MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the economics of journalism in the Internet age. If advertising and subscriptions no longer cover the cost of running a newsroom, how will the fourth estate survive? Experiments are everywhere. The New York Times announced plans to charge some readers to access its stories online. Startup news organizations like the investigative ProPublica are testing the nonprofit model. But two long-time media reformers say the answer lies in the past, not the future.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIIn the early days of our republic, printing and postal subsidies kept the presses rolling, and no one objected the public funding for journalists. Has the time come to revisit that model, to use public dollars to support the free press that's vital to a healthy democracy? Our guests say, yes. Robert McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joins us from Madison, Wis. Robert McChesney, thank you for joining us.

MR. ROBERT MCCHESNEYMy pleasure, Kojo.

NNAMDIJohn Nichols is Washington correspondent for Nation magazine. He also joins us from Madison, Wis. John Nichols, thank you for joining us.

MR. JOHN NICHOLSIt's great to be on with you, Kojo.

NNAMDITogether, Robert McChesney and John Nichols are coauthors of the book "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again." We're inviting your calls to this conversation at 800-433-8850. Or you can join the conversation by going to our website at kojoshow.org. Between the growth of the Internet and the decline of the economy, news organizations are in trouble. Is it possible, Robert McChesney, that journalism will rebound on its own as new business models take hold and the recession ends?

MCCHESNEYNo, I don't think so. And, I think, the evidence is in that the -- you know, the moment of which journalism is commercially viable for the last, say, 100 to 125 years in which the market could generate sufficient journalism that it would -- the private sector would be counted on to do that was based on having advertising. And it provide between 60 and 100 percent of the revenues. And that era is ending. We've already seen it decline last year for the first time in its history. The New York Times had less than 50 percent of its revenues from advertising, and for any daily newspaper to have under 65 percent, traditionally, is extraordinary. That's not going to turn around. That's not coming back.

MCCHESNEYAdvertising, as it moved to a digital era, has 10,000 alternatives to journalism to reach their target audience, different ways to do it. And some of it will stick with journalism, but the majority won't. And as a result, there simply isn't going to be the revenues there for any business model to support the amount of journalism we've grown accustomed to and that we require as a free society.

NNAMDIJohn Nichols, indeed you've said we need a fundamental shift in how we frame the discussion about the future of journalism because it's a waste of time to look for ways to make journalism as profitable as it used to be -- just not going to happen.

NICHOLSWell, I think that's absolutely true as Bob has outlined. And, also, I think that a discussion about how to make journalism profitable is a little bit of like beginning the health care reform debate with a discussion about how to make insurance companies profitable. It's not really the way that we should frame it. We should understand, as the founders did, that journalism is the essential source of information, useful information, in a republic. It's what gives people the details about their local, state, national and international affairs in a digest that is easily consumed and that citizens can then put quickly to work, so that they can engage politically at all sorts of different levels.

NICHOLSWithout it, the democratic experiment degenerates into competing propagandas, you know, each side is speaking to its silo, if you will, to the people who only consume information from those who agree with them. It's journalism that pushes us beyond a narrow conversation. And it also gives us, you know, the range of opinions, the range of ideas that allows us to engage. Without it, democracy doesn't work. So our concern shouldn't be, can it be profitable? Our concern should be, how do we make sure that we have it?

NICHOLSNow, it happens -- Rob and I have nothing against somebody making a profit -- if somebody figures out a way 20, 30 years from now how to make money online, for instance, in journalism, that's great. We celebrate it. We encourage it. But what we say is, we can't wait 20 or 30 years for some rich guy to figure out how to get richer. We have to understand, as the founders did, that at any moment, any day in American history where journalism is in crisis, where it isn't sufficient, it is the job of the citizens, through their government, to make sure that we can sustain it.

NNAMDIWhich brings me to your major thesis, and that is if a free and -- you describe journalism as a fundamental American value, like national security, like public education, things the public needs but market forces alone can't provide, so -- cannot provide -- so if a free and robust press is fundamental to the nation, does that mean the federal government should have a role to play in supporting and encouraging journalism, Bob McChesney?

MCCHESNEYAbsolutely. And, you know, it's very much, Kojo, like your last segment I was listening to before we came on air about public transportation, which is a public good also, would not exist without the government playing a central role. Doesn't mean there's not a place for the private sector, but it means the government plays quarterback or the ball never moves off the dime. The game never gets going. And I think that what we've learned from looking at American history and from looking at other democracies, the most advanced democracies in the world today, is that national governments have an enormous role to play to subsidize journalism.

