1863 Leadership · Issue Paper No. 5
Somebody Has to Be in the Room
When the county commission votes, in a growing number of American counties nobody is watching. Four repairs that take power away from government, and one proposal we cannot yet prove.
Abstract
A working press is not a favor granted to journalists. It is infrastructure — the thing that raises the cost of corruption in a county courthouse and in a corporate boardroom alike, and one of the reasons American markets and American government are trusted enough to function. That infrastructure is failing, in small markets first and now in large ones, and the remedy most often proposed — rules requiring fairness, balance, or truth — hands the government authority over the institution whose job is to investigate the government. The American record shows what happens next, and Section 2.4 sets it out from the White House tapes. This paper takes a different route. Four of its five proposals require the federal government to surrender a power it now holds over journalists: the power to compel a reporter to name a source, the use of federal courts as a war of attrition, the ability to sit on public records without consequence, and the discretion to reward or starve an outlet with public advertising money. Every one of the four is already law somewhere. The fifth is a proposal rather than a recommendation — an obligation on media revenue, spent on newsgathering payroll in the market where it was collected — which we believe would work, cannot prove, and set out with the objections we cannot answer.
Key findings
- Nearly 3,500 American newspapers have closed since 2005 — about 40 percent of the country's local papers — along with more than 270,000 newspaper jobs.1
- 213 counties have no local news source of any kind and another 1,524 have exactly one, leaving roughly 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news. About 80 percent of those counties are rural.1
- When a local newspaper closes, municipal borrowing costs in that county rise by 5 to 11 basis points — roughly $650,000 more per bond issue. The effect is causal, and the authors find that online media are not acting as sufficient substitutes.2
- Across every reported fraud at large American companies from 1996 to 2004, the media brought roughly as many to light as the auditors and more than twice as many as the SEC.3
- On the White House tapes of 15 September 1972, President Nixon observed that the Washington Post owned a television station that would "have to get it renewed," and that challenges to licences were "going to be God damn active here." Four months later his Florida campaign finance chairman filed one.4
- There is no federal shield law. Forty-nine states afford reporters some protection against compelled disclosure of sources; federal courts afford none. The PRESS Act passed the House unanimously and died in the Senate.6
- Congress has never passed an anti-SLAPP statute, and the federal circuits disagree about whether state protections even apply in federal court — so a journalist's defense against a meritless suit depends on which courthouse the plaintiff chooses.7
- The countries that rank highest for press freedom also rank highest for low corruption, and every one of them supports its press by formula rather than discretion. The mechanism of media capture in Hungary was the opposite: state advertising placed at official discretion.8
Section 1The question before us
Somewhere tonight a county commission is meeting. It will approve a bond, or rezone a parcel, or renew a contract with a firm owned by somebody's brother-in-law. In a growing number of American counties, no one will be in the room who does not work for the county.
That is the subject of this paper. Not whether the national press is fair — Americans have argued about that since Franklin, and will go on arguing — but whether anybody is left to watch the ordinary machinery of American government where most of it actually happens.
A free market needs referees. So does a free government. We have been quietly firing them for twenty years.
This author has spent a working life in business and believes what most readers of this site believe: that markets allocate better than committees, that regulation usually costs more than it returns, and that the burden of proof belongs on anyone who proposes a new rule. None of that is in tension with what follows. A referee is not the enemy of a game. A referee is the reason there is a game rather than a brawl, and no one has ever suggested that the way to improve officiating is to let one of the teams hire the officials.
And the officiating is not only of government. A press that works raises the cost of dishonesty everywhere it can reach — in a county contract, in a quarterly filing, in a supplier's safety record. That is not a burden on honest business. It is what makes an honest business distinguishable from a dishonest one, and it is a substantial part of why American capital markets are trusted by people who have never set foot here. Reputation is an asset. Somebody has to be in a position to price it.
1.2 Our own share of the failure
The complaint that the media is broken is very often made by people who pay for none of it.
That is the uncomfortable half of this argument and it belongs at the front. A great many Americans who can describe in detail what is wrong with the national press have not subscribed to their local paper in twenty years, do not know whether one still exists, and would not recognize the name of the last reporter who covered their school board. The classified advertising that paid for that reporter did not get taken away. We stopped buying it and took it somewhere cheaper, one household at a time, and the reporter's job went with it.
