Media studies: Rise of nonprofit journalism likely to shift local coverage to the Left
First issue of PRAVDA. Image by Wikimedia Commons
More than 3,000 newspapers have closed over the past 20 years, which has created a local information vacuum. But Howard Husock at the National Review worries that filling it with quasi-journalistic propaganda funded by big foundations is no substitute for news.
Consider the most significant funding source for nonprofit local journalism, a national philanthropic effort known as Press Forward, started in September, 2023 with $500 million from a core group of identifiably left-of-center foundations: MacArthur, Ford, Knight, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It expresses support, to be sure, for some incontrovertible basics of good local journalism, including “truth, accuracy and independence.” Covering the City Council in the process is pretty important, too, it might be added.
But the Press Forward initiative reveals clear biases much more worrisome than the alleged financial conflicts of interest that Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest persons, has related to Washington Post stories. Consider its April 2024 “open call” for applications for support from local-news organizations.
“For this open call, Press Forward is prioritizing organizations that are producing and delivering news and information to underserved audiences such as communities of color, linguistically diverse communities, low-wealth rural communities, and others not adequately served, reached or represented,” it reads. This language is consistent with the organization’s founding goals to “enable growth with equity and diversity of thought” and “to close longstanding inequities in media ownership, philanthropy, and journalism, so the future of local news in America is more relevant and better serves all communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized in media and democracy.”
This is funding à la NPR, of whom MacArthur is a long-time supporter as part of its interest in a “just, verdant and peaceful world.” Funding for causes is antithetical to serious journalism.
No serious newspaper should ever ignore any potential readers. Indeed, in my time as a general-assignment reporter, circa 1973, for the Middletown (NY) Times-Herald Record, I won my spurs, after my probationary period, by covering the travails of migrant laborers in the Hudson Valley’s “black dirt” onion fields, controversies over subsidized housing, and a performance for the local black gospel group’s anniversary. Good reporters look for good stories — whether about the factory’s workers or the factory’s owner.
But attaching strings to financial support in the allegedly fairer-minded nonprofit model ignores a key aspect of advertising-supported, for-profit traditional newspapers: the search for as many readers of any and all backgrounds as possible, not a sliver of the population interested in news with a selective focus. Press Forward may think it’s correcting for historical bias — but it’s actually introducing bias at the risk of ignoring what draws so many readers, from high-school sports to the advent of new local businesses.
Financial support predicated on a specific worldview — it’s hard not to call Press Forward’s hardcore DEI — will simply not increase that credibility. Nor will a nonprofit model per se.
Read the whole thing here.
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