In their analysis of what ails the journalism business (CJR.org, 10/19/09), Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson seem to pooh-pooh the idea that newspapers could be turned into non-profits funded by endowments, "as though they were museums."

"It would take an endowment of billions of dollars to produce enough investment income to run a single sizeable newspaper," Downie and Schudson write, "much less large numbers of papers in communities across the country."

But would it really? At another point in the article they note that the Baltimore Sun is down to 150 reporters--but it seems like you'd still have to call that a "sizeable newspaper," able to do a great deal of the "accountability journalism" that Downie and Schudson are rightly focused on...particularly since, based on the figures they give, the typical state capital only has seven full-time reporters. Let's say you can hire a reporter for $100,000; that would give you a journalistic payroll of $15 million.   To get that using the average rate of return for college and university endowments for 1998-2007, you would need a nest egg of about $174 million.   If you had an endowment of $2 billion and got that rate of return, you could hire more than 1,700 reporters--maybe that's what Downie and Schudson mean by "sizeable."

Is it possible for the public to amass that kind of funding to support journalism?  The same group that provided the college investment income figures, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, reports that a total of 785 academic institutions across North America had a combined endowment of $411 billion--enough to hire 350,000 reporters.

Education is important; so is journalism.  The difference is that our society recognizes that capitalism is not going to provide us with all the educational institutions that we need.  When we realize that the same thing is true for journalism, we'll be able to find the resources.

Noticing that "days ago, buried in a chart under the headline "How the Health Care Bills Compare," the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information," Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill's "public plan that would 'compete with private insurers,'" as "the Times chart explained on July 18":

The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'"

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of coverage--'basic, enhanced and premium'--can be offered through the public option."

Those few grainy sentences, quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media, referred to a disturbing aspect of "public plan" scenarios. If the ostensible goal is healthcare for all, then--at best--some of the "all" would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican Party is coming from such a right-wing place that any government action to improve healthcare access is ideologically unacceptable. In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic "public plan" at least embrace the precept that the not-so-tender-mercies of the market are insufficient to fully provide for the population's medical needs.

But as a practical matter, a "public plan" coexisting with the private health insurance system--generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican "free market" fixation--is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to healthcare.

While "media accounts keep telling us that the current political debate on healthcare is unprecedented and groundbreaking," Solomon points to "an article in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, by seasoned healthcare reporter Trudy Lieberman, makes a convincing case that little has changed within the frames of media parameters."

Sign on to FAIR's petition telling corporate media to stop censoring the healthcare debate.

And if you happen to be near New York City, join our July 28 Petition delivery at ABC.

Posting to the Columbia Journalism Review's Behind the News blog, Megan Garber (5/26/09) catches New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt espousing "a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness" in his May 23 column:

One that plays itself out via divisiveness--and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are not. In particular, those nagging, nattering bloggers. (Outsiders! Pouncers! Rougher-uppers!) And he does so right in his lede: There are those "within" the Times, "trying to protect the paper's integrity"…and then there are those "outside" it, "ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists."

Garber contention that "such thinking represents all too well the protective, entitled, wagon-circling attitude that so many people resent about the Times--and about mainstream journalism more generally"--even comes after choosing to "leave aside the fact that Hoyt's column vastly underplays the transgressions in question within it":

MoDowd’s, in particular. (After a quick, he-said/she-said summary of the scandal, Hoyt declares: "I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.... If the words are not hers, she must give credit." And then he moves on.)

For the record, even Dowd herself admits having lifted lines wholesale from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall.