Democracy without Journalism? by Victor Pickard

“When you see, for example, what the UK is doing, or what Germany or what the Nordic countries are doing, or what Japan, Australia, Korea-they all have robust public media systems. “A good starting point is to look at what other democracies around the planet are doing,” says Pickard. Throughout the conversation, Pickard calls for a democratized media system that is funded, owned, and controlled by the American people, which could mean either building on partially publicly-funded systems in existence, such as PBS and NPR, or starting from scratch. On this week’s installment of Scheer Intelligence, Pickard joins host Robert Scheer to discuss the failures that have led to this dire misinformation precipice, most of which are rooted in monopoly capitalism, and how more public funding for media could be the exact medicine this ailing country desperately needs. In his book, the author and Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania urges his readers to see this crisis as an opportunity to reimagine a better, stronger model for journalism. Pickard argues that the era for commercial journalism is over, especially when it comes to the kind of expensive, local journalism that democracies depend on. Author Victor Pickard’s latest book, Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society, however, offers a simple solution to our media woes: government subsidies.

As advertising revenue newspapers once relied on has increasingly ended up in the pockets of big tech companies such as Google and Facebook, many have shut down their presses, while others such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have turned to billionaires to fund their papers, resulting in a model that has turned journalism into a playground for the uber rich that conceals the economic plight of most of the population. funding model for journalism is broken, and that this had terrible consequences for our democracy, but it may not be without repair.

Democracy without Journalism? by Victor Pickard