In blindness we trust

Robert W. McChesney on The Death and Life of American Journalism (book due in Jan.)

The problem, in short, is rooted in the longstanding tension between advertising-supported, profit-making media and democracy-sustaining journalism. . . .

the Internet will no more spawn sufficient journalism than will the old media. . . .

Jefferson and Madison and our other founders did not roll the dice and hope rich people could make profits doing journalism so we could have a Republic. Instead, in the first several generations they instituted massive postal and printing subsidies that created the independent newspaper system in the United States. The value of the federal subsidy of the 1840s, for example, in contemporary terms would be roughly $30 billion annually. That is roughly 75 times greater than the current federal subsidy for public broadcasting. . . .

These were brilliant democratic subsidies that gave us quality journalism but also a competitive and uncensored press. We need to do the same today. We need to revamp daily newspapers into independent post- corporate entities, vastly expand funding to public media and find ways to subsidized nonprofit journalism online.

All of which, yes, fine. But why look solely to private citizens for subsidy, and not to corporate citizens as well?

McChesney makes a case for the need within a capitalism run amok to support honest journalism. Still, something is blocking our thinking -- preventing us from seeing how the profits of Big Pipes can be put into a blind trust to help support Net Content.

Corporations work on multiple levels in the service of unending profit. One of the layers is human freedom. That unendingness is the infinity that perforates any usable form of balanced economic system. There is justice in redressing the imbalance.