There is a further share that belongs elsewhere. Distrust of the press has been a durable applause line in American politics for fifty years, and much of that criticism was earned. But somewhere in those fifty years the criticism stopped being an argument for a better press and became satisfaction at a weaker one. Anyone who believes government is prone to waste and capture has an obvious interest in somebody being paid to go look. A great many people who hold that belief cheered while the people who went to look were laid off.
Section 2What was lost, and what it costs
The scale is not in dispute. Northwestern's Medill School has counted local news outlets county by county for a decade. Since 2005 the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers — about 40 percent of its local papers — and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs. In the most recent year measured, 136 more closed.1
Two hundred thirteen counties now have no local news source of any kind. Another 1,524 have exactly one, usually a weekly. Together those counties hold roughly fifty million Americans, and about eighty percent of the empty ones are rural.1
Ownership concentrated as the industry shrank. In 2005 the country's daily newspapers had 459 separate owners. The survivors have 162, and fewer than fifteen percent are independently owned.1
2.1 What it costs in dollars
The civic argument for local journalism is familiar and easy to wave away. The fiscal one is neither.
Pengjie Gao of Notre Dame and Chang Lee and Dermot Murphy of the University of Illinois at Chicago examined what happens to a county's public finances after its newspaper closes. Municipal borrowing costs rise by five to eleven basis points — roughly $650,000 more on a typical bond issue. The effect is causal and is not explained by the local economy going bad. Closures are also associated with higher government wages, larger deficits, and more costly refinancing.2
They tested the obvious objection directly, and found that online media are not acting as sufficient substitutes — with the effect largest in states with weaker governance.2
When the local paper closes, the county pays more to borrow, and the taxpayer covers the difference.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Lenders price what they cannot verify. A county nobody is watching is a county where the budget documents get less attention, the contracts get less scrutiny, and the surprises arrive later. That risk goes into the yield, and the yield goes onto the tax bill.
2.2 Why the internet did not fill the gap
The internet delivers every story in the world except the one nobody else will gather. National coverage is abundant and nearly free, because millions of people want it and the cost of producing it is spread across all of them. Coverage of a school board in a county of nine thousand has one possible supplier and nine thousand possible customers, and when the supplier closes, no algorithm takes over.
Daniel Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania documented what happens to a public that loses local information. American political behavior has nationalized: the correlation between how a person votes for governor and how the same person votes for president rose from about 0.6 to above 0.8 since 1990. His leading explanation is not partisanship. It is the collapse of the audience for state and local news. As Americans moved to cable and the internet, they moved to sources that cover Washington and little else.9
A citizen who knows more about a Senate hearing than about their own county commission is not better informed. They are differently informed, about matters over which they have almost no influence, and less informed about the ones where their vote is worth the most.
2.3 What the press catches that regulators do not
The argument so far concerns government. The case for a working press is at least as strong in the private economy, and the evidence there should interest anyone who prefers markets to agencies.
Alexander Dyck of Toronto and Adair Morse and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago examined every reported fraud at large American companies between 1996 and 2004 and asked a simple question: who found it? Not the Securities and Exchange Commission, which uncovered about 6 percent. Not primarily the auditors, at roughly 14 percent. The media accounted for about 14 percent — as much as the auditing profession and more than twice the federal regulator — with employees and industry bodies accounting for more still.3
The press was also the channel through which other detectors surfaced what they found: for short sellers and analysts who identified fraud, the media was the next actor in a majority of cases.3
A market cannot price what nobody discloses, and a good deal of what gets disclosed was pried loose by a reporter.
This bears directly on how a free-market reader should think about the subject. Every fraud the press uncovers is one an investor did not fund, a competitor did not lose to, and an agency did not have to be enlarged to pursue. The alternative to a press that finds these things is not a market that polices itself. It is a larger SEC.
2.4 Why the obvious remedy is the one to avoid
The reform most often urged is a rule: require fairness, require balance, require accuracy. It is the natural instinct and it has been tried in this country, which means the argument does not have to be conducted hypothetically.
