Tax Support Won’t Save Local News, Especially in Illinois
By Brad Weisenstein
June 12, 2024
I spent more than three decades delivering local news at my hometown newspaper, a job and mission I loved that allowed me to do good and serve my neighbors.
It was a highly lucrative business. Until it wasn’t. I was shown the door, along with many talented colleagues.
Audiences and delivery methods changed. The local grocery stores and car dealers didn’t need our captive audience. It was so easy making money that we failed to figure out what most businesspeople knew about how to keep that audience engaged or supplied with a product they needed or to get by on thin margins. But Craigslist and Facebook and Reddit all figured it out.
Now taxpayers are being asked to support something the market will not, or at least not in its traditional form.
Illinois politicians just agreed to subsidize journalism, although Gov. J.B. Pritzker has yet to sign the state budget containing the $25 million in taxpayer-funded donations. Newsrooms can get $15,000 per reporter or $25,000 for a new hire. The governor also has a bill on his desk that pushes half of state advertising to local news outlets.
Here’s why Pritzker should use a line-item veto on the $25 million bail-out as well as reject the targeted ad spend.
State-sponsored media is the opposite of what America is about. The whole point of local news is to serve as a watchdog keeping government in check by telling voters what it’s up to. The First Amendment protections are to protect free speech from government oppression, but creating state-sponsored media is a form of assimilation that will quickly erode independence and replace it with reticence.
I knew a guy who worked for the Chinese state media. I asked whether he’d ever been censored, and he said no one needed to: He knew which topics to avoid if he wanted to keep his job. That fear grew greater self-restraint than any brow-beating censor could ever impose.
You can’t be a government watchdog if you are an extension of the government. And when the government repeatedly is listed as the nation’s most corrupt and has been that way for decades, Illinois especially has no business in the news business.
It’s not that we don’t need local news. I dedicated most of my life to trying to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – most of whom were political elites. I believe an informed electorate is democracy’s greatest guardian. We need a marketplace for competing ideas to advance us as a society.
Our journalism exposed a priest abuse scandal a decade before the Boston Globe and Spotlight. We discovered the opioid epidemic in our community well before it was national news. We sent corrupt politicians to the federal pen for pay-to-play and for spending tax dollars on themselves. We exposed government failures to protect abused children and find justice for rape victims. We helped people cope with disasters, then dug into the failures that exacerbated them.
But recreating all that is just silly if no one is listening. You can’t direct people’s attention to what’s important with tax dollars, especially when media consumption has completely changed but the medium has not.
In one way it is just cruel to put local news on life support. Handing money to the buggy-whip manufacturers would have only prolonged the pain for their workers. Their salvation was in moving on to jobs in the auto trades.
Plus, the government creates a destructive inertia, whether in a state-owned tractor factory or news outlet. Competition creates strength and agility. Frankly, too little competition is what doomed local news and put it in the position that government feels the need to force taxpayers to support its survival for our own good.
Trust competition. Vacuums will be filled where there is a need and a clever soul and an audience. People will learn to be critical, to “consider the source” and to be smarter consumers of information without it having been branded by a 19th century publisher.
And those smarter information consumers will know not to trust a source bought and paid for by the government it is supposed to monitor.
-30-
Brad Weisenstein is managing editor at the Illinois Policy Institute, where he guides institute content and ensures it is accurate, thorough and communicates the principles of personal liberty and fiscal restraint. For 32 years Brad was an editor at his hometown newspaper. His work with investigations, multimedia, special projects and opinions won numerous state and national awards. He individually won awards for his editorial opinions on where a poor community’s mayor really lived and with a farewell to the Illinois Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, as well as for an investigation into taxpayer subsidies of a shuttle bus system to St. Louis Cardinals games (Go Cards!). He lives in Belleville, Ill., and is a graduate of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He can be reached at bweisenstein@illinoispolicy.org.
