Back when I was preparing for entrance exams for the faculty of journalism, I was once tasked with an essay about my vision of a media business model, which would allow for truth and accuracy, independence, fairness and impartiality, humanity and accountability – the main principles of ethical journalism. I was asked to describe a business model that would allow for a "good" and reliable media outlet.
It's been almost 20 years since then, and I still haven't found or seen a perfect system.
I'll start by saying that here at the Mercury, we exist thanks to our business community advertising with us. Yes, any government, be it municipal, provincial or federal, can buy an ad in the paper or trust us with their advertising campaign, and we appreciate it when they do, but if they don't then we just have to find someone else to advertise.
What does it mean? It means that no one dictates what we have to or mustn't write about. But at the same time, most outlets that choose this model end up stuck trying to survive with very limited resources to allow for good reach and higher quality, and many end up folding.
As hard as it is to imagine looking at today's Russia, back in the late 1990s-early 2000s there was hope for democracy there. I was raised believing in freedom of the press as one of the essential pieces of a successful, free and just community. I was also raised understanding that achieving independence for media is one of the toughest jobs ever.
To have strong reporters and high-quality articles, you need time, access to technology and resources, skills and talents, and much more. To summarise – you need money. And the better the product is, the more money it takes.
Since the introduction of the concept that "the information wants to be free", every year, it becomes more and more difficult to explain why people would need to pay for the information. It's available everywhere at no charge, one may say. But to get facts straight, to ensure that your story is unbiased and true, to get the details, you have to have great employees, you need to cover their time and expenses, you need to support them with resources, you need technology and more. So you need someone to pay for everything. If it's not the reader, it's someone else. And unfortunately, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
If that's an individual or one business, even if they start with good intentions, eventually it will be their vision that will be manifested through the media. People are biased, it's our nature and information is a power we can't resist using.
If it's a government, again, intentions can be good – to support an industry which is vital to democracy and is a must-have to successfully co-operate in any kind of group or community greater than a couple of hundred people. Also, to use the taxpayers' dollars to supply people with information, which is supposed to be unbiased as it's paid by everyone rather than one entity.
But the reality is that most governments end up falling for pushing their agenda via information resources available to them. They may manipulate or threaten, but they actually don't have to. We all know not to bite the feeding hand, right?
Back in the day, when I worked as a journalist in Russia, I could see first-hand what even partial government funding meant. In one of the outlets I worked for, even back in early 2010s, we'd receive directional emails explaining how we should/shouldn't cover particular events or topics. I hear from my former colleagues that now the government regularly produces workbooks explaining exactly what reporters have to say, even if it has nothing to do with what's happening, and there are measures to keep any government-funded media compliant.
(Well, in contemporary Russia there are measures to keep any media under control, no matter what source of funding they use, but that's another story.)
I've never been in a position to learn first-hand how it works here, but it seems that government funding may affect what some media see and don't see even in Canada.
The media's main duty is to serve the people by providing them with facts and allowing them to come up with their own conclusions. How to achieve that? There are different ways to try – advertising, donations, mixed models, but I believe the taxpayers' money can work as well if the distribution system is changed. In the current model, taxpayers' dollars are accumulated in hands of the elected government and they make decisions on what the people need, what people should hear and how they should move forward.
But I believe that to keep the government accountable, the media has to be separate and not afraid to bite the government's hand, as it's the citizens that journalists serve and are paid by.
Whether the latest is achievable is another question.