MCCHESNEYAnd -- I hasten to add, as we say that -- in both the American experience in our first 100 years of American history with postal and printing subsidies and in the European experience of public media and journalism subsidies across Northern or Western Europe and Japan, these subsidies can be made in such a way to protect and even promote the integrity and independence of the newsroom. They do not require or necessitate that we have any government censorship of content. And, you know, John and I emphasize throughout our work that this is not a negotiable value that we see these like the Founders did, an independent uncensored free press and a well-funded independent free press are complementary, not necessarily antagonistic, values.

NNAMDIPeople may not realize that the Founding Fathers invested public money to support journalism in the country's early days. What did they do? And is that a model we should return to, John Nichols?

NICHOLSWell, they did a lot, and it is a model that we should learn from. I think we should be careful about the notion of returning to something. We know from the founding that this country has understood in its history the value of investing in journalism, the value of making sure that journalism exists to sustain democracy. We know that that is not antithetical to or at odds with our constitutional protections and particularly our emphasis on freedom of the press, that in fact it is a part of the freedom of the press protection, so that's the framing.

NICHOLSNow, when we talk about what they did, it was remarkable. Now, remember, this is a new country that was very, very hard to travel to some parts of it. So the local printer, the person who put out a newspaper, would circulate it mostly through the mail. And the founders of the American experiment, the people who wrote the Constitution and then framed out the early years of this country, understood that to get those newspapers from place to place was going to require some support. It had to be -- you had to have a postal subsidy.

NICHOLSNow, the debate at the founding was not about whether to charge the most so that the post office could make the most money. It's quite the opposite. It was how little should we charge a newspaper so it could circulate. The -- if you will, the more conservative forces of the time argued that there should be some minimal fee. There should be, you know, some entry charge for a local printer who wanted to circulate his or even her newspaper around the country. The more liberal forces, the more libertarian forces, if you will, argued, no, there can be no entry fee because that would shut down the dissenting voices.

NICHOLSWe had to have it be a complete postal subsidy. And, also, there were printing subsidies as well, particularly with an emphasis on making sure that international affairs coverage was picked up and emphasized through the new country so that citizens could participate in debates about foreign policy. Now, when you add all this up in the numbers of the time, you get a relatively small figure. But if you adjust it for inflation, if you look at it in today's dollars, what Bob and I figured out and both -- relying on the research of others, people who've done wonderful work on the postal subsidies and also some of our own number crunching -- came up with a figure of roughly $30 billion in today's dollars.

NICHOLSUnderstand that if we were doing the same level of support for journalism today, we'd be spending in the range of $30 billion. So it was a massive commitment to this project at the founding of the republic. In fact, when you look at domestic outlays, domestic commitments, it was, by far, the biggest endeavor of the government. And even things that we don't think of as associated with this subsidy relate to it because that post office, which was primarily a vehicle to deliver the newspapers -- the journals of opinion of those early days -- the post office also was building postal roads and really moving us into the western parts of the United States. So it was a very big deal.

NICHOLSAnd I'll give one final thing that's very, very important. This was a non-ideological subsidy. It didn't go to friends of the government or even friends of the revolution. If you were putting your paper out and you wanted to go through the mails, you could. And what was exciting about this is that very early on in the early years of the 19th century, the government of the United States provided postal subsidies and support to the first newspapers created by freed slaves and by freed men. So one of the first places in which the government of the United States actually did something honorable with regards to African-Americans rather than to treat them as three-fifths of a human being or slaves was via this postal subsidy.

NICHOLSAnd the postal subsidy was a driving force, one of the key elements that helped the abolitionist movement to grow because those local newspapers were -- especially in the northern and some western states -- the primary supporters of abolition. So this was a remarkable subsidy and remarkable commitment that allowed dissenting voices, challenging voices to be heard, and it worked. It created a press system that was hailed not just by Americans but by visitors from around the world and...

NNAMDIAnd...

NICHOLS...is really a model for any democratic society.

NNAMDIAnd it's my understanding that if the United States devoted the same percentage of its gross domestic product to journalism subsidies in the year 2009 as it did, say, in the 1840s, you gentlemen have calculated that the allocation would have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal subsidy last year for all of public broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million, which raises the question that I'd like our audience to try to respond to for us. Would you favor the government using your tax dollars to support a free press, the kind of journalism that we have grown used to and which seems to be disappearing very rapidly so much so that the word collapse is apparently not an inappropriate word to use?

NNAMDIWould you favor your tax dollars being used to continue a free press? 800-433-8850. Or you can join that conversation -- either offer a comment or a question -- at our website, kojoshow.org. We're talking with the co-authors of the book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again." John Nichols is Washington correspondent for Nation magazine. And Robert McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here now is Larissa in Washington, D.C. Larissa, you are on the air. Go ahead, please. Larissa, are you there?

