Would You Pay Taxes for Better Journalism?

Aubrey Nagle
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

This week I came across the Community Information Districts project, thanks to one of the co-founders writing “Journalism is a public service. Why don’t we fund it like one?” for the Columbia Journalism Review. Basically, the CID project argues that journalism is a public service and journalists should (and, most importantly, could) be funded locally like fire and sanitation departments are, through special service districts. As CID’s Simon Galperin explains,

“The United States currently hosts more than 30,000 special service districts, which fund everything from local fire departments and water infrastructure projects to sanitation services and hospitals. Special service districts are paid for by taxes or annual fees assessed in a geographic area; and, in turn, they deliver services to the communities that fund them. They can be created by town councils or voted into existence via referendum.”

The piece acknowledges some of the downfalls of such a plan as, of course, there are many — but they’re optimistic.

Community information districts are not a cure-all, and there are obstacles to establishing them. Some communities might resist the notion of an additional tax. Others may not have the tax base to support such services in the first place. We are still looking for solutions to these issues, but they are not insurmountable.

I think this is intentionally understating the problem a bit, but I get it. It’s hard to be persuasive when you give equal weight to the cons. Because hell yeah it would be hard to administer a new tax on a society that is largely anti-tax, regardless of its socialist pockets. And many communities won’t have a big enough tax base — if we knew how to wriggle around those issues, many public schools wouldn’t be criminally underfunded.

But I like this idea, a lot. As we discuss every week, journalism is crucial to the health of a democratic republic. And as we discussed last week, capitalism is no longer supporting its creation. So, an alternative solution is publicly funded journalism.

I’m sure every person that works at NPR and PBS would read this and think I’m basically the guys at Uber who forgot that public transit had already been invented. But there is nuance to this, I swear.

The contemporary argument for public or, in this case, taxpayer funding of journalism isn’t just “the public should pay for the media because public media is unrestrained by commercial goals and thus of higher quality.” The argument is, instead, twofold:

  1. The public is not getting their [journalistic] needs met by the market and is not in a position to fix the issue without special attention paid by the government. [From what I understand, essentially CID’s argument.]
  2. Journalism is just not monetarily sustainable in a capitalist society, and thus must be donor-funded, rather than ad-funded. [At least, that’s my POV.]

I have my reservations about the ability to implement such special service districts in this political climate. Considering both the government’s and the public’s general disdain for “the media,” I’d be hard pressed to believe we could convince taxpayers to fund their creation. A new level of understanding and belief in journalism as a social good would be required for that to take place in any measurable capacity.

However, for me its a Utopian ideal. Journalism funded by the public, truly, as a public service, would ensure the field serves its readership and is served by its readership. It would foster deeper relationships among the industry and its constituents (and they would be called constituents; how novel). It could bring us back to a (perhaps never existing) golden age where people bought their local newspaper to be better prepared to engage with the world around them, rather than to entertain or distract themselves.

Alas, for now, it is just a Utopian ideal.

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