Comments 33
This is just an attempt to turn the media into the Ministry of Propaganda. Anything to waste the taxpayers’ money in an already overtaxed state. The state government has no valid reason to subsidize the media -if the media cannot stand on its own merits, it doesn’t need to exist. We have a local handout paper which is worthless. It is nothing but propaganda for the local politicians. What’s next – a subsidy for the Tribune and Sun-Times to further their propaganda operations? Don’t laugh – it’s coming. As long as the voters (who are too brainwashed to figure out their own best interests), continue to elect these slimebags, it will continue. According to these voters, Illinois is Mister Roger’s neighborhood – it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. An early nomination for the Motza, perhaps?
You’re exactly right. The Washington Post and NY Times are an arm of the National Democratic Party. The Tribune and Sun Times for out state Democrats. And they wonder why they’re losing readers🙄
The deadliest words in America
“I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”
There’s this feeling that the key to making newspapers and other media outlets survive is money from either a government — state, local or federal — or a foundation. While there are examples of media outlets supported by foundations doing what they’re supposed to be doing — providing objective, nonpartisan reporting — like the Voice of San Diego, there’s always a risk the donor and/or funder, whether a foundation or a government, will insist, perhaps on the sly, their views seep into the reporting.
Media outlets, especially newspapers, appear to have lost their ability to make a compelling case why any business should advertise on their website or in their print product. For that matter, a newspaper’s print product, based on what I’m seeing, isn’t treated well. It’s considered an artifact from a day that’s long since past and isn’t worth investing in.
Subscriptions might be the answer. But there are likely few — very few — media outlets that can make that work on the web.
Whatever you think about what’s happening at The Washington Post, there’s one fact that stands out — it lost nearly $80 million last year and digital revenue fell faster than print revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported. It’s also seen a precipitous drop in its online audience, around 50%, The Journal reported.
I’m not optimistic about the media business.
The Sun-Times is now a CTU outlet unabashedly joined at the hip with WBEZ/NPR, so left of left I suppose. The Tribune is transparently liberal and bearing more consistently left in the editorial department.
With whole Alito flag episode, the NYT removed all doubt that it’s nothing more than a left-wing Democrat prop shop. WaPo has always been what it is.
And now I see WSJ drifting left. (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-slow-rolling-nightmare-inside-the-revolt-at-the-wall-street-journal/amp/ )…as a long-time WSJ subscriber, I can attest to the drift I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.
And forget the national “news” magazines.
It’s become very difficult and time consuming to cobble together anything to replace these outlets with something resembling balanced, centrist actual news. Most will not take the trouble or time which bodes ill for our republic.
The State has no business subsidizing the institution that ought be holding it to account. Taxpayers must revolt! But they’re asleep…
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my parents had the paper delivered every day. When I got married and set off on my own, having the paper delivered to my driveway was one of the 1st things I had set up. I was a daily subscriber for almost 25 yrs before I finally pulled the plug. The writing was on the wall for a few years. The daily paper started getting so thin that a slight breeze would carry it a few houses down while still wrapped in its bag. Then the Sunday paper was getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, all the good old columnists were let go, and that’s when I finally threw in the towel.
I still miss the paper, how it was 20 plus yrs ago. I enjoyed the difference in writing styles, the differences in opinion pieces, and the ability to read different viewpoints to get to the truth in the middle. My 93 yr old uncle still gets the paper delivered. It allows me to occasionally take a peek at it to see what I’ve been missing. I can say with sadness and honesty that I’m not missing anything. They made their beds, now they can sleep in it.
Once newspapers, now Pravda and Izvestia on the Lake.
Agreed. Not only no, but hell no! There are State and Federal elections every two years with the concomitant political advertising. There is already too much political subsidization of the press.
Computer programmer (not a journalist) who saw and understands the pre-internet/post-internet transition.
