within the debate on media policy, comparing it to both the public media and the restrictive strategies, and offering a (preliminary) justification for it. Part 2 conducts a critical assessment of five ambitious proposals that might be said to fall within the civic strategy: (i) Cagé’s proposal to stimulate the proliferation of non-profit media through special fiscal policies, (ii) Latham’s voter-funded media system, (iii) Hind’s public commissioning system for journalistic projects, (iv) Ackerman’s digital news voucher system, and (v) McChesney and Nichols’ citizenship news voucher system. This assessment uses two desiderata as standards for media policy. The first is media pluralism: a healthy media ecosystem should include a journalistic and a non-journalistic sector, both of them internally plural. The second desideratum is quality journalism, which I conceive as the deliberative ideal of journalism. To operationalize this ideal into workable standards for media policy, I suggest three institutional characteristics that news media should meet: independence, professionalism, and internal democracy. Drawing from how well or poorly these proposals might honour these two desiderata, part 3 proposes a framework of intermediate principles, meant to serve as guidelines for future proposals within the civic strategy. These principles are organized in three groups, depending on whether they regulate (i) the criteria of eligibility, as I call the requirements that media should opt to fund for public funds, (ii) the funding system through which funds are transferred to eligible media or (iii) donation system, through which the allocation of funds is decided.