Amid concerns of ‘market failure’ in the U.S. commercial news industry, this paper explores more than a decade’s worth of scholarly arguments that government intervention and investment is the best solution to what many deem a crisis in American journalism. Through the lenses of First Amendment theory and political economy, the analysis examines a range of ideas and proposals that, in many ways, began with Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism in 2010 and continue up through Victor Pickard’s Democracy Without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society in 2020. The paper concludes that, while a ‘positive’ interpretation of the First Amendment would seem to demand such intervention, the window of opportunity has closed due to a range of political and economic forces that have either developed or become further entrenched over the past decade. To that end, it calls on journalists and journalism scholars to work to shift the discourse of journalism, to characterise it as an essential, nonpartisan public good – one no different than education. It argues that such a shift, along with enough evidence of further market failure, could someday help inspire the necessary political and economic will to help rescue the floundering news industry on a wider scale.

在对美国商业新闻业“市场失灵”的担忧中，本文探讨了十多年的学术论点，即政府干预和投资是许多人认为美国新闻业危机的最佳解决方案。通过《第一修正案》理论和政治经济学的视角，该分析考察了一系列想法和提议，这些想法和提议从许多方面开始于罗伯特·麦克切斯尼和约翰·尼科尔斯于2010年撰写的《美国新闻业的死与生》，并一直延续到维克托皮卡德（Pickard）的没有新闻业的民主：在2020年面对错误信息社会。该论文的结论是，尽管对《第一修正案》的“积极”解释似乎需要这种干预，在过去的十年中，由于各种政治和经济力量的发展或根深蒂固，机遇之窗已经关闭。为此，它呼吁新闻工作者和新闻学者努力改变新闻的话语，将其描述为一种基本的，无党派的公共物品-与教育无异。它认为，这种转变，加上足够的证据表明市场进一步失败，有朝一日可以帮助激发必要的政治和经济意愿，以帮助更大规模地拯救陷入困境的新闻业。