Local papers had a lock on advertisers as well as ‘first-dibs’ on the news they covered. If organization XYZ published a carefully-researched piece (malfeasance of an elected official, some other problem facing their community), they would be the only ones talking about the issue for a couple of days. Folks would tell their friends to read the article. Lots of focused attention would be attractive to advertisers, hence income.
That world no longer exists. When organization XYZ does the same thing now, dozens of sites parrot the story 15 minutes later. No one credits the original reporting in a meaningful way, attention doesn’t get focused on the organization that broke the story, hence no income. So we’re stuck with ‘journalism as entertainment’ (i.e. advertisement revenue is derived from the star-power of talking heads).
I would be in favor of the following scheme:
– Collect taxes for rewarding original reporting.
– To qualify, reporters need to deposit encrypted versions of their notes to a repository.
When a story breaks and shows up everywhere, an organization can collect from the tax fund under the following circumstances:
– The organization published an article related to the story.
– Their reporters submit keys to decrypt the notes they archived in the repository. The notes would need to corroborate that they did indeed work on the story.
No. Who’s to say what “original reporting” is? Should we trust the government to do this? Maybe the only “original reporting” is that which the government approves of? I don’t think a government “seal of approval” would be worth much to most people.
And why should taxpayers, who may not want their tax dollars going to such a scheme, have to pay for it? If the “reporting” has value shouldn’t there be an audience and economic model that can support it?
The media could go a long way towards fixing its revenue problems if they just simply began reporting the news fairly – covering both sides of an issue, doing real investigative reporting, only using sources that will go on the record, ensuring that no bias enters into story selection or slanting a story, etc. There isn’t one media outlet today that reports the news this way. And, unfortunately, the vast majority of reporters are lazy and brainwashed leftists that have horrible analytical and critical thinking skills.
What is actually killing the media is that since the media isn’t really practicing the skills that separate a true journalist from anyone else, the anyone else has become regular people who post “the news” on social media and on non traditional news sites. People are going to these sources realizing they may have to go multiple places to get the real information. But today, literally anyone can be a “journalist.”
One more point. Of the many failures of the media (too many to list) it failed totally in its reporting of the pandemic. The classic example of this failure to me was when The Tribune ran stories promoting the availability of the vaccine for teenagers and children and advised parents to get their children vaccinated. They did this without ever looking at COVID mortality rates for teenagers and young children. Fatalities due to COVID in these age groups were about as close to zero as you can get. No one in these groups needed such a vaccine! Since the “vaccine” at that point was proven to neither prevent transmission or acquisition of the disease there was no reason for getting it. Since then we’ve found side effects of the vaccine in teenagers are sometimes deadly. Had the Tribune done its job it would have reported it that way, and perhaps saved lives instead of contributing to the death toll. Media irreponsibility doesn’t get much worse than that.
It’s a joke what they are doing at the Sun Times…..a multi millionaire who grew up wealthy buys it, turns it into a “non-profit” because we know capitalism is terrible and then aligns it with NPR. Now the papers want subsidies!!! HA. South Park should satirize it. They were horrible before but wow, can you imagine the stories now. BTW, found out John’s friend Rick Pearson went to my HS.
Joseph Goebbels would be proud of our politicians.
Ha! That’s a good one!
An outrageous affront. Thanks for sparking opposition.
Sadly, the local Chicago press already lies and covers up for the politicians NOW. DEMS are protected big time. Here in Lake County I tried to get Chicago media to expose the local States Attorney who had an assistant states attorney (ASA) who was an opiod addict and who ‘gave’ opiods to a friend who then himself became addicted and over dosed. The coroner helped cover up the over dose death by NOT doing an autopsy and investigation. Nothing was done about the ASA until someone threatened to expose this drug addicted ASA. This ASA then ‘retired’. That someone then went to multiple press outlets with story. NO ONE WILL COVER IT! After all this States Attorney is backed big time by gov Jelly Belly.
I never realized how important journalism was until a couple years ago.
Thank you for this.
