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only get about a third of their funding from grants, and most of those come from private foundations, not the government. It's a similar story for PBS stations. An injection of cash would allow NPR to improve its coverage and expand its reach, and would allow PBS to spin off the news shows it already produces into a 24 hour news channel that could do what cable news channels don't

cover a diverse range of stories with more on-the-ground reporting and less talking head analysis, and broadcast some of the fantastic current events-related documentaries that are being made all the time but struggle to find distribution.

If we want to get even more ambitious, we could create a National Public Newspaper using a similar funding model as NPR or PBS (government funding mixed with reader support, private grants and corporate underwriting). The newspaper would cover national and international affairs, as well as local stories of national interest, but not be targeted toward any particular region of the country. Rather than competing with local for-profit newspapers, it could actually help them by allowing them to rerun its original international and national coverage at low rates, and by paying to use their infrastructure to publish and distribute the national public paper locally.

The value that these new media resources would provide-in supplementing our struggling education system, in articulating our national identity, in ensuring our ability to make informed democratic decisions, and in salvaging the integrity of our existing news media-to me far outweigh their financial cost.

The Pulitzer Center funded 25 extensive international reporting projects last year for only $270,000. The BBC covers the globe with the
world's largest network of reporters for TV, radio and the web, and still has room in its $6 billion annual budget to produce loads of entertainment programming.

All of the NEJ projects proposed here could probably be executed for a few hundred million dollars a year in government funds. To put it in perspective, that's about how much the state and federal governments combined are likely to spend each year for the next decade to replace
Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct, or the cost of roughly 12 hours of the war in Iraq.

The BBC model also provides a strong counterexample to the most obvious criticism of this idea that government-funded media invites corruption. The BBC has operated for 80 years as an autonomous public corporation funded through tax dollars, without its editorial independence being compromised by government interference. Besides, many of our worst fears for how integrity and editorial independence in journalism might be compromised by government control have already been realized with papers under corporate control consider Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell weighing Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich's offer to facilitate Tribune's sale of the Chicago Cubs if Zell would fire newspaper editors critical of the governor.

An NEJ with nonpartisan leadership and independent control over funding and editorial decisions could only be an improvement over the corporate media ownership model. Best of all its formation would create jobs for some of the legions of newly laid off journalists and editors soon to be loosed on the streets of Seattle and across the country by a shrinking newspaper industry. We'll be paying their salaries anyway when they hit the unemployment rolls. We might as well save American journalism while we're at it.

Learn more about this author, Alex Stonehill.
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