Democracy without Journalism Flyer

This chapter provides an overview of the entire American media landscape, with an emphasis on the various degradations caused by commercial imperatives. As media outlets desperately chase increasingly elusive revenues, they further debase journalism. Problems that emerge from journalism’s decline range from the turn to invasive and deceptive forms of advertising to a growing precarity in news labor. The chapter systematically goes through potential alternatives to the advertising revenue model and concludes that a public option is the best model going forward.

Journalism Practice, 2012

By providing historical context for the recurring regulatory retreat in the face of structural problems in the news media, this study examines the policy discourse that continues to define the US journalism crisis and government’s inability to confront it. To contextualize this pattern, I compare two historical junctures, the first occurring in the 1940s, exemplified by the Hutchins Commission, and the second occurring in the more recent policy debates during the years 2009–2011, exemplified by the Waldman Report. Both of these historical moments represented a societal response to a journalism crisis, and both entailed deeply normative discussions about the role of media in a democratic society and government’s role in managing that relationship. A comparison of these historical case studies brings into focus recurring weaknesses in liberal reform efforts. Specifically, it highlights what I refer to as the “discursive capture” reflected in common assumptions about the proper relationship between media and government, and how this American paradigm is constrained by an implicit market fundamentalism.

2020

The commercialism driving much of the American media system counts among the many factors that enabled Donald Trump’s election. When it mattered most, too many American media institutions privileged profit over democracy. This does not mean that people working within the media industries are bad. It does suggest, however, that the incentive structures driving these media institutions are skewed. To contest a thriving ecosystem of misinformation, we need to redesign our news media system so that different logics are guiding it.

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2020

The Communication Review, 2011

Donald Trump’s election exposed structural pathologies in America’s media system. This commentary addresses three broad media failures that combine to imperil democratic society: the news media’s extreme commercialism; Facebook’s proliferation of misinformation; and the crisis of newspaper journalism. I then outline a policy program that can begin to address these structural pathologies.