I’ve spent the vast majority of my career of 40+ years on the circulation side of magazine publishing. In the late 1980s, as the Circulation Director at Crain’s Chicago Business, I received a phone call from AOL (America Online) asking if we would supply our editorial content to them. I asked how much they were willing to pay for the content, AOL’s response was $0.00 and that we should willingly supply it for free. Why for free I asked. “To reach a larger audience” was the reply. I told them CCB is not trying to reach a larger audience, but the right audience.
Fast forward 10 years and “Big Tech” didn’t have much success convincing publishers to supply their content for free. So what do some businesses do to sell more product or gain a competitive advantage? They hire a lobbying firm to get Congress to enact a law helping them. Thus came the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1999, which exempted Big Tech from all copyright laws. It didn’t take long for Big Tech to obtain the vast majority of advertising revenue, which is the life blood for magazine and newspaper publishers.
In my humble opinion, the demise of print media lies at the feet of Congress during the Clinton Administration. If this law did not exist, Big Tech would have had to pay for any editorial content they posted. I’m assuming this process still exists for every song that is played on the radio. The artist, composer and publisher (ASCAP) are compensated through a royalty fee (because they own the copyright) by the radio station. This same process should apply to Big Tech for everything they post online.
The surest way to level the playing field for the print media industry is for Congress to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as soon as possible.
Thank God the Wall Street Journal is still going strong! It’s expensive, but getting a balanced op-ed section makes it well worth the price, unlike that Chicago paper we finally gave up on.
You can go online and get a scrip for under $250/yr
The hijinks never end with these guys! This only proves that local media outlets are in fact the propaganda wing of the Democrat party. Another late nite subsidy under the radar to bail out a failing medium from the usual suspects in Springfield. Useful idiots indeed. Under the guise of being a “non-profit” The Chicago Slum Times continues to conduct its business in selling its various half truths and lies. I’m wondering what the well compensated higher ups get paid. My guess is they get the “profit”. The bottom feeders on the staff get the “non” part. Meanwhile the Chicago Fibune continues its descent into irrelevance by gradually shrinking away. Thanks to its inaccurate and biased reporting by its crack Northwestern School of Journalism “activist” reporters its revenue is disappearing also. When I was a kid delivering newspapers, getting the Sunday Tribune was almost like an event for the elderly subscribers. Chock full of articles to read and money saving coupons, people would often greet me to get their paper in the morning. The Fibune should be ashamed for selling a product like this for such an inflated price. A while back it hilariously referred to itself as a “conservative” newspaper. It was once, used to be, and not anymore best describe what it now is. What precipitated the collapse of the print media that we are now witnessing? The election of Donald Trump revealed these guys for being the hacks that they are. Trump coined the term “Fake News” and it is now a common lexicon. It has also affected televised media as people tune out propaganda outlets like CNN and MSNBC since they’re blatantly purveyors of the Fake News propaganda machine. Let’s continue to cancel subscriptions. Pay TV is the next one to go. Cut the cable. Why should anyone subsidize channels they don’t watch? Maybe the revolution WILL be televised. Let’s make it happen.
Good column. Thank you for the words “taxpayer-funded donations.” I cringe every time I hear the word “investment” from the politicians.
This is why we subscribe to the “Free Press.”
Thank you for a great column!
I couldn’t agree more! But…as we have seen with our Jacobin news media outlets, the leftist government is controlling the shots anyway. This just now clarifies the monetary aspect of that control.
Next up: Rundfunkbeitrag, just a small tax to support television and radio “quality” programming.
Isn’t the local news already biased? I stopped watching the local news and reading the Chicago Tribune a few years ago. Thankfully we have John Kass’s news column right here!
Nothing from any Government ever comes without strings firmly attached.
