Private Media, Public Funds, and Democratic Allocation: Outlining the Civic Strategy in Media Policy

After the digital revolution, quality journalism is more necessary than ever. And yet, journalism is undergoing an unprecedented economic crisis precisely because the digital revolution led its advertisement-based funding system to collapse. How can we save journalism as a key institution for upholding the quality of democratic deliberation? Most approaches to this question focus either on media literacy campaigns, restricting the dissemination of disinformation, or fostering public media. This article explores another, largely neglected approach: the civic strategy in media policy, which consists of distributing public funds among private news media through democratic allocation mechanisms. Civic media policies promise to create a more democratic media system, enhance media pluralism, and, crucially, secure robust funding for quality journalism. To examine how they might do so, I assess the four main proposals within this civic paradigm: Cagé’s proposal to create ‘nonprofit media organizations’, Latham’s ‘voter-funded media’ system, Ackerman’s ‘internet news voucher’, and McChesney and Nichols’ ‘citizenship news voucher’. Drawing on a critical examination of these proposals, I extract some lessons for designing more effective civic media policies in the future.