Trust Ownership and the Future of News

Media Moguls and White Knights

Gavin Ellis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137369444
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Crumbling business models mean news media structures must change. Gavin Ellis explores the past and present use of newspaper trusts – drawing on case studies such as the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Pulitzer Prize winning Tampa Bay Times – to make the case for a form of ownership dedicated to sustaining high quality journalism.

Part I

Journalism in Crisis

1

Why We Need Public Interest Journalism

There is absolutely nothing wrong with profit. The issue for today’s news media organisations is the purpose to which profit is put. If it is siphoned off as dividends to investors it is lost to journalism. If it is employed to make the media organisation self-sustaining, journalism can be the beneficiary. In an age of marginal viability, the former no longer makes much sense and the latter is a necessity.

It is necessary because, as the late C. Edwin Baker noted, a country is democratic only to the extent that its media, as well as elections, are structurally egalitarian and politically salient. And democratically significant journalism is under threat.

Baker’s summation of the importance of the media, contained in the opening pages of Media Concentration and Democracy, was penned shortly before the 2007 Global Financial Crisis. If media ownership at that point struggled to be “structurally egalitarian”, the economic maelstrom into which the world was subsequently propelled appeared to be the final straw. The future of commercial news media ownership – egalitarian or otherwise – was being called into question by plummeting revenue and mountainous debt.

It was not, however, the final straw. In the following years, news corporations tottered on. However, the integrity and even morality of the media was tested to the limit in phone hacking and sex scandals in the United Kingdom, financial collapses in North America and “big business” interference in Australia. In South Africa the integrity of government became the issue as repressive laws were placed in the way of news media attempting to be “politically salient”.

The end may not be nigh but news media, in the English-speaking world at least, are headed for a cathartic moment. It may result in what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” – the need to replace old products and services with new ones – that will reform and renew the way the public receives information. Or it may fail to do so in a way that meets Baker’s prerequisite for a democracy and leave, instead, a democratic deficit.

His definition is no less resonant now than it was in 2007: ownership and governance remain central to the survival of democratically significant news media, that is, media willing to provide information that citizens need to know, and able to distribute it to sufficient numbers of citizens to make the information broadly relevant.

It is time to ask whether the form of corporate ownership that both sustained and benefitted from news operations in the second half of the 20th century will do justice to this democratically significant journalism in the 21st century. Entertainment-driven media and specialist financial newspapers will continue to find friends on Wall Street and in the City of London but increasingly the former are diverging from traditional views of journalism and, in particular, its civic purposes. Serious mainstream journalism can no longer rely on the financial support that was forthcoming in the halcyon days when news-based print and (to a lesser extent) broadcasting had monopolies on advertising space or time and when rivers of gold flowed into dividend accounts.

In the days when media companies delivered double-digit annual profit growth it would have been heresy to suggest that “the news” was not a business. Purists determined to preserve the separation of church and state might suggest that the business was advertising but, in fact, that would not exist but for the news content that sat alongside. Now the advertising is migrating to digital platforms where that symbiotic relationship with news is no longer deemed necessary. It is a step too far to suggest the corporate world has no business in serious journalism but it is important to consider whether alternative forms of ownership and, certainly, governance are needed to counter a growing civic deficit in the traditional business model. Large questions hang over the future of that business model and of the structure of the industry.

It would be easy, but not altogether appropriate, to let technological determinism dictate both the form of this book and the nature of the news industry in future. Certainly, many scholars have an understandable focus on the massive impact that digital platforms have had on traditional mainstream media, but a longer view will recognise that the distribution of news has been a process that began evolving before Phidippides was dispatched to inform Athens of victory over the Persians at Marathon. And while invention has precipitated changes in the method and scale of delivery, it has not fundamentally altered the purposes of news dissemination. There is something enduring about what society makes of information.

Journalism and, in many respects, media enterprises have been formalised for at least 150 years. Today there is broad acceptance of the institutional nature of the press, both as an element of the political landscape and in its internal structures and practices. Therefore the subject is examined here in its institutional context. While opinions differ on the relationship between journalists and the political establishment (see, for example, Bennett & Livingston 2003, 359–362; Davis 2003, 669–690), there is little doubt that the relationship is systematised. Hallin and Mancini’s Comparing Media Systems and its predecessor Four Theories of the Press both attest to the development of the news media as political institutions within particular social settings (Hallin & Mancini 2004, 14). Likewise, the structures and practices of journalism have become institutionalised, along with the values and ethics to which professional journalists subscribe (Brighton & Foy 2007; Kovach & Rosenstiel 2001; Sparrow 2006). The nurturing of these institutional values and practices in the face of mounting external pressures is central to the argument made in this book that different – more altruistic – forms of governance will be necessary to sustain democratically significant journalism.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary has seven definitions of institutions but Scruton (2007, 332–334) sums up for us the important characteristics of these bodies, as they are perceived within sociology and political science, and which may be found within journalism and the news media:

• They contain members but are not identical with any member.

