Tax breaks to boost reporting diversity
Bill Birnbauer
By Bill Birnbauer
I am using this column to ask News Limited and Fairfax to support tax deductibility for donations to non-profit investigative reporting centres, not only to increase media diversity in Australia, but to improve the quality of their own reporting.
Enlightened editors at The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and PBS have done so, and the US media today routinely publishes and collaborates on stories from journalists at philanthropically funded, non-profit investigative reporting centres and publications. This would not have occurred as little as four years ago.
But when I was in the US in late 2010, The Washington Post publisher of famous investigations ran a front-page story on the Mumbai massacre written and bylined by a reporter from the
non-profit ProPublica. What changed is that traditional media found it increasingly difficult to resource long-term, legally risky investigations that may not produce stories even after months of digging, which beancounters viewed as expensive luxuries. One can envision a similarly sorry situation arising in Australia in the next five years due to staff cuts at Fairfax, News and elsewhere.
The reason mainstream US editors trust and collaborate with non-profit organisations such as the Centre for Public Integrity, the Centre for Investigative Reporting, the Texas Tribune, the Voice of San Diego and others is that their senior journalists are former colleagues professionals who have moved to the non-profit realm, by choice or otherwise.
I am not talking about bloggers, commentary sites or those nice places that tell you where to get the best macchiato in Sydney or Melbourne. The US centres are staffed by experienced journalists who spend a year or two investigating systemic failure, corruption, crime, campaign funding and so on.
The biggest US centres employ at least 30 journalists and have scooped up all the major journalism awards, including the two most recent Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting, won by ProPublica. One of the winning stories revealed how hospital staff after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans euthanased terminally ill patients. That story involved 140 interviews and 21/2 years of investigation, costing an estimated $400,000.
I interviewed another ProPublica reporter, AC Thompson, who had produced an award-winning series that was published on separate online, news magazine, newspaper and TV documentary platforms about police shootings of poor black Americans after Hurricane Katrina.
His investigation was important in the conviction of 15 serving and former police officers. He told me he would not have been able to investigate as deeply if he had been employed at a mainstream newspaper.
I can't think of an established or online outlet in Australia that would devote as much time to a risky story or not run the story if they were offered it (with their own checks, editing and editorial contributions).
Last year, wealthy US foundations contributed more than $140 million to about 75 nonprofit investigative centres.
They did so because the donations were tax-deductible under an education provision of the internal revenue code.
Obvious ethical problems arise when a foundation or wealthy activist contributes millions to a struggling journalistic start-up.
Some of the issues can be mitigated if the funding is for general purposes rather than specific projects, if the editors are imbued with routine newsroom values, and if