The Fairness Doctrine, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949, required broadcasters to cover controversial issues and to present contrasting views. Its intent was plainly reasonable. Its operation was not. Complaints could be filed against a station by anyone, each one requiring counsel, review of tapes, and a written response — and the cheapest way for a small station to avoid the cost was to carry no controversy at all. The chilling effect was documented by economists at the time and afterward, and the Commission repealed the doctrine by a 4 to 0 vote in 1987.4
It was also used exactly as one would expect a discretionary power over speech to be used. Reporting in the New York Times in 1975 established that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had used Fairness Doctrine complaints to pressure broadcasters carrying commentary they disliked. Nixon's White House used it against the networks, sending Charles Colson — later imprisoned for his part in Watergate — to warn executives of Fairness Doctrine scrutiny over Vietnam coverage. Colson reported the executives "accommodating, cordial, and almost apologetic."4
And then there is the licence power, which is the part worth reading in the participants' own words.
On 15 September 1972, in the Oval Office, President Nixon discussed the Washington Post with John Dean and H. R. Haldeman while the paper was pursuing Watergate:
Nixon: "The main thing is the Post is going to have
damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station."
Dean: "That's right, they do."
Nixon: "And they're going to have to get it renewed."
Haldeman: "They've got a radio station too."
Nixon: "Does that come up too? The point is, when does it come
up?"
Dean: "I don't know. But the practice of non-licensees filing on top
of licensees has certainly gotten more … more active in the area."
Nixon: "And it's going to be God damn active
here."5
It was. In January 1973, George Champion Jr., who had chaired Nixon's campaign finance operation in Florida, filed a challenge to the licence renewal of WJXT in Jacksonville — a station owned by the Washington Post Company. A challenge was filed against WPLG in Miami, owned by the same company. The White House denied any involvement at the time. The challenges failed and the licences were renewed, but the stations spent years and substantial money defending them.5
That is the whole case against content regulation, and it does not depend on predicting anything. A rule requiring balance taught broadcasters to avoid controversy. An agency holding licences at its discretion became a tool a president considered turning on the newspaper investigating him, and the papers to prove it are in the National Archives.
Whoever holds that power will eventually be somebody a given reader did not vote for, and they will use it on somebody that reader agrees with. Every reform that follows is designed to avoid creating it.
Section 3Reform I: A federal shield law
Congress should enact a statutory privilege protecting journalists from being compelled to identify confidential sources, and barring federal authorities from seizing a journalist's records from the third parties who hold them, with narrow exceptions for imminent violence and terrorism.
This is not novel and it is not untested. Forty-nine states afford reporters some protection against compelled disclosure. The federal courts afford none, and the federal government has by far the greater surveillance capability. A journalist's protection therefore ends at the courthouse door of the sovereign most able to compel them.6
The PRESS Act would close the gap. It passed the House of Representatives unanimously, sponsored by a Democrat and a Republican, and died in the Senate. It passed the House unanimously a second time. It has still not become law.6
Note what this reform is. It is not assistance to the press. It is the federal government giving up a power it currently holds — the power to make a reporter choose between naming the person who spoke to them and going to jail. Every source who has ever described waste, fraud, or abuse inside a government agency did so knowing that protection is what a federal prosecutor decides it is.
Section 4Reform II: A federal anti-SLAPP statute
Congress should enact a federal anti-SLAPP statute permitting early dismissal, with fee recovery, of meritless suits brought to punish speech on matters of public concern.
A strategic lawsuit against public participation is not designed to be won. It is designed to cost more to defend than the defendant has. Roughly two-thirds of the states — red and blue alike — have decided this is a problem and passed laws about it. Congress never has, and the federal circuits disagree about whether a state's protections even apply in federal court. A journalist's defense therefore depends on which courthouse the plaintiff selects.7
This reform matters most to the smallest outlets and to the entrants a recovering market would produce. A national newsroom treats a nuisance suit as a line item. A two-person newsroom treats it as an extinction event. If one believes, as this paper does, that new local outlets are the likeliest source of renewal, then the single cheapest thing government can do is stop letting its courts be used to kill them in the crib.
Drafting matters here. A statute written too broadly would shield deliberate falsehood as readily as honest reporting, and defamation remedies exist for good reason. The better designs condition protection on good-faith journalism — speech produced through deliberate effort to report accurately — rather than extending it to anyone who claims the label.7
Section 5Reform III: Freedom of information with consequences
The Freedom of Information Act should carry enforceable deadlines, narrowed exemptions, automatic fee recovery when an agency loses, and personal consequence for officials who withhold records without a lawful basis.