• They have independent agency – the faculty of action – and may have rights and obligations that do not belong to individual members.

• They may endure beyond the life of any member and have a history that is not simply the history of its members.

• They manifest their existence through the intentional acts of their members, whose intentions they form and govern.

• They may be autonomous, or not.

Scruton sees autonomy in two distinct senses: as self-governing and answerable to no external constraints other than law; and as a body that requires its institutional arrangement to fulfil functions that could not be discharged any other way. News media organisations qualify on both counts although subject, of course, to the caveat that they are influenced by external political, economic and social agencies.

Likewise, Barley and Tolbert (1997, 93–94) could have been writing directly about the news media when they described institutions as organisations (and the individuals within them) that are suspended in a web of values, norms, rules, beliefs and taken-for-granted assumptions that define their view of the world. These are characteristics of a newsroom familiar to any journalist.

Some scholars make the case for placing the media within the ranks of major political institutions rather than simply acknowledging influential linkages between two autonomous fields (Cook 1998, 2006, and Sparrow 1999 among others). To delve too far into such arguments risks adding unnecessary complexity: the following chapters will demonstrate both the autonomous institutionalised nature of the press and the way in which its structural and cultural institutional elements have been impacted by both internal and external pressures. They will show that the obligations, values and codes that in many ways define the institution of journalism have been threatened and demonstrate how governance structures can be bound – morally and legally – to protect them.

The principal focus will be on mainstream print media because their future is most at risk. A symptom of their predicament is the fact that the concept of “mainstream” is no longer as clear-cut as it was even a decade ago. Cook’s more recent contribution notes that the media landscape has become “messier” due to the declining power of mass media and the growth of autonomous Internet-based outlets, and is more circumspect in ascribing homogeneity and complementarity across media organisations because he acknowledges more players, greater diversity and more permeable institutional walls (2006, 165). The walls have not, however, come tumbling down and, for our purposes, it is still possible to define “mainstream” as media that continue to have a generalised distribution of news, comment and analysis to significantly sized audiences and which continue to follow established institutional practices and exert political influence.

It is important, however, to acknowledge that many traditional outlets have, under profit-driven commercial ownership, swerved towards entertainment and away from information that helps the audience to function as citizens. Hence, profit-driven companies under pressure to deliver shareholder dividends do threaten the institutionalised qualities and values of journalism. Alternative forms of ownership and governance based on a concept of trusteeship of journalistic ideals are now urgently needed to protect both the values and political significance of mainstream media.

Here we hit another definitional issue: what are journalistic ideals? Predictably, there are differing opinions and it may be useful to group them in order to find points of agreement and to distil the essence of what it is about journalism that needs to be protected and fostered. Opinion falls broadly into four camps that I have labelled traditionalists, restructuralists, reductionists and individualists.

Traditionalists believe that the social responsibility model articulated in 1947 by the United States Hutchins Commission continues to hold sway. Restructuralists advocate structural change and set their norms accordingly. Reductionists recognise changes to the media landscape in a digital age, and place journalists in a more narrowly defined role within a broad informational mix. Individualists believe that if media structures have not satisfied journalism’s democratic imperatives, the need can be met by granting autonomy to socially responsible individual journalists. Each approach takes some account of current realities, but generally does so to identify deficiencies that will be overcome if a particular theoretical position is taken. Each requires a more detailed examination.

