Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of

Current Affairs magazine. Today we are discussing the crisis in journalism and how to fix it.

I am joined by Victor Picard. He is Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is also the author of

the book, Democracy Without Journalism, Confronting the Misinformation Society, Professor Picard.

Nice to talk to you. Thank you, Nathan. It's great to talk to you.

So the book, I should add, there's a question mark at the end of democracy without journalism,

because the central theme of the book is whether we can have democracy if we don't have

journalism. And you make the argument in this book that we can't, just to spoil your position

for people. And you make a pretty straightforward and clear case. And in fact, you lay it out

in bullet points before you go into the detail. And what you say is that there's a crisis in journalism.

There's always been a crisis, that it's a structural

crisis, it's a deep structural crisis, that that crisis threatens democracy, requires

public policy interventions, and then that those public policy interventions should be built

on a certain kind of what you call a social democratic

vision with public media producing public service journalism and that we can now sort of reimagine

journalism and that this crisis doesn't need to be destructive to democracy if we think about

alternatives. So I want to go through the pieces of

this with you. So let's start with this case that there is a crisis in journalism. I mean,

if someone comes to you and says, I don't see a crisis in journalism, say, say some reporter for the New York

Times, I think we're doing our best journalism. Say some reporter for the New York Times.

I think we're doing our best work ever. What do you think of as the crisis in American journalism?

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