“Someday, in the future, I may call on you to do me a favor…” – Don Corleone
Brad,
As if the mainstream media isn’t already the servant to the socialist propaganda machine? And now, Gov Maximus wants to pay them? How far we’ve fallen since Joe mumbles and Obama took over!! The lefties must be stopped, but are getting more desperate each day as Trump’s popularity grows. Hope we survive the coming fight…
John,
I have oft been amazed at how socialist and how incredibly stupid the leaders of Illinois are (and have been).
However, thinking it through, it is actually the voters of Illinois and Chicago who are stupid…..after all, they keep voting these people in year after year (despite the metaphysical certitude of their corruption) and in Chicago’s case the voters were more interested in their favorite pizza than the best politician to save their city.
Yes, I left.
This should be known as the “Buy a Reporter Act.” Seriously though, there are news aggregating websites that allow you to populate them with news from various sources so you can at least try to get a balanced view of the world. I recommend Feedly .com.
Thank you for this reporting. A few years ago when there were announcements about Illinois legislation being passed to rescue local press — gotta say, I was wondering, how/why?
The date of the legislation. Was that shortly after Covid lock-downs were relaxed by the Governor? Was it before or after the exec order directing us to fly flags at half staff in memory of Covid victims?
But now that it is The Law, let’s have some reporting about it. Who sits on the panel/Board to approve the grants? Let’s see what the grant form requires. How long does the grant last? What do you have to do to continue the grant next year? Is there an entity that issues a report at the end of the year of how the money was spent?
I mean, in the words of the chick that secretly taped US Supreme Court justices — I demand accountability! And I am sure, neither Gov. Pritzker nor Sen. Dick Durbin have any problem with that.
I agree 100%. Let’s see…………look at the Chicago Tribune Sunday, June 9, 2024 front page article, “This will not be 1968”. The first sentence of the third paragraph states “……even amid resurgent political violence driven predominantly by the far right.” Looks like writers Petrella, Quig, and Charles are lobbying Illinois Gov JB for some of that government money! Also, maybe the Tribune news staff is so RIF’d (reduction in forces) that there are no longer editors to check what the children reporters are publishing. I can’t understand why I keep my Tribune subscription! I also usually wear a necktie to work………..old guy I guess.
No need for another leftist, tax payer funded newspaper. The Sun-Times is funded by PBS. The Tribune leans left daily. Seems the Tribune can’t get their facts accurately. The 1968 DNC riots were caused by by the far right?
None currently follow the true newspaper mantra. A newspaper guideline should always be “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!”
About 6 months to one year past I posted here about the pathetic subscriber count of the Trib and the Sun Times but noted their influence because they are deeply embedded in the local political culture. But taxpayers subsidizing failed newspapers! I had no idea!
About 2 to 3 years past I briefly subscribed and lightly read the WSJ. Then heard Ben Shapiro state that the WSJ newsroom is more Left than the NYT newsroom. I found that difficult to believe, because the WSJ is capitalism’s daily journal. But I started paying close attention to the articles in the “culture” sections and investigated their reporter’s LinkedIn profiles and agreed with that assessment. That shows depth of the Marxist/Woke infiltration in legacy media. I’ll bet that 90% of legacy media reporters Millennials and younger are full woke.
The States Newsroom project needs some exposing as well. Found by lefty Chris Fitzsimon with beginnings birthed with Soros web $$. Since blessed by the IRS as a 501c3 in November 2019 it’s not got “bureaus” in all 50 states. Claims to be fair and unbiased yet op/eds hard left and “journalism” mainly left of center.
The most disingenuous part is that they claim to shine a spotlight yet won’t release who’s paying the bills. All they list is “”Donors who have contributed more than $1000 since States Newsroom launched as an independent 501C3 in November 2019 include:”
That the federal tax code is now subsidizing a nationwide network of connected outlets all controlled out of DC by Fitzsimon is bad enough. That the general public has no clue and other papers routinely just print whatever their state bureau puts out without clarification or context is even worse.
Every state now has one, so pay attention when you see one of their stories on your own local paper site.