LARISSAYes. Yes, I'm here.

NNAMDIGo right ahead.

LARISSACan you hear me?

NNAMDIYes, we can.

LARISSAYes. There are government journalists at the Voice of America Radio Station, and I used to work for it for -- I worked there for 20 years. And our slogan at VOA is, news could be bad, news could be good. We will -- the truth so -- except that VOA broadcasts only to foreign countries. And I used to work in the Russian service. As far as independent media is concerned, all it -- here, you know, there are, like, 10 people who holds all the media. And it reminds me of Henry Ford who once said, I don't care what color is the car as long as it's black. So those independent journalists are not so independent as they seem to be. That's what I think.

NNAMDIWell, Bob McChesney has known a lot of reporters who worked for VOA, and they try very hard to be as independent as they can possibly be. But they do suffer with a perception problem. Do they not?

MCCHESNEYThey do indeed. And I think that it's a very important perception problem, and it's a very real issue, which is to make sure that government money doesn't mean you have government-controlled content. And that's why we look to our past and why we look to other nations. And I think Larissa hits on a very important point, which is that, you know, the commercial guys who have been running our news media -- the big conglomerates that have really dominated news media for the last generation, newspapers and broadcasts news -- have done a deplorable job of it.

MCCHESNEYPart of the reason, not the whole reason, but part of the reason we're in the crisis we're in today is that our newsrooms have been gutted and trivialized and commercialized to such a large extent over the last three decades, that when the Internet came along and began to demolish the business model of news media, there wasn't much left to demolish. They didn't have young readers of newspapers. They had already closed a lot of international bureaus. They had already gutted newsrooms.

MCCHESNEYAnd the importance of that is that John Nichols and I would never propose that we just write checks, have the taxpayers write any checks to give money to these corporations that have gutted newsrooms. I think they've proven that that model doesn't work. We have to come up with a new model for local independent ownership that's not connected with these conglomerates. And we also have to have a significant expense for public and non-commercial non-profit broadcasting, which will, of course, become digital media.

NNAMDIIndeed. I'm going to go a few -- to a few specifics of the proposals made by Bob McChesney and John Nichols. But first, we've got to take a short break. You can keep calling, 800-433-8850. What do you think about government support for helping to maintain a free and diverse press? 800-433-8850. Or join the conversation at our website, kojoshow.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWho should pay for American journalism? That's the question we're trying to answer here with our guests, Robert McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. They both join us from Madison, Wis. and are co-authors of the book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again." We got this e-mail from Walter who says that, "The idea that government support for journalism will corrupt journalism is ridiculous. As a former CBC reporter in Canada, I can tell you that we were equally despised by all political parties.

NNAMDI"If the conservatives were in power, they thought we hated them. If the liberals were in power, they thought we hated them. Basically, the government of the day just, well, hated us. But they continue to fund public journalism. Not as much as I would like, but they did continue. I realize that your guests are not advocating for this style of journalism. It's a good one, especially if you're talking about tax breaks and other ideas that support journalism business models." And speaking of tax breaks, Bob McChesney, let's look at one of your proposals. Talk about tax credits to hire reporters. How would those work?

MCCHESNEYWell, there's -- this is a proposal that's made by the late great First Amendment scholar Ed Baker of the University of Pennsylvania. And he argued that one way the government could subsidize journalism would be to have the U.S. government basically pay half the salary of all working journalists up to a certain amount. They pay no more than $45,000, say, toward a journalists' salary, but basically reduce the cost of journalism by half for the actual working journalists for news media. And Ed thought this could apply to both non-profit and profit media. We mentioned it in the book. We think it would need some work.

MCCHESNEYEd was convinced that you could do it in such a way to prevent fraud, but it's sort of the way you think about making a subsidy that would apply, that would work, that would not give the government the control over who gets the money. There would be sort of objective and transparent criteria that would need to be met, and that's just one of the many proposals in the book. And this is the sort of thinking we need to start having if we're going to have journalists covering our community, covering politics again. And, Kojo, I think the point we haven't made in the show yet, that some listeners may not be familiar with, is the nature of the crisis.

MCCHESNEYI mean, it seems somewhat abstract to say there's a collapse. We're talking literally about a point now where there are city and county governments that virtually have no reporters covering them at all. State House governments barely have any reporters left covering them. We're in a situation where much of what is public life in the United States and government behavior, not to mention large corporate behavior, is all but uncovered. And we're in a situation now, where for every working journalist today, there are four full-time PR people trying to influence the news surreptitiously. And just 30 years ago, the ratio was one-to-one. Today, it's four-to-one, and it's going to seven or eight to one in three or four years if we don't do something to change matters.

