Pitfalls of Government News Subsidy

The BBC and NPR have the most thorough and interesting news coverage in the world.  That is the premise for Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s argument that the government should respond to the rapid disintegration of economic viability in the newspaper industry by providing government subsidization of news coverage.

The problem is that the admittedly excellent scope of coverage at the BBC and NPR leaves out part of the story.  The BBC and NPR also provide some of the most consistently biased coverage and analysis.  NPR consistently favors Democrats in its political and economic coverage. One can listen to NPR for days without hearing a single a single serious representative of a conservative viewpoint.  And the BBC’s record of coverage of the Iraq war and of stories related to Israel makes “biased” far too weak of a description.

Bollinger suggests that proper oversight and integrity could be maintained by using the same procedures that universities use in issuing grants for research.  His example shoots his argument in the foot.  Because universities are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals and those further left (studies show the dominance is in excess of 90% in most fields), grants programs are infamous for favoring research  projects that deal with whatever questions are currently trendy in liberal circles and guaranteeing to provide answers that liberals will find pleasant.  For example, at most major research universities, one can search in vain essentially forever for a funded research project that promises findings critical of expansive government social programs.  And graduate students beginning work on dissertations are often cautioned against doing any project that might make them appear conservative, lest the consequence be a blacklist on the extraordinarily difficult and opaque academic job market.

Government assistance for news gathering might nonetheless be a necessary expedient because of the economic collapse of the traditional news-gathering industry combined with the “tragedy of the commons” that plagues the blogging world that has grown up to replace it.  But the oversight processes are going to need a lot more thought and a lot more self-critical reassessment from the likes of Bollinger if such a system is to avoid the trap of self-blind bias into which the BBC and NPR have already fallen.