Center for a Stateless Society » New York Times

In earlier times, the New York Times was a New York staple; the way you held the paper on the subway indicated whether or not you were from the area. Nowadays, most of us read the Times on our iPads, but although the New York Times and other print publications have cut staff and budgets drastically for print editions of their news in recent years, print is becoming the dominant form of media in developing nations.

Everyone going into journalism has probably heard that journalism is dying, or at least that brick-and-mortar newspapers are. This is quite misleading; with the upsurge in media technology, while niche publications and media start-ups in recent years have given aspiring journalists in the United States and Europe more mediums and avenues for their interests and ideas than ever, the assumption that print is dead is pretty Western-centric. As travel becomes more restricted, especially for members of the press, this assumption is understandable.

Why the shift to print? The 2011 State of the Media report said:

“Countries with either evolving democracies or at least evolving capitalist systems tend to drive newspaper growth, which helps explain why Hungary (6.9%) Kosovo (12.5%) and Russia (9.3%) are also on the list of countries where newspapers are launching in bigger numbers, helping advertising revenue grow. Volatile as it is, Afghanistan also saw its paid daily newspaper titles jump 12.5% in 2009.”

It’s safe to say that movement towards capitalism drives the growth of news as the market for news expands and literacy rates go up. This isn’t rocket science. What’s more interesting is this:

“Still a fourth factor affecting the health of the newspaper industry is government subsidy. In several countries, the government offers substantial subsidies to help the newspaper industry thrive as a matter of public policy. The amount and nature of the subsidy can vary widely, and it is difficult to pin down how widespread the subsidies are—they are being scaled back in some places and increased in others. Ireland, for instance, has devoted hundreds of thousands of Euros per year to subsidize Gaelic-language press.”

Aside from Ireland, where Gaelic-language media tends to have a niche, if culturally significant market, the government subsidizing news in developing nations is a red flag. That said, newspapers can slip further under the radar than easily trackable online media, even though they logistically take longer to produce. With Turkey’s recent Twitter ban though, and similar Internet restrictions worldwide, it makes sense that regional news is easier to circulate when it’s written down.

This 2008 Economist article reinforces that point:

“Publishers in India benefit from a long tradition of press freedom. But papers in countries with more meddling governments are also, by and large, doing well. This is especially true of small newspapers. Governments with limited resources are often ill-equipped to monitor a profusion of local and regional newspapers. In Mali, for example, newspapers are popping up “like mushrooms”, says Souleymane Kanté, the local manager for World Education, an American NGO that aims to eradicate illiteracy. The Malian government keeps large national publications in line, Mr Kanté says, but local and regional papers have some breathing room.”

Many pieces on print in the developing world refer to these markets as “maturing,” but this government sidestepping places small, localized papers ahead of the game, even if literacy rates still lag behind Western numbers. The developing world’s growing print industry is expected to decline as Internet access becomes more widespread, but Internet restriction doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

From Common Sense to anarchist zines, print has played a unique role in the face of the media. Limits on press freedom are a looming threat, but as the FBI discovers more and more Internet rabbit holes, maybe it’s time to throw them a curve ball and go back to basics.

Hanker for a hunk of corporatism?

Ross Kenyon — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:34:38 +0000

Sometimes it might look like the state is having an identity crisis: “Should we be protecting people from their own choices, or helping corporations boost their bottom lines?” Don’t be fooled. The dual enactment of these divergent interests may come off as a sort of failure of central planning, democracy and/or bureaucracy, but this reading is far too narrow and leads lowly citizens into mistaking the corpus of state predation for the thin cloak of bumbling “protection.”

The American government spent $6.5 million last year through the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion to teach Americans about eating healthier. At the same time the state spent $136 million encouraging more consumption of the same dairy products the previously named center was combating. The New York Times printed an article (“While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sale”) on November 6th, 2010 which addressed this incident:

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Dairy Management is a state marketing/consulting agency (were you aware these even existed?) of the Agriculture Department. It has been central in challenging the empirical trend against American dairy consumption. This natural process toward healthier choices threatens established economic actors: Dairy producers. In response, dairy interests have utilized the bounty of state power through political organization to assist them in achieving what they couldn’t accomplish through normal market mechanisms.

These privileged producers use the power of the state to tax dairy producers — themselves — as well as average American citizens, to pay for their advertising campaigns, in order to remove a vector of competition between the firms engaged in dairy production. In this way, such a tax is not an affront to large interests, but a cartelizing force to be desired.

Smaller, locally oriented dairy producers are forced to fund centralizing and homogenizing campaigns which they might not want, against their will, when their money may have been better spent elsewhere. The excess capacity of overly capitalized firms who are producing too much milk is artificially bolstered in anti-market fashion rather than being redirected into more profitable pursuits. This function is supported by taxpayer and industry money when this sort of intervention is not conducive to natural economic development or individual consumer health. It is a state gift to established corporate producers; the dark side of a Janus-faced statism which overpowers mealy-mouthed concerns about consumer welfare.

Let someone else comment on the pitfalls of bureaucracy and waste; the knee-slapping story of the American state pursuing contradictory goals. The lesson here is simple: For every dollar of your money it spends to protect you, it is spending twenty to enrich a corporation at the expense of the market, the consumer, and your health. That one dollar receives attention and diverts people from realizing just how complicit the state is in the complex economic problems of today. It is a convenient smokescreen. The intolerance of fairness lactose producers and other “market” actors are receiving to non-exploitative markets is apparent. Don’t fall for it.