Does Colorado truly believe in freedom of the press?

I’m actually starting to wonder. I mean believe, believe, the way our founders believed that press freedom is to human freedom like air is to breathing.

Alas, a panel of Colorado lawmakers with good intentions recently watered down a “Supporting Local Media” bill meant to help give local journalism a fighting chance against the Facebooks, Googles and Instagrams of the world.

The original bill, proposed by Littleton Democratic Rep. Lisa Cutter, would have required Colorado agencies and departments to spend at least half of their advertising budgets with local news organizations. It also created a $250 tax credit for people who subscribe to local newspapers.

But apparently the governor objected to that original plan, so what’s left doesn’t directly benefit local news outlets. Instead, the bill on preliminary approval gives small businesses a 50% tax credit to advertise in local media, capped at $2,500.

When it comes to supporting the foundations of freedom, I think Colorado can do better than that.

This pittance comes at the same time bills to aid local media are stalled in Congress, while other countries speed ahead with subsidies and laws to make sure tech companies who thrive parasitically on local media content pay newspapers and others to use that content.

Such a first-of-its-kind law that was passed in February last year in Australia is reviving the local journalism industry there, according to a new report published last week by a media research group, the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. The new law requires tech companies like Facebook and Google to pay media outlets for the right to link to their content in search results and news feeds.

In total, Facebook and Google have paid roughly $146 million to Australian media companies to keep their content on users’ feeds, according to the report.

One of the authors of the report said the market for entry-level journalists is the best its been in 20 years.

In its support of press freedom, the rest of the world is suddenly speeding past the country that invented freedom of the press.

According to the most recent Freedom of the Press index by Reporters Without Borders, the United States, once the beacon of press freedom around the world, now ranks 44th.

We’re below Uruguay, South Africa, Botswana and Taiwan, if you can imagine.

Though the U.S. has made some rebounds lately, “As with any patient, however,” the report lamented, “while the most obvious symptoms of an ailing democracy may have cleared up, many chronic, underlying conditions — from the disappearance of local news to the ongoing and widespread distrust of mainstream media — remain.”

A Freedom House study also ranked the United States relatively low in press freedom because of failures to protect sources and because economic conditions have made journalism more difficult. Interestingly, the nations that top Freedom House’s list as having the best press freedoms in the world rank among the top per capita press subsidizers in the world, such as Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.

As journalism scholars Robert McChesney and John Nichols write in their book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” “What has been missing from the narrative is that the nations with the freest press systems are also the nations that make the greatest public investment in journalism.”

There are worries about private companies and governments with their own agendas subsidizing the press. But such efforts to underwrite journalism are as American as apple pie. It’s called advertising, and second-class mail, which was established by our founders as a cheaper way to widely distribute newspapers and periodicals with the sole intent of making sure there was rigorous political debate in our country to sustain and grow democracy.

The postal subsidy slashed as much as 90% off postage fees for local media outlets in the early days of democracy. Our founders saw the press as a public good as well as a business. Those subsidies they provided helped spread newspapers and pamphlets all over the country, and via those they spread a new form of politics and citizen political debate and enabled informed democratic participation. In other words, newspapers were the original delivery system of America’s democracy.

I think we’ve forgotten that.

As McChesney and Nichols write, “While there were rollicking disagreements about the character and content of the post-colonial press in America, the one universally accepted premise was that the government needed to heavily subsidize the creation and development of the press if the constitutional system were to succeed.”

So journalism in this country was heavily subsidized during its first century, then the infusion of advertising in the second century began to provide the majority of revenues for supporting journalism, masking the “public good” mission. With Google and Facebook siphoning that advertising away in its third century, “Journalism is increasingly left standing naked in an unforgiving market,” wrote McChesney and Nichols.

We need a new kind of second-class mail subsidy for digital delivery of news.

When she proposed her bill, Cutter offered statistics she said show 81% of Coloradans read a local print or digital newspaper each month. The hunger for good information is there.

I would argue that it’s time to remember what our founders figured out, that good journalism is good democracy, and worth publicly investing in.

“Journalism is the best vaccine against disinformation,” Reporters without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said recently. “Unfortunately, its production and distribution are too often blocked by political, economic, technological and, sometimes, even cultural factors. In response to the virality of disinformation across borders, on digital platforms and via social media, journalism provides the most effective means of ensuring that public debate is based on a diverse range of established facts.”

I don’t think I’ve paid for a single one of my COVID vaccines. It’s time for our government and tech companies to step up and help pay for a disinformation vaccine as well.