A Kitchen Sink of Quinine Water, Or, Why the Free Press Is Both Necessary and Dangerous (Part 1, in which the necessity of private news organizations is discussed)

It’s easy to get caught up in the hectic, day to day milieu of modern society.  The news is disseminated far faster, and to a much wider audience than it has been at any point in history.  Every day there is more new information available to us on-line and on-air than no one person could possibly follow, let alone interpret, all of it.  This problem is compounded by the economic reality that most of us can only afford to set aside a few hours a day to get up to speed and reflect on the day’s news.  Fortunately, the vast majority of the events that happen every day around the world aren’t of any value to us.  We therefore rely on filters to pluck out the events that affect our lives, the events that we care about, and present them to us in an easily understandable form.  These filters are newspapers, television news, news agregator websites (i.e. Drudge Report), blogs, twitter, etc... .  Think of a fire hose and your kitchen sink.  The fire hose provides much more water, but you can’t drink from the fire hose.  Your kitchen sink filters the massive amount of water flowing throwing the public water main down to a manageable amount. 

But reporting (or filtering and presenting) the news costs time and money.   Either government or private industry must provide the capital to cover the costs of reporting the news.  News, especially in a democracy, is a public good.  A well-informed, well educated citizenry is vital to the success of democracy.  We might, therefore, be tempted to let Government take responsibility for providing the news.  However, this leaves the country open to the greater threat of deliberate misinformation by the government.  In modern America, it is widely and rightly accepted that a free press is the greatest defense of liberty. 

But a free press brings with it its own set of problems.  If news agencies cannot rely upon public funding to cover their operating costs, then they must turn to private investors.  Private news agencies are like quinine.  Malaria is a horrible, often fatal disease.  For years, quinine was the only known treatment for malaria, but quinine is poisonous.  The quinine killed the malaria parasites, but it also poisoned the patient, often resulting in terrible side effects.  Yet compared to the alternative (dying painfully of malaria) the side effects were deemed acceptable.  All major private news agencies are, at their most basic level, corporations.  They all have a responsibility to their shareholders to generate profits, or, at the very least, to cover their own operating costs.  They may also have a moral obligation to fairly and accurately report the news, but the fact remains that unless they can generate enough revenue to continue operating, their fairness and accuracy will be short lived. They must therefore operate with one eye on their bottom line. 

PART 2 of this entry. click the link