FOIA is presently a statute with a right and no remedy. An agency that ignores the statutory deadline faces, in practice, the possibility that the requester will sue — which costs the requester money and years, and costs the official who stonewalled nothing at all. The rational strategy for an agency with something embarrassing in a file is to wait, and it is the strategy agencies of both parties reliably choose.
This is the least glamorous reform in the paper and possibly the most valuable. Records requests are the raw material of accountability journalism, and delay is the cheapest form of censorship available to a government, because it never has to be defended. Nobody is ever quoted refusing to release a document. The document simply does not arrive until the story is dead.
Section 6Reform IV: An end to discretionary government advertising
Federal, state, and local governments should be required to place public notices, legal advertising, and other public-information spending according to a published formula — circulation, geography, audience — with no official discretion to reward or withhold from a particular outlet.
Most Americans have never thought about this, and it is the most direct corruption channel between government and press in the country. Governments buy advertising. Somebody decides where it goes. An outlet dependent on that revenue learns quickly what kind of coverage keeps it coming.
We are not speculating about the failure mode. It is the documented mechanism of media capture in Hungary, a member of the European Union in the present decade: state advertising placed with friendly outlets and withheld from independent ones, until the independent ones could not operate.8 No censor was needed and no journalist was arrested. The government simply chose its customers.
Notice what this proposal does. It does not create a fund, an agency, or an appropriation. It takes an existing stream of public money and removes the discretion from it — the same repair this organization has proposed for districting: publish the rule before the map, apply it mechanically, and leave no room for whoever draws the map to favor themselves.
Section 7Reform V: A newsgathering obligation on media revenue
This section is different from the four before it, and we mark the difference plainly. Everything above is either already law somewhere in the United States or already law in comparable democracies. What follows is ours. It has never been tried anywhere. We think it would work and we cannot prove it, and a reader who declines to support an untested mechanism is applying exactly the standard we ask them to apply.
The proposal: a small, uniform obligation on consumer media revenue across all mediums, collected at the point of sale by the seller. The money is never remitted to any government. The seller keeps it and must spend it on newsgathering payroll, allocated across media markets in proportion to where it was collected. An obligation may be satisfied either by employing reporters in that market or by contracting with a newsroom that does.
7.1 Why an industry obligation rather than a subsidy
This author spent fourteen years building and operating restaurants, an industry that pays for its own health inspection regime and does not much complain about it. The reason is not civic virtue. It is that nobody eats at a restaurant they believe will poison them, and the inspection is what makes the belief unnecessary. The industry pays for the thing that makes its product trustworthy, because a product nobody trusts is not a business.
Newsgathering is that for media. It is the reason the industry exists, the original product from which everything else descended, and the thing that makes the word media mean something more than entertainment. An industry that has stopped producing it has stopped being trusted, and the numbers on public confidence in the press are what one would expect of a restaurant trade that quietly closed the health department.
Notice what distinguishes this from every funding proposal this organization has rejected. No public money is appropriated. No agency allocates anything. No official decides which outlet deserves support. The consumer's purchase decides where the money goes, competition among outlets continues unchanged, and there is no annual renewal for anyone in government to threaten. The objection that has defeated every other funding mechanism — that the power to fund is the power to condition — does not arise, because nothing is funded by anyone but the customer.
7.2 Why pro rata by market, and why spend-or-buy
The geographic rule is what reaches the places that have lost coverage. Money collected from households in a market must be spent on reporting in that market, which means a national seller with subscribers in a rural county owes newsgathering there and not only in the cities where its own newsroom already sits.
Spend-or-buy is what makes the money usable. A reporter costs a salary, and obligations chopped county by county would produce sums too small to hire anyone. Allowing an outlet to satisfy its obligation by contracting with an existing local newsroom aggregates the money into amounts that can employ a person — and creates a market in which small local newsrooms are suppliers selling a service rather than supplicants receiving a grant. Allocation stays entirely in private hands. Nobody in government picks the newsroom.
The base should be broad — all consumer media, entertainment included — and the rate correspondingly small. A narrow base assessed only on news would send the most money to markets that already buy news, which are the markets that already have coverage, and would raise the price of the one product we are trying to make more common. A broad base tracks population instead of news appetite, which is what puts money where the reporters are missing.
