Capitalism turns journalism. It makes it inherently unsustainable, and the pursuit of profit means it can never solve democracy.

Capitalist control over the news media has always been problematic: commercial values have tended to be incongruous with journalism as a public service; and owners have enjoyed using the political power of the press to their advantage. That prerogative was generally weighted toward advancing the interests of the owning classes. In fact, “professional journalism” emerged as a form of industry self-regulation in the first half of the twentieth century, to some extent to allay concerns about monopolistic or commercial control over public information. It did so by informally delegating control of the newsroom to professionally trained editors and reporters. The professional system was probably at its peak in the 1960s or 1970s, and even then it was far from perfect.38

The current crisis of journalism began in the 1970s, owing in part to increasing corporate consolidation of ownership, which exploded in the 1980s. In monopolistic markets, media owners had incentive to lowball the resources to newsrooms, assuming they would keep their customers and advertisers. These firms were out to maximize profit, and journalism was merely a means to that end.

The system of professional journalism began to wither. Corporate owners increasingly found journalism too expensive for their tastes. The number of working journalists per capita began to decline by the late 1980s, though corporate news media profits were booming, and in the first decade of the new century, the number of journalists fell off a cliff. In 1960 the ratio of public relations people—attempting surreptitiously to doctor the news—to working journalists was around 1-to-1. In 2011 the ratio approaches 4-to-1. Large sections of public life are barely covered anymore, and those that are rely to a much larger extent on the unfiltered missives of PR firms. Add to this the rabid right-wing partisan ramblings of commercial media, and we are, in many respects, in the midst of a golden age of propaganda.

The Internet did not cause the crisis of journalism, but it certainly accentuated it. It took away tens of billions of dollars of advertising—in one decade, Craigslist alone all but wiped out $20 billion in newspaper classified advertising. Advertisers had no particular commitment to newspapers any more than journalism, and the digital world created new and better alternatives. The Internet also provided one more reason for young people to avoid reading increasingly flaccid newspapers or watching TV news. The one thing news media had done that was unique—provide original coverage of events in their communities and on their beats—had been cut back. What they replaced it with—sports, entertainment news, trivia—could be found anywhere and had no connection to “hard” news.

Journalism has many traits of a public good. It is something society needs and something a self-governing society requires. But the market cannot produce journalism in sufficient quantity or quality. Public goods generally require public subsidy and explicit public policies to exist. This was implicitly understood during the first century of U.S. history, but the role of advertising in supporting journalism masked its public good characteristics thereafter. For the past century, media critics have concentrated on how the market has negatively affected the quality of journalism; now, as the dust clears, the issue of the quantity of the news, of the very existence of popular journalism under capitalist auspices, has moved to the fore.