NNAMDIJohn Nichols, you also suggested a program that would encourage young people to become journalists. Talk about the News AmeriCorps.

NICHOLSI'm delighted. The News AmeriCorps idea is one that, frankly, Bob and I toyed around with as we were writing the book. And we're -- our core question was, how do we make sure that in this moment of crisis -- and as Bob just outlined, this is a moment of crisis. We are losing 1,000 newspaper employees a month. Last year, we had 140 newspapers across the country close down, including major dailies in cities such as Denver and Albuquerque, Phoenix and -- or, I'm sorry -- Tucson and Seattle. So it's a real crisis. And it -- and the people who are getting the hardest -- hit the hardest are, not surprisingly, young people, particularly young people of color and young women who have, in many cases, just been breaking in to the newsrooms.

NICHOLSAnd so what do we do to make sure that they don't get pushed away from this work in this moment? And the News AmeriCorps would work like this. If you understand the AmeriCorps program, which put teachers into neighborhoods across this country, particularly neighborhoods that are economically challenged and also rural areas, News AmeriCorps would put journalists into the same sorts of neighborhoods, the same sorts of circumstances, perhaps working with a community radio station or a public radio station, maybe working with a school newspaper and extending it out beyond the walls of the school into the neighborhood, all sorts of different approaches.

NICHOLSBut the idea being that they would get a small stipend, enough money to live on and a chance to go out and do journalism in a part of the country that needs journalism. We think that for a remarkably small amount of money, you could put 10-, even 20,000 young people to work across this country, beginning to fill that gap. Remember, in the last two years, we've lost 30,000 newspaper employees across the country. Beginning to fill that gap at the local level, keeping young people engaged, helping them to develop skills so that they can be the journalists of the 21st century.

NICHOLS'Cause journalism, to survive, it can't just be an old white guy's craft. It has to be a craft that is diverse and that -- particularly that has, you know, young, fresh talent coming in, people who are willing to do the really tough stories, to sweep under the bridge to tell the story of homeless people, to climb to the top steps in a tenement building, all of the concepts that we celebrate.

NNAMDII'd like to assure our callers who have called already to stay on the line. We will get to your calls. I'd like to ask two more questions before we go to the calls. If the phone lines are busy, go to our website, kojoshow.org, and ask your question there. But, I think, I needed to ask these two questions so people would understand where this can go. One more, you've suggested a voucher program that would let taxpayers choose the news outlets they want to support. Some people would say that would create an even more biased media with people supporting only the voices they agree with, Bob McChesney.

MCCHESNEYWell, you know, the voucher program idea is that every American over the age 18 should be able to allocate $200 of federal money to any non-profit, non-commercial medium of their choices, as long as it meets certain minimal criteria to prevent fraud. And the idea would be that anything that news media that got the vouchers produced would automatically go into the public domain, be made available for you in the Internet so the public could have access to all of this information.

MCCHESNEYAnd what it would do is it would create an enormous public subsidy of media, of journalism content, but it would not have the government controlling who would get it. It would be up to individuals. So it's both the recognition of the public good nature of journalism that's not a profitable undertaking, on one hand, but it embraces the Internet. It doesn't try to fight it by putting up all sorts of electronic barbed wire and passwords, so people can't get around the Internet. And we think it would work really well. Now, some people say, well, then people just end up giving their money to junky shows and junky journalism and trash stuff.

MCCHESNEYWell, we think since it's non-commercial and non-profit that, probably, it wouldn't encourage that. We think that probably, people would still -- commercial interests would make money providing garbage or junk, and people could consume it in the commercial marketplace. We suspect this money would go to journalism. And, you know, our feeling, basically, is we have a lot of faith in people. We're willing to roll the dice on people willing to make -- you know, using this money in smart ways. And we think if we're a democracy that we have to be true to that commitment to people self-government.

NNAMDIWell, let me quote you both here for my final question, "By our rough calculations, the total price tag for what we propose -- postal subsidies, journalist tax credits, News AmeriCorps, student media, public media and especially, citizenship news vouchers, could run as $35 billion annually." My question, so who will bell the cat, John Nichols? What member of Congress are you likely to find who will propose these in our current partisan environment?

NICHOLSWell, the very brave and very visionary member of Congress -- let me put it that way -- and say that when the Federal Trade Commission held a set of hearings on these issues in December, Congressman Henry Waxman -- one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives, the chair of -- really, the key committee on a lot of these issues, the (word?) Commerce Committee -- appeared at that session and said, look, there are going to have to be explorations of ways in which the government can come in to sustain and encourage journalism. And I'm not telling you that Henry Waxman has embraced all of our ideas or that any member of Congress has.

