To Save the Media, Ditch Capitalism, a New Study Says

Last week, The Washington Post cut a third of its workforce. This action follows attacks on local news from governments, the shuttering of many local newspapers, and the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. These events demonstrate the failure of decades of treating media systems as commodities rather than essential public services, says Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a recent paper published in the journal Communication, Culture and Critique —“Eroding the market’s hidden hand: toward a Post-Capitalist media system” — Pickard breaks down the failures of a media market that values profit over the public good and proposes a plan to create a post-capitalist media system that eliminates the commercial pressures that prevent news media from serving democratic needs.

Our commercial media system, which favors advertisers and investors over public knowledge, is not working, Pickard argues. “Capitalism incentivizes the degradation of news media — from disinvesting in local journalism to capturing our attention and extracting personal data to devaluing and casualizing news workers’ conditions,” he says. “Because we’ve failed as a society to shield journalism from unfettered capitalism, the U.S. has lost more than one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since the early 2000s.” Voices and outlets that are not profitable are shuttered or censored, leaving communities in the lurch and creating news deserts without the high-quality information needed for democracy to function.

But hardly do you see capitalism mentioned in the common narratives around this crisis. The role of advertisers, hedge funds, and inept owners is routinely discussed, of course, “but rarely is the larger capitalist political economic system indicted or singled out to be scrutinized,” Pickard says. Capitalism is treated as “immutable, with no imaginable alternatives,” in what Pickard dubs “capitalism media realism,” referencing Mark Fisher. 

However, Pickard argues, to save the media, scholars and media workers must be brave enough to believe that what seems to be the natural order of things, what we call the status quo, can be challenged — and that a post-capitalist media system is possible. “It’s precisely during dark political times that we must articulate bold policy visions,” he writes. “Autocrats and oligarchs around the world today may be privatizing public broadcasting and consolidating control over commercial media, but soon we must reinvent and rebuild our media from the ground up.”

Pickard calls for a multistep project to gradually, but systematically, transform media infrastructures to privilege democracy over profits. There are many paths to this new public media ecosystem, he suggests, whether through vouchers for citizens to subscribe to local news, partnerships between nonprofit news organizations and existing public infrastructure, or the creation of publicly funded news cooperatives.

“Rebuilding this system up from the ashes will require massive public investments not reliant on private capital and corporate sponsorship,” Pickard writes. “American public media 2.0 should be radically democratic and truly public, not just in name, but actually owned and controlled by local communities.”