Why the Public Can’t Read the Press
Nuts-and-bolts Washington coverage has shifted to subscription-based publications, while the capitol’s traditional outlets have shrunk.
.. The audiences for these publications are lobbyists, corporate executives, Hill staffers, Wall Street traders, think-tank researchers, contractors, regulators, advocacy-group and trade-association policy wonks, and other insiders who have a professional interest in up-to-the-second news on the policy issues and whose institutions can afford subscription prices that run thousands of dollars per year.
.. But because of the nature of its business model, the trade press encourages its reporters to pursue the stories its elite readers most want, not necessarily the stories the public most needs—as I saw in my own experience covering offshore drilling.
.. What I found was that there are roughly the same number of accredited reporters in Washington today as there were 25 years ago, but that more of them are working for trade publications and fewer are working for newspapers and newswires.
.. One of the big reasons for the trade-paper explosion is the massive increase in lobbying over the past few decades. In 1975, according to David C. Johnston’s book, Free Lunch, Washington lobbyists together made less than $100 million a year in fees. Thirty years later, they were raking in $2.5 billion, a growth rate ten times faster than the economy as a whole.
.. Another big customer base—one more squarely in the targets of populist outrage—is Wall Street trading. The sector’s growth in the 1990s and 2000s meant that there was a considerably bigger pool of potential readers willing to pay for reporting on the latest information on, say, regulatory filings by the Federal Communications Commission—intelligence that might enable them to make smarter trades on communication company stocks.
.. In 2013, for instance, Bloomberg Government published an astute analysis of an emerging conservative legal argument against the Affordable Care Act, months before the mainstream press took note. The story predicted that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court. But because the analysis stayed behind the BGOV paywall, it never became part of the broader Washington conversation about Obamacare, and public advocates of the law were unprepared when the case was, in fact, taken up by the Court.
.. But the fact remains that on a day-to-day basis more and more information is flowing to Washington’s elite while less trickles out to the American public. And while trades vie zealously for a larger slice of that Washington Insider market, publications that appeal to a wider audience are either struggling to keep their lights on or leaving traditional reporting about government behind altogether.
.. But misleading or conspiratorial ideas about government activities can spread more easily when the public lacks credible information to counter it. And instead of solving that problem, the market is directing more and more journalistic resources and talent toward figuring out how to keep insiders better informed and at a greater convenience.