NICHOLSBut what I can tell you is that there has been tremendous level of interest and a recognition that this is just going to have to happen. I appeared, about a year ago, before the House Judiciary Committee for a hearing that Chairman Conyers and others were present at -- and also, I would note, not just Democratic members of Congress, also Republicans -- in which we discussed many of these issues and some of these ideas. And I think that the best way to understand this is that, yes, we are talking about significant commitment by the federal government. And we're talking about the federal government being more flexible and more innovative than it often is. But this is a time of crisis.

NICHOLSAnd in a time crisis, we often find it becomes much easier to make those leaps forward that are not always made when it would be easier. Of course, it'd be easier if we were planning 20, 30 years into the future. We don't have that option. We have a crisis that's demanding intervention and action. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are both doing, essentially, what could be described as emergency examinations of the collapse of journalism in this country. Members of Congress have shown interest. And we think that the key on this, of course, is to do exactly what we're doing right here. Talk to you. Talk to members of your audience about these issues, so that we can get a lot of Americans engaged in this discussion.

NICHOLSIt shouldn't just be Congress that sets the framework for journalism in the 21st century. It should be the American people as part of a great rich national debate, in which we demand that we have the information we need, and a government committed to make sure that information is available. If we don't do so, the alternative is so unsettling, so threatening to democratic discourse and, really, democratic participation that I think any member of Congress ultimately -- who opposes some sort of action -- has to be called to account and ask, you know, why do you want to have an America without journalism where propaganda, frankly, is so empowered? And we think, ultimately, we'll find allies -- that we have found allies on the left and the right...

NNAMDINow...

NICHOLS...and even among some libertarians.

NNAMDINow, on to the callers and our listeners, who join us online. Here is Nick in Baltimore, Md. Nick, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NICKHi, Kojo. Thank you for my taking my call. I kind of have a two part statement. I'll take the answers off the air. You know, it strikes me that as a human being in the world of 2010, I have exponentially more access to information of any color whatsoever than any human being in our recorded history has ever had. And the federal government...

NNAMDIAnd as you -- and are you convinced that that information is coming from a wider variety of sources than you were getting information in the past?

NICKAbsolutely...

NNAMDIOkay.

NICK...but it rolls into -- but it is not the journalism and the media of old, and we're talking here about -- you know, really, what I think your guests are proposing is analogous to a huge bailout of the illuminated manuscript industry 10 years into the invention of the printing press. The established media totally bungled their entry into the world of adding value in Internet-based distribution of their content. They started by giving everything away for free, and they've been reeling ever since. And, you know, we do invest billions and billions of dollars into spreading Internet infrastructure. And I don't think a sane person can say we don't have access to more information than anyone ever has. A lot of it is garbage. But, you know what? So there are a lot of...

NNAMDIWell, allow me to have...

NICKSo are a lot of printed newspapers, you know…

NNAMDIAllow me to have one of two people -- who I hope are sane -- respond to your assertion that we are now getting -- that we now have more access to information than we have...

NICKKojo, can I just make one other quick point? And that's really...

NNAMDIPlease do.

NICK...the issue of demand. And, you know, I'm all for, frankly, supporting journalism, but true journalism. But the issue is we have a public now that is woefully undereducated, gravitates toward sources that are extraordinarily biased, speak to the lowest common denominator, and I think it's important not to look at the issue of access information in the vacuum, but also look at education. I mean, we have the state of Texas that's on the verge of, you know, putting into textbooks that cavemen were riding around on dinosaurs. And if this is where your public is at, in a growing sense, then you can put as much good information into their hands. But, you know, you're not necessarily going to get anywhere. So it's really a two-part question. Thank you much, and I'll take the answer off the air.

NNAMDIFirst, you, Bob McChesney.

MCCHESNEYWell, first of all, we're not interested in supporting old media versus new media. And anyone who reads the book or listens to this thing is familiar with that, where -- everything is going to be digital or largely digital. This is all about newsrooms and having people doing the paid labor of covering communities. We think the Internet is great. John and I live on it. We think it's unavoidable. We use it all the time. We also know there's an extraordinary volume of information that's out there for people to surf and find and use, and we do that all the time. So that's really not in debate.

MCCHESNEYAnd we don't think, though, that undermines our basic point, which is that the actual job of democracy, of being a citizen of self-government, as far as we know what people in power are doing, that they're held in check. There are people who want to be in power requires that we know what government is doing, what powerful institutions are doing, and that, though, does not happen magically on the Internet. You just can't sort of Google up finding that sort of stuff out there. That requires human labor -- paid human labor, ideally in competing newsrooms going out and covering it. And that function is shrinking. It's disintegrating before our eyes. And we can't replace that by 500 Google pages on the Cleveland Indians baseball thing.