7.3 Defining the obligation without licensing the press
Qualifying expenditure should be defined by input and never by output: compensation paid to people whose work is gathering and reporting original information, verified the way any payroll item is verified — employment records and job descriptions — with no review of anything published. Illinois already administers a journalist-employment tax credit on essentially this basis, at a stated sum per reporter retained and per reporter hired.10
We will not pretend this removes the difficulty. Defining who counts as a reporter is licensing by a gentler name, and a hostile administration could narrow the definition. Section 8.7 states that objection at its full strength because we do not have a complete answer to it.
Section 8 · The strongest case against
8.1 A shield law protects people who do not deserve it
Any privilege broad enough to protect a reporter exposing a defense contractor also protects one publishing material they should not have. The answer is that we have made this trade in forty-nine states already, deliberately, and the republic has survived it. But a reader who thinks the federal government should retain this power has a coherent position and is entitled to it.
8.2 Anti-SLAPP can shield deliberate falsehood
Early dismissal is a blunt instrument. Drawn broadly, it protects the malicious as efficiently as the careful, and a person genuinely defamed deserves a remedy. This is a real cost and the reason the good-faith standard matters, but no drafting eliminates it entirely.
8.3 FOIA enforcement is not free
Deadlines require staff, fee-shifting costs the treasury, and personal liability for officials will make agencies more cautious about creating records in the first place. The last effect is genuinely perverse and we have no answer for it beyond the observation that a government that writes less down is telling us something.
8.4 A formula for public notices will misallocate
Any mechanical rule sends money somewhere a thoughtful person would not have sent it, and circulation-based formulas will favor incumbents over new outlets. We accept the misallocation. The alternative is discretion, and discretion is the failure mode.
8.5 The newsgathering obligation is a tax on the press, and the doctrine is against it
This is the most serious objection in the paper and it goes to Section 7.
The Supreme Court has struck down special taxes on the press three times in the modern era. In Grosjean (1936) it voided Huey Long's levy on the advertising receipts of larger Louisiana newspapers. In Minneapolis Star (1983) it voided a use tax on ink and paper, holding that when a state singles out the press the ordinary political restraints on taxation weaken and the threat can operate as effectively as a censor — and that differential treatment, absent some special characteristic of the press, is presumptively unconstitutional. In Arkansas Writers' Project (1987) it voided a tax exemption because it distinguished among publications.11
There is an opening. In Leathers v. Medlock (1991) the Court upheld extending a general sales tax to cable television, because no narrow group was selected to bear the burden.11 Our proposal is deliberately general across every medium, and the money never leaves the payer's hands, which distinguishes it from every tax the Court has struck. But we will not oversell that. Characterized as a tax, it faces Minneapolis Star. Characterized instead as a rule about how a media company must spend its own revenue, it faces the argument that government is directing editorial expenditure. Both doors are guarded, and no court has ruled on anything like it.
8.6 It has never been done, anywhere
The four reforms preceding it are working somewhere today. This one is not. The nearest American analogue is the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to lend in the communities where they take deposits — a serve-where-you-collect obligation nearly fifty years old — and whose history includes compliance drifting toward box-checking and regulators grading performance. Both are plausible futures here.
We therefore recommend that no one enact this nationally until a state has tried it. New Jersey and Illinois both built their journalism programs at state level first. That is the honest sequence for an untested idea, and we would rather be proven wrong in one state than right in theory everywhere.
8.7 Defining a reporter is licensing by another name
Any obligation to spend on journalism requires somebody to say what journalism is. Payroll-based definitions are the least intrusive available and still require an auditor with access to a newsroom's books, and a definition written by one administration can be narrowed by the next.
We think the risk is smaller than in any content-based alternative, and smaller than the risk of a grant program, because the auditor examines employment records rather than published work. We do not think it is zero, and a reader who concludes the risk is unacceptable has reached a defensible position by a sound route.
8.8 What we concede, and what we do not
We concede that a shield law will protect some people who do not deserve protection. We concede that anti-SLAPP protection can shelter deliberate falsehood and that a defamed person deserves a remedy. We concede that FOIA enforcement costs money and may cause agencies to write less down. We concede that a formula for public notices will misallocate. We concede that the newsgathering obligation is untested, that the doctrine on press taxation runs against it, and that defining a reporter is uncomfortably close to licensing one.
We do not concede that the alternative is acceptable. Fifty million Americans live where almost nothing is covered, their counties pay more to borrow because of it, and the remedy most often urged on them — a public authority empowered to police what the press may say — is the one repair the record in Section 2.4 shows will be turned against them.
