One of the disadvantages of Gript’s funding model is that, to some extent, I must be mindful of what I write on these pages. Because we are funded by you, our readers, that gives our readers a certain power to do away with us in the event that we stop providing the product that you are paying for. As an editor, my job is often to ignore that as much as I dare and, in areas where I have disagreed profoundly with some readers and supporters, to plough on and take the criticism and the occasional cancelling of a subscription. If you don’t do that, and if you stop saying what you think, you may as well pack it in. At the same time, do it too often, and you effectively are packing it in.
Journalism is often lauded as sort of the opposite of censorship: Free speech, open debate, evidence that we live in a free society, and so on. But my experience, and the experience of many journalists I speak to in more mainstream outlets is that often the opposite is true: That journalism can be a form of self-censorship. We are, after all, selling a product, and if people don’t want that product, then we don’t survive.
But that is not, necessarily, all bad.
Being forced to consider what one’s readers think, and what they want, is a humbling exercise at times. It forces the writer to be, at least on some level, in touch. While I have mocked Fintan O’Toole on these pages, for example, for writing his single transferable Boris Johnson column on a loop, the fact is that his readers consistently read it. While his views are not beyond mockery, they do represent an important strand of public opinion. The same is true of Gript: While the issues we cover are not always popular universally, and certainly are not beyond mockery, they also represent an important strand of public opinion. Because we are reader funded, we know that: If we were not representing our readers, we would not exist. The same is true of the Irish Times.
This is the fundamental danger of the state funding model for media now favoured by people in Government. They would, on the basis of the future of media commission report, offer state funding to a range of traditional and digital media outlets. If that money is available, outlets like Gript would be insane not to apply for it: It’s a shortcut to growth and stability.
But that funding would, necessarily, change us. There is, in my experience, no such thing as state funding without strings attached. We do not know what those strings may be, and perhaps under this Government, there would be none. But consider for example the fact that Labour, this week, have an Oireachtas bill on the floor calling for “more diversity in broadcasting”. If passed, is it hard to see state funding for a media outlet tied to the gender breakdown or ethnic breakdown of its writers or broadcasters?
Would a broadcaster, or a media outlet, be tempted to temper its coverage of Sinn Fein under a Sinn Fein minister for arts, culture, and the media? Again, this is just a question, and the answer would depend on the conduct of the Minister. But it is hardly impossible to imagine how pressure might be applied.
The most fundamental problem with state funding, though, is this: It changes who I, as an editor, would be accountable to. That is true, too, of the Editors of the Times, Journal, Examiner, and everybody else, though they may have more sense than to admit it. No longer, with state funding, can readers alone do away with a publication or an outlet if it stops serving them. Your customer is no longer the reader, or the advertiser. It’s the civil servant, and their political master, who pay your bills.
Now, no doubt, many editors would defend the right of the press to publish what it wants. Some might even make a point of it – as I sometimes do today – to publish material that challenges the reader, or, in this new case, the paymaster in Government. But can you do that all the time?
Does anybody have faith, of any kind, based on the history of this country’s public life, that the state would tolerate and continue to fund a media outlet that consistently made trouble for it?
The Irish media make many excuses for falling readership, and their need for state support. But the truth of it is that the whole thing is an entirely understandable and forgivable exercise in self-interest. No local newspaper editor wants to lose their job as the paper goes under: So a political case must be made that the local newspaper is a vital public service. Even as it goes under precisely because locals are no longer reading it. Falling sales threaten the entire industry, and so the industry repackages itself as “too essential to fail”.
The trade off will be a zombie media. No longer answerable or accountable to its readers, but to mandarins and politicians, who will decide who survives, and who does not.
Perhaps most people won’t notice the change. After all, it’s already happening passively: Listen to 15 minutes of broadcasting on any radio programme, and count how many of the ads come from state agencies, whose funds are helpfully supplanting falling private sector ads. But if you do notice the change, and if you do think this matters, then I’d note that the Irish Times has a subscribe button, and Gript has a donate button, right there, at the top of the page.
We either answer to you, or to the Green Party’s culture minister. I think that choice matters.