NNAMDIYet the notion persists, Bob McChesney, that most of the news information we're getting online is coming from such a wide variety of sources when, in fact, that wide variety of sources seem to be depending on a shrinking paid news media.

MCCHESNEYPrecisely. Most of the news stories that the Web gets -- that we have access to come from old media news stories. And they're disintegrating. They're shrinking. So we have fewer and fewer journalists actually covering stuff. We might have five million Web hits to them, but it won't help us. There are five million people pontificating on those three stories, but not people doing the original research. And the evidence here is just crystal clear. This is really isn't an empirically debated matter about the creation of original journalism covering public life. And so if we're going to get it, it's not going to happen magically through the Internet.

MCCHESNEYAs to the question of demand, John has a lot to say in this, I'm sure. I'll only say one crucial thing, which is when we understand journalism as a public good or not as a private good, not as something like hamburgers or a pair of shoes, but as a public good, we can acknowledge that just looking at how people respond to the existing market doesn't tell us what they'd want if there was better stuff out there. A public good, like education, you don't do by audience demand. You understand that the people are more complex in just what they buy or sell being an indicator of what they want.

NICHOLSIf I could just throw in here for one second on demand, and I think your caller is absolutely right when he says that he has access to more information than maybe anybody in the history of the world. But...

NNAMDIWell, let me get to the issue of demand from a review of your book by Chris Hedges...

NICHOLSYeah.

NNAMDI...who says, "We've become unmoored from a world of print, from complexity and nuance, and with it information systems built on the primacy of verifiable fact. Newspapers, which engage rather than entertain, can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily. The public, which has walked away from newspapers has embraced the emotional carnival that has turned news into another form of mindless entertainment." We don't want that stuff anymore, John.

NICHOLSWell, that may be. And, you know, there may be some folks who really don't, and that's fine. But see, the problem with assuming that is to make a huge leap as regards to the American people are in what they want and how they might respond to a better journalism. Remember, Bob and I have been writing critically about the American media system for the better part of 20 years. We've been saying long before this current crisis came into full fruition -- look, it's not doing the job. It's not providing people with a rich nuance, diverse array of information that they can access easily with regard to not just national affairs, but local affairs as well, and that critique hasn't changed.

NICHOLSThe old media system was a mess, and it was driving people away. But we don't think for a second that the American people don't want journalism, that they don't want information, that they don't want, really, information that is, perhaps, opinionated but still fact-based. And so we reject the notion altogether that Americans have given up on information, have given up on ideas. And where we think the intervention needs to occur is at multiple levels. As we argue, yes, there must be some interventions to make sure that journalism itself is practiced, that people go out and gather information. I would disagree with your caller on the suggestion that, at every level of government, we have more information that we've ever had.

NICHOLSI can assure you that there is dramatically less reporting on state and local government today than there was 20 years ago. And so, when your caller says he has more access to information, he's really talking about national affairs and international affairs, not the government that's closest to us. So we do need to intervene there. But, also, I don't think we de-link this discussion from a discussion about how to improve education and how to make sure that people know how to get the information they need, particularly in new forms of communication.

NICHOLSOne of the biggest mistakes we make is to assume that everybody's online and that everybody is as engaged as the listeners to your show. The fact of the matter is, there are million and millions of Americans who care passionately about this country, who really are serious thinkers and want to be a part of it, but who happen to live in a place where they don't have the easy access to the Internet, especially don't have a universal ubiquitous broadband that's high-speed and of good quality. And, also, there are a tremendous number of Americans who are -- who work two jobs, have two kids and, frankly, don't have the time to troll the Internet looking for reliable sources of...

NNAMDII'm going to have to interrupt you because we have to take another short break. John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Robert McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Together, they co-authored the book "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again." We're going to take a short break, and then we come back to our phones and our online participants again. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIThere was a time in the past when government supported the free press, and our co-authors believe that government should be given another opportunity to fund a free press. They are Robert McChesney and John Nichols. John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Bob McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their book is called "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again." Here is Paul in Arlington, Va. Paul, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

PAULKojo, hi. Love your show.

NNAMDIThank you.

PAULHi, gentlemen. I'm sure you did a good work. I have not read your paper yet -- your book. I want to say that, although I respect your gentlemen's work, I do believe you're all on the same side. And as the other caller said, I don't think this is falling on positive years as far as the American public goes.

NNAMDIWhy is that, Paul?

PAULWell, perhaps the new paradigm that needs to come along for journalism, like other things, requires a total collapse first. Maybe until that happens, we won't see what can be on the other side, perhaps.