The traditionalist view places the informed citizen at the centre of democracy and journalism as its servant. At the core of its journalistic ideals is the proposition, expressed by American editors in 1912, that “freedom from all obligations except that of fidelity to the public interest is vital” (Friend & Singer 2007, 5). While recognising that changing market circumstances affect its application, the traditionalist position does not concede that the normative role of the media should be compromised for the sake of expedience. Rather, it acknowledges that some conditions make the ideal harder to attain (Patterson 2003). It is a theory seen by some as the best defence against negative effects of ownership. Soderlund and Hildebrandt (2005, 137–150), for example, argue that adherence to the doctrine (with its parallel requirement of editorial autonomy) could protect the Canadian press from the interventionist tendencies of major chain owners. In so saying, they reflect views expressed by two enquiries into Canadian press ownership, neither of which was under any illusion about the dimensions of the lofty heights to be scaled. The Davey Committee in 1970 described newsrooms as “bone yards of broken dreams” while the Kent Commission in 1981 added that there were now “fewer dreams to be broken” (Canadian Royal Commission on Newspapers 1981, 218).

A subset of the traditionalist view (what I will term the New Traditionalists) is the basis of civic or public journalism that seeks to reinvest citizens with democratic participation through journalism that is attuned to the community’s civic needs and desires (Fallows 1997; Sparrow 1999). It is a standpoint at odds with interpretations of objectivity held by some mainstream media, because of its forms of advocacy engagement with the public but it is, nonetheless, consistent with the Hutchins Commission’s ideals. A further example of New Traditionalism is Gans’ theory of “multiperspectival” news (2003), which is the embodiment of the Hutchins Commission’s pluralistic ideals.

The value preferences of the restructuralists suggest, perhaps self-evidently, that complex democracies require complex media ideals. The complexity is derived in part from their equal emphasis on structure and its effects on practice. Both Baker and Curran, for example, develop ideal-type ownership structures which they believe more capable of delivering journalistic ideals in a pluralistic democratic society, but which require enormous restructuring and re-regulation. Baker’s vision of an ideal press is for “separate media entities, with each entity focused on, and preferably controlled and maybe owned by, one of the various groups making up the polity” (1998, 343–344) and for widely dispersed ownership (2007, 163–189). Curran envisages a broadcasting-based “working model of a democratic media system” with a core public service television sector, supplemented by a ring of four peripheral sectors, which he admits embodies a “complex set of requirements” (2002, 240–247). His model envisaged a civic media sector supporting activist organisations, a social market sector embodying minority media supported by the state, a professional media sector under the control of professional communicators utilising state-supported non-commercial structures, and a private sector operating on a commercial basis but with constraints to prevent subversion of the other sectors. His view of the significance of media structures is reinforced by his collaborative study with Iyengar, Lund and Salovaara-Moring of media models in the United Kingdom, United States, Finland and Denmark. It found that a public service model provided a greater amount of democratically significant programming than entertainment-centred, market-driven media (2009, 22). Baker’s solution is for a “structurally mixed system . . . with different economic bases and different goals for different portions of the press” facilitated by “intelligent and properly oriented structuring of the media” by means of government regulation (2002, 283–284). There is recognition among the restructuralists that the structural change they envisage will redefine journalistic norms to embrace an express pluralistic ideal, and redefine the relationship between journalist and government.

While Baker and Curran meet complexity with complexity, reductionists such as Zaller (2003) see it as a reason to reduce expectations and accept the value of journalists producing “burglar alarm news” to satisfy citizens’ desire to be informed in moments of need. This viewpoint, drawn from a re-examination of the role of the citizen by Schudson in 1998, is that the scope and detail of government activity has grown to the point where no citizen can hope to be informed across its range, and the role of the journalist should therefore be confined to those aspects of policy and administration that meet the civic needs of “monitorial” rather than “informed” citizens (Graber 2003a; Zaller 2003). If the notion of the “informed citizen” has been over-stated, and Schudson is not alone in thinking so (Carpini 2000) then, by extension, the role of the press must also have been exaggerated. The reductionist argument accepts what Zaller calls “the Full News standard” in elite publications like the New York Times, but applies a different standard for “ordinary people”. The “burglar alarm” standard calls attention to matters requiring urgent attention and does so in “noisy and excited tones” (Zaller 2003, 122). The reductionist approach finds support for the need to redefine the role of the media in line with a pragmatic re-evaluation of citizens’ democratic activity (Graber 2003b), but its ready acceptance of aspects of tabloid journalism and imprecise explanations of democratic theory have rightly drawn criticism (Bennett 2003; Patterson 2003; Strömbäck 2005). It is an approach that, in the name of pragmatism, replaces the aspirational dimension of journalistic idea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Journalism in Crisis
• Part II: The Trust Models
• Appendix A: The Poynter principles
• Appendix B: Government-mandated governance in PSBs
• Appendix C: Charter of South African Broadcasting Corporation SABC (Extract)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index