The violence of the market

When commercialism trumps democracy

Although journalism’s structural attributes often escape serious scrutiny, Trump’s election rendered visible market-driven pathologies that degrade media systems. Privileging ratings and profits over democratic discourse, typical news coverage trivialized and sensationalized the elections in horse-race style reporting, while offering almost no substantive policy analysis whatsoever (Patterson, 2016; Pickard, 2018). This wasn’t the result of a few bad journalists or news organizations; rather, it evidences systemic problems stemming from the extreme commercialism driving our entire news media apparatus.

Telltale symptoms include the following: Growing precarity in journalistic labor as news organizations cut costs and try to do more with less; an emphasis on clickbait and deceptive and invasive forms of advertising as news outlets chase ever-diminishing digital ad revenues. The latter encourages a reliance on corporate pay-to-play practices (such as native advertising and sponsored content) and surveillance that exposes readers’ privacy – without their consent – to third-party data-brokers (Libert and Pickard, 2015).

But the most glaring manifestation of the market’s destruction of journalism is the sheer loss of jobs: the newspaper industry has been reduced by more than 50% since 2001 according to the U.S. bureau of labor statistics. Creating vast ‘news deserts’ (Abernathy, 2016), newspaper closures, bankruptcies, and extreme downsizing are accelerated by ‘vulture capitalists’ swooping in to profit from the scraps (Reynolds, 2018). Little evidence suggests that any commercial model will emerge to sustain the journalism that democracy requires.

All democratic theories and foundational principles – including the First Amendment itself – assume a thriving press system. The Fourth Estate’s current collapse is a profound social problem that screams for public policy intervention. That no such intervention has occurred stems as much from ‘discursive capture’ as it does from regulatory failure (Pickard, 2015b). We need to reframe the debate.

Journalism crisis = market failure

A vocabulary for describing this problem has long existed. However, journalism studies’ disconnect from political economic analyses (Pickard, 2017) has led to a paucity of scholarship focusing on commercial media’s structural constraints. One useful concept from the political economic literature is ‘market failure’, which aptly captures journalism’s demise (Baker, 2002; Pickard, 2015a). Market failure describes situations where public goods such as news and information are given inadequate support, having detrimental effects on society.

The reluctance to discuss market failure, what I refer to in another context as ‘the great evasion’ (Pickard, 2014), stems from a number of characteristics in the communication field. Scholars are loathe to sound reductive, over-deterministic, and, worst of all, Marxist. In the field’s early years, to criticize the market was to seem un-American and subversive, potentially hurting one’s career (Pickard, 2015a, p. 201). Silences and blindspots emerged over time.

Even otherwise critical media scholars, such as Michael Schudson, have given relatively little attention toward critiquing the market’s effects on journalism. In response to Benson’s (2017) charges of de-emphasizing commercialism in his work, Schudson (2017) states that ‘It is a mistake to see what has become of journalism in the past half century as primarily the story of ‘market failure’’.

This is a dubious claim, especially when looking at the economics of journalism over the past two decades. In several key respects, a history of American media is a history of market failure (Pickard, 2015a). Commercial constraints in the press have long created barriers for particular voices and views. The press has never fully lived up to its democratic expectations and obligations. Journalism’s public service mission and its commercialism have always been in tension. Indeed, the very project of developing ethical codes and professional standards was to prevent journalism from being overwhelmed by business priorities (Kaplan, 2002). What we’re witnessing today is an apotheosis of those tensions, a culmination of long-standing structural contradictions in commercial journalism. But our analyses of this crisis remain deeply impoverished.

In the United States, we treat the market’s effects on journalism – as we treat the market’s effects on nearly everything – as an inevitable force of nature beyond our control or, at the very least, a public expression of democratic desires. This ‘market ontology’ simultaneously naturalizes the market’s violence against journalism and forecloses on alternative models (Pickard, 2015b). Ultimately, this resignation ensures that society won’t attempt a serious public policy response to a major social problem.

By this logic, if publics (or rather, advertisers, investors, and media owners) don’t support certain kinds of journalism, we must let them wither. This position’s inherent absurdity is cast into stark relief if we imagine designing our public education according to a similar commercial logic. If students and their parents elect not to pay for civics class, then it’s discontinued. Or consider academic labor: if scholars’ journal articles aren’t receiving enough clicks, their research agendas must be abandoned. While it seems preposterous in its extreme, it’s precisely this kind of savage logic that’s snuffing out journalism in broad daylight.

The path forward: De-commercializing journalism

While journalism faces external threats ranging from oppressive state governments to changes in audiences and technologies, the structural challenges posed by the market are existential. Therefore, as much as possible, we should either remove news production from the market entirely or minimize commercial pressures.

Five general approaches are conducive to such a project:

I discuss the politics, discourses, and policies required to actualize these alternatives elsewhere (Pickard, 2015a), but establishing this noncommercial vision as a long-term normative goal is in itself a worthwhile project.

Of course, removing commercial imperatives won’t solve all journalism-related problems. Deeply embedded cultural orientations, hierarchies, and routines – both within newsrooms and in the broader society – will persist after removing journalism from the market. But de-commercialization is an important first step toward democratization. It opens the door for a journalism that’s universally accessible, but attentive to different global contexts and cultural particularities.

Salvaging a non-profit model from the ashes of market-driven journalism goes far beyond nostalgia or seeking to recover a golden age that never existed. This isn’t about finding the right business model to preserve the status quo. Commercialism lies at the heart of this crisis, and removing it could be transformative. Any path toward reinventing journalism must acknowledge that the market is its destructor, not savior.

The ravages of the market escape the same level of alarm than other risks facing journalism today. Without minimizing the life-and-death threats to journalists around the world, we must also confront this more subtle violence. Communication scholars have an important role to play in clarifying the structural roots of this social problem and expanding the political imaginary for potential futures. We must identify alternatives and help chart a path toward actualizing them.