NNAMDIAnd this e-mail we got from someone, gentlemen, who says, "Your guests keep referring to newspapers, hundreds of papers going out of business, past mail subsidies to distribute papers. Ink on paper is dead. It's a very inefficient way to distribute content. Any news organization that continues to spend money on printing presses is doomed to failure." Bob McChesney.

MCCHESNEYWell, again, not to be "Johnny One Note," but, excuse me, I've already said several times...

NICHOLSYeah.

NNAMDIYeah.

MCCHESNEY...and it's about -- makes clear. This isn't about saving newspapers. This is about saving newsrooms, and we understand that journalism will be largely digital. And, I think, Paul, you know, his argument that, you know, we have to have total collapse. So I think we're pretty much near the edge of the cliff right now. We don't really want to go any further down the cliff 'cause if we get to the bottom of the cliff, we might not be able to scale the walls back up.

MCCHESNEYWithout a credible journalism at all, the idea that we will somehow, you know, 10, 20 years down the road, be able to solve the problem, puts us in a historically unprecedented place, which is having a constitutional republic where there's absolutely no journalism or very little journalism. It's really very difficult to understand how that situation remains exigent. And, you know, I will add this, Kojo. One of the things we did in our research for this book is we re-read all the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment concerning freedom of the press in the 20th century, all the great decisions.

MCCHESNEYAnd what was stunning to us, when we re-read them, was that the opinion in all the cases that addressed the relationship of the press system to the government was clear. They all said that the first duty of the federal government or of the national state is to make sure that a credible fourth estate exists -- the free press exists, -- and that without it, the whole constitutional system can't survive. And I think that's the way we've got to understand the problem. Having a press system and journalism isn't optional. It's not like, yeah, it would be nice if you could have one of those things.

MCCHESNEYThe Supreme Court basically said it doesn't -- our First Amendment is a structural requirement upon the government to make sure such a free press exists. And I use the term press -- again, not about ink and paper -- but about newsrooms, about journalists paid in competing independent newsrooms to cover their communities. Our whole system won't survive without it. It's not really an option. The question isn't whether we're going to wait 20 years. We don't have that luxury anymore than we have the luxury of waiting 20 years if we're under military attack.

NNAMDIBut, John Nichols, what do you say to people who say, look, we do have that luxury? We still have big broadcasting networks covering the news all over the world. You can't tell me that the L.A. Times and The New York Times and The Washington Post are going away anytime soon. These things are institutions. We'll find a way to keep them going.

NICHOLSWell, here we have very conflicting things being said in the matter of 10 minutes. And I think it's not that anybody is wrong.

NNAMDIYes.

NICHOLSIt's to say that that's a crisis moment when people are sort of, like, popping up with all sorts of different ideas. We have somebody telling you ink is dead. It's over. It's gone. They've left the playing field that we have -- a very incredible statement you just made. Well, L.A. Times, New York Times, these are still big institutions. They still even make some money sometimes. And so the fact of the matter is that we are in a crisis moment where we see a radical reshaping of our media landscape. That radical reshaping has one constant in it, and that is the abandonment of journalism. You mentioned The New York Times. The New York Times has laid off hundreds of reporters.

NICHOLSIt is doing less journalism today than it did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. You have listeners in Baltimore. There's a great new Pew Center study out where they studied, you know, the production of original news stories in Baltimore. They suggested it to Baltimore Sun. The primary source of original news in that city is producing 73 percent fewer stories today than it did 20 years ago. So these big institutions are still there, and it's true -- they are not going to disappear today or tomorrow or next week. But they are producing dramatically less journalism. We have less coverage of our communities today, and we have great confusion about what to do.

NICHOLSWhat Bob and I are suggesting is, in this moment, we have wonderful lessons from the American past and also from other countries about how we can do smart, relatively rapid intervention, such as the one thing that we haven't really discussed -- supercharging funding for public broadcasting and community broadcasting and making linkages between our public and community broadcasting outlets and our university and even high school broadcasting outlets with new, high-quality digital sites, and, perhaps, even with some new print products in their operation.

NNAMDIYou know what's clear, John and Bob, is that this is going to have to be an ongoing discussion because you're right. You haven't had a chance to discuss aspects of your proposal as yet, but we're running out of time. And I really wanted to get Kerry in Baltimore in on the conversation. Kerry, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

KERRYHi, Kojo. I want to start by saying thank you for having me on the air. You are one of the most fair and unbiased reporters I've ever listened to, and I appreciate you being on the air.

NNAMDIThank you, my son.

