Beyond Legitimacy: Broadening the Evaluation of Practice and Policy in Journalism

Abstract How do we nurture high-quality journalism in a digital age, in which intense financial pressure is dragging new and legacy titles alike down into partisan hackery, tabloid sensationalism, and AI slop? Rubén Marciel’s excellent recent paper ‘Private Media, Public Funds and Democratic Allocation’ sets out to explore the ‘civic strategy’, which aims to distribute public funds amongst private news organisations in accordance with the preferences of citizens. In this brief reply I want to pull out, examine, and challenge a key assumption he makes about how we should understand and evaluate journalism. That assumption, which I think is widely shared, is that the political significance of journalism derives primarily from its role in legitimating democratic states, and should be evaluated exclusively on that basis. Though journalism certainly has this role, I think we should be more pluralistic about the ultimate political values that journalism can help us to realise. In this reply, I want to support that claim by focusing on its contribution to one such value, the stability of democratic political communities in the sense of their capacity to maintain their commitment to democratic principles and procedures.