Section 9What we are not claiming
We are not claiming these reforms will make the press fair, accurate, or likeable. Nothing here touches what anyone may publish, and that is the point rather than an oversight. Every proposal in this paper regulates process — consent, disclosure, procedure, and the government's own conduct — and not one of them asks any official whether a story is true. A country whose government may rule on that question has a different problem than a shrinking press.
We are not claiming this reverses the collapse. Four of the five reforms lower the cost of doing accountability journalism; they do not create demand for it. The fifth might, and it has never been tried. If every proposal here were enacted tomorrow, a great many counties would still have nobody in the room, and any paper that told you otherwise would be selling something.
And we are not claiming the press is owed anything. It is not owed subsidy, protection from criticism, or deference. What it is owed is what every American is owed: that the government not use its subpoenas, its courts, its records offices, or its checkbook to punish people for what they publish. That is not a favor to journalists. It is the ordinary meaning of the First Amendment, and four of these five reforms do nothing more than make it operational.
Section 10The argument you can carry
The paper compressed to what a person can remember and repeat.
And the one that belongs to the reader rather than the industry. The complaint that the media is broken is very often made by people who pay for none of it. The advertising that funded the reporter at the county commission was not confiscated. We spent it somewhere else, one household at a time, and then were surprised by what happened next.
Section 11Conclusion
A free people cannot govern itself on information nobody gathers.
The instinct to fix the press by regulating it is understandable and it is wrong, not because the press deserves protection but because the tool does not work and does not stay pointed where it was aimed. Section 2.4 sets out the record: a rule requiring balance taught broadcasters to avoid controversy, and an agency holding licences at its discretion became a tool a president considered turning on the newspaper investigating him. Whoever holds that power will eventually be somebody a given reader did not vote for, and they will use it on somebody that reader agrees with.
What is left is less satisfying and more durable. Take away the government's power to unmask a source. Take away its use of the courts as an instrument of exhaustion. Take away its ability to sit on a public record until the story dies. Take away the discretion in its checkbook. Those four reforms are already law somewhere, they cost almost nothing, and taken together they would make the United States the most protective jurisdiction for journalism in the world — achieved entirely by a government giving things up rather than acquiring them. No country has done that. It is a more distinctly American thing to do than anything we could copy from abroad.
The fifth reform is ours and it is unproven, and we have said so at length rather than burying it. If it is a bad idea we would rather learn that from a state that tried it than from a country that adopted it.
None of this is a favor to journalists. Most readers of this paper will go on disliking a good deal of what the press produces, and are under no obligation to stop. But somebody has to be in the room when the county commission votes, and at present, in a great many American counties, nobody is.
Notes
- Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University, The State of Local News 2025, localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu. Figures for newspapers lost since 2005, newspaper employment, news-desert counties, single-source counties, rural share, and daily-newspaper ownership are drawn from the 2025 edition and its accompanying coverage. Medill updates these counts annually; verify against the current edition before publication.
- Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy, "Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance," Journal of Financial Economics (2020), sciencedirect.com; summarized at brookings.edu. The authors report offering yields rising 5.5 basis points and secondary-market yields 6.4 basis points over the three years following a closure, with a 5-to-11 basis point range across specifications.
- Alexander Dyck, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales, "Who Blows the Whistle on Corporate Fraud?," The Journal of Finance 65 (2010): 2213–2253, onlinelibrary.wiley.com. Examining all reported fraud cases at large U.S. companies from 1996 to 2004, the authors attribute roughly 6 percent of detections to the SEC, 14 percent to auditors, 14 percent to the media, 16 percent to industry regulators, and 19 percent to employees. Detection rates by mandated actors improved after Sarbanes-Oxley. Zingales is at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
- On the Fairness Doctrine's adoption in 1949, its operation, and its repeal by a 4–0 vote of the Federal Communications Commission in 1987, see the Commission's own record and the standard histories. On the chilling effect — stations declining to carry controversial programming rather than bear the cost of defending complaints — the principal academic treatment is Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa, "Chilling the Internet? Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcasting," Cato Policy Analysis No. 270 (1998), which also documents the Nixon administration's plan to generate Fairness Doctrine challenges against network-owned stations. On the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' use of Fairness Doctrine complaints against broadcasters carrying commentary they opposed, see the New York Times reporting of 1975 and the discussion at cato.org. On Charles Colson's meeting with network executives over Vietnam coverage and his report that they were "accommodating, cordial, and almost apologetic," see cato.org. The Cato Institute opposes the Fairness Doctrine and readers should weigh its framing; the underlying documents are the Commission's records, the Nixon tapes, and contemporaneous Times reporting, and the Hazlett and Sosa paper is a peer of the academic literature rather than advocacy.