KERRYI also want to point out that -- or a couple of quick points, and I know you guys haven't got much time left. So what -- you'd mentioned, again, the founding and how it -- what they did (unintelligible) at the beginning in giving money for the press. What was done at the beginning to prevent like a quid pro quo as to what -- to prevent propaganda of what the government's point of view? And how do you...

NNAMDIKerry...

KERRYWhat's that?

NNAMDIKerry, we also have an e-mail from John. And Kerry -- I was joking -- is not a relative. We also have an e-mail from John about that who says, "How, if at all, did the Founders early support of a free press balance church-state separation issues against the uncensored support of any journalistic entity? And absolutely, yes, I'd support aggressive public support of a free press." Does that express your question also, Kerry?

KERRYIt is. And I wanted to know if they know of any specific examples of back then of opposing view of the people giving them the money, that they had to give the money to these people who were giving an opposing point of view of the government.

NNAMDIBob McChesney.

KERRYAnd one final statement (unintelligible)

MCCHESNEYYeah.

NNAMDILet me listen one at a time, Kerry, because we're running out of time. Very quickly, Bob.

MCCHESNEYLook, this is such an important point he raises. Those polls -- those subsidies that were given were given to all newspapers that qualified the minimal criteria, which basically meant any newspaper that haul its butt down to the post office. So what we have, which is extraordinary, is that the southern taxpayers were supporting abolitionist newspapers through that subsidy much like pro-slavery newspapers were being supported. It raised the water level, the tide, for all the proverbial boats in the water. The printing subsidies were done in such a way that every major party always had subsidized newspapers in the nation's capital. They were never concentrated on a single party or even faction in a party.

MCCHESNEYAnd so sort of subsidies we're talking about today would all be the same way. They would be done with transparent objective criteria, where no politician gets to cherry pick who gets it and who doesn't. And postal subsidies still work that way today. We still have them. We'd like to see them expanded so that both right wing, libertarian, left wing and nonpolitical publications are all eligible for the exact same subsidy. It can be done. Other nations have shown it, but it won't be done unless we face up to it and really study the best way to do it.

NNAMDIAnd, Kerry, thank you for your call. We got this e-mail from Leslie, John Nichols. "I would gladly pay taxes to have a free independent, unbiased, non-conglomerate, nongovernment-controlled news source. I think the ideal is non-commercial, not-for-profit news. It also might become more apparent what is news and what is pundit-based monologue. We might become less divided across the political aisle if the freedom to spin the news became limited. We also might get our international bureaus back." John Nichols.

NICHOLSThat is exactly right. And, you know, I want to just point out one kind of amusing thing. We've had a couple of callers who said, well, you're just not going to be able to sell this thing to the American people when, in fact, most of the callers, most of your e-mails have at least been sympathetic to some of these ideas. And we think Americans are very, very concerned about the loss of news coverage and, particularly, the loss of international news coverage. And international news coverage doesn't make money. It especially doesn't make money when you send people into war zones in very, very poor and very, very difficult parts of the world. That's always going to cost the news institution.

NICHOLSAnd so here's a situation where if Americans want to be their own governors, if they want to have the information they need to engage in a realistic and important way with foreign affairs issues, we're going to have to have coverage of the rest of the world. It's going to have to come from a lot of different sources. It's going to have to be diverse and dissenting. And the only way that we can realistically do that is to support not-for-profit and low-profit, non-commercial mediums that are going to go out and not try to make a buck covering a war, covering, you know, something that's sexy around the world.

NNAMDIBob McChesney.

NICHOLSAnd, yes, your caller's exactly right.

NNAMDIBob McChesney, John just said that it would appear that most of our listeners are sympathetic. That's probably because we already have an example in this country of public funding for journalism, and you and they are participating in it right now. Is public broadcasting a relevant model for the kind of funding you're proposing?

MCCHESNEYAbsolutely. It's the first thing we should do for emergency funding, is -- what we think is that we would never -- continents having a single commercial monopoly newsroom control an entire community. We wouldn't have one company control all the commercial newsrooms in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, Pa. We think we should have the same approach to nonprofit, non-commercial broadcasting. We should have healthy, vibrant multiple newsrooms that are non-profit, non-commercial, that are public broadcasting where they'll all go online as well -- so it's really more public media. And I think conventional NPR, PBS stations, community stations, university stations -- all these things are part of the solution to the problem in creating a pluralistic, competitive, non-profit, non-commercial journalism system.

NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Robert McChesney and John Nichols, I think you have launched us on an odyssey here that we will have to continue because a whole lot of listeners and e-mailers, et cetera, want to participate in this conversation. For the time being, it's over, but we'll revisit it. Robert McChesney is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John Nichols is Washington correspondent for Nation magazine. Together, they co-authored the book "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.