The
‘nichefication’ of news media
Accelerating
de-centralization of the news media should begin improving
Nevada government
By Steven
Miller
Many Nevada business
people, looking out upon the state’s demagogic
political scene today, find it thoroughly demoralizing—which
is entirely understandable.
They should know, however, that big and encouraging changes
are coming down the pike.
Today what Milton Friedman called the “Iron Triangle”—the
powerful alliance of special-interest groups, politicians and
bureaucrats—continues to drive and dominate state public
policy news. As always, what this alliance wants is
ever-larger government, plus the strangling in the cradle of
any moves for governmental reform.
Public education here in Nevada is where this pattern is most
notorious. But similar triangle alliances operate in many
government sectors. Just last week, advocates of more
socialism in Nevada health care policy snagged big headlines
and news coverage around the state for their agenda.
The folks running these predatory triangles, you may notice,
always stay on offense. They know that to get the ever-bigger
and more invasive government programs they want—and the
ever-higher taxes on you to finance them—they need to dominate
the news in order to dominate the Nevada Legislature’s agenda.
And so they work relentlessly to do both.
In addition, they exploit the fact that, for many years, the
playing field upon which such contests occur has been tilted
in their direction. An example is that they can often pursue
their goals on the taxpayer’s dime. This, for instance, is the
real significance of the annual class-size reduction
appropriations authorized by the Nevada Legislature. While
shown by many studies to be educationally ineffective,
class-size-reduction funding persists because it virtually
insures increased union membership—boosting the union’s
treasury and political war chest.
For government bureaucracies, propagandizing and spinning on
the taxpayer dime is even easier. Within school districts
advocacy of an ever-larger government sector occurs under
budget headings for “public information” or “community
relations.” This is just one method through which Nevada
government bureaucracies finance their campaigns to increase
citizens’ tax burdens with funds taken from those very
citizens.
This particular advantage of the ever-larger government crowd
most likely persists because it’s linked to a kind of subsidy
for a politically influential private industry: the news
business. Representatives of public information offices (PIOs)
inside government agencies spend much of their time making
reporters’ lives easier by tracking down information that news
organizations need for stories. Thus you can rely on reporters
to give government flacks a respectful hearing on any
controversy, and often even the benefit of the doubt.
Similarly, from the news corporation’s point of view, ending
the tax-subsidized government PIO operations rarely rises to
the level of an editorial priority. All it would do, someone
is bound to say, is raise the company’s costs.
Nevertheless, the days of this cozy symbiotic arrangement
between news organizations and government are numbered. And
it’s the same with other forms of insider symbiosis that
special interests working for ever-larger-government have, for
over a century, enjoyed with our gate-keeping news media.
The big new disruptive factor here is the Internet. A Carnegie
Corporation study last year revealed that, now that news
consumers have more choices, they increasingly see little
reason to stay with traditional media. Just one example: Only
9 percent of consumers between 18 and 34 see newspapers as
trustworthy, and only 8 percent find them useful.
So, almost as we watch, the entire gate-keeping apparatus of
the news industry is disintegrating under the fire hose of the
Web. Now virtually anyone can find, distribute and market news
content—and, as RatherGate showed, fact-check the Big Media.
In the words of Jeff Jarvis, “Media, always a one-way pipe,
now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the
centralization of media—the marketplace, the network, the
monopoly—is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes
everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the
economics. It changes the power.”
Jarvis is a highly credible witness. Not only does he
currently have an immense footprint on the Web—some 5,000
daily visitors to his personal blog—but he also knows the Old
Media. Creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly,
he’s been Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New
York Daily News and a good deal more.
Jarvis terms what is going on the “nichefication of media.”
It’s a good phrase; the former lords of the journalistic
universe are being reduced to mere niche players. More
significantly, with the passing of the centralized media, the
ability of Iron Triangle operatives to continue to fake the
Nevada public’s legislative agenda will also fade into
history.
<746 words>
Steven Miller is editor of BusinessNevada and policy director
for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