- Conversation of 15 September 1972, Oval Office, President Richard Nixon with John W. Dean III and H. R. Haldeman, Nixon White House Tapes, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration. The passage quoted was omitted from the edited White House transcript released in May 1974; the New York Times reported the omission at the time. The tape and its subject logs are held by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff and the recording is available through the Miller Center's Secret White House Tapes collection, millercenter.org. On the licence challenges that followed: in January 1973 George Champion Jr., finance chairman of Nixon's 1972 campaign in Florida, petitioned to deny renewal of the licence of WJXT, Jacksonville, owned by the Washington Post Company; a separate challenge was filed against WPLG, Miami, owned by the same company. Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler denied White House involvement. Both challenges failed and the licences were renewed. See the contemporaneous New York Times reporting of 1973 and 1974, and the summary at poynter.org. The transcript wording above should be checked against the Nixon Library's own transcript before publication; published renderings vary slightly in punctuation and elision.
- Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (PRESS Act), H.R. 4330 and predecessor bills; passed the House by unanimous vote in January 2024 and again in September 2024. Sponsored by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA). On the state-law patchwork and the absence of a federal statutory privilege, see Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, rcfp.org.
- On the absence of a federal anti-SLAPP statute and the circuit split over whether state anti-SLAPP protections apply in federal court: Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Anti-SLAPP Legal Guide, rcfp.org. On the good-faith journalism standard as a drafting solution: Christian H. Ross, "Fair and Balanced: Why We Need a Federal Anti-SLAPP Law for Good-Faith Journalism," 75 Duke Law Journal 775 (2026).
- On the correlation between press-freedom and anti-corruption rankings and the arm's-length principle in Nordic media support: Nordicom, "Direct media subsidies to news media — a Nordic overview," nordicom.gu.se; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, fact-finding mission report on Denmark and Sweden (2020). On discretionary state advertising as the mechanism of media capture in Hungary, see reporting and analysis by the Reuters Institute and by Mérték Media Monitor. This paper cites the Nordic material for the design principle only; we do not propose Nordic-style subsidies, for the reasons given in Section 7.1.
- Daniel J. Hopkins, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (University of Chicago Press, 2018), press.uchicago.edu. Winner of the American Political Science Association's Philip E. Converse Book Award. The finding on declining state and local news audiences appears in chapter 9.
- Illinois Journalism Preservation Act and the associated Local Journalism Sustainability tax incentive program, enacted 2024, providing a refundable credit per journalist retained and per journalist newly hired, subject to a per-outlet cap. New York operates a comparable program. Cited here solely as precedent for defining qualifying expenditure by employment records rather than by content.
- Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233 (1936); Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 460 U.S. 575 (1983); Arkansas Writers' Project, Inc. v. Ragland, 481 U.S. 221 (1987); Leathers v. Medlock, 499 U.S. 439 (1991). Overview at Constitution Annotated, constitution.congress.gov. We cite these cases against our own Section 7 and readers should weigh them accordingly.
A note on the author
Issue papers are published under the name of 1863 Leadership rather than an individual byline.
A note on sources
Media policy is thick with advocacy organizations and we have kept them out of the load-bearing positions. The scale of the losses rests on a university research program that publishes its county-level methodology; the fiscal finding on a peer-reviewed finance journal; the fraud-detection finding on The Journal of Finance; the nationalization finding on a university press monograph that won its discipline's book award; the legal claims on the Supreme Court's own opinions. The historical record in Section 2.4 rests on a White House recording held by the National Archives and on contemporaneous New York Times reporting; note 4 identifies the one institute with a declared position on the Fairness Doctrine among those sources. The cases cited in note 11 run against our own Section 7, and we have set them out at full strength rather than in summary.
Recommended citation
1863 Leadership. "Somebody Has to Be in the Room." Issue Paper No. 5.
September 2026. 1863leadership.org
Corrections: None to date. Errors of fact are corrected on this page within one business day of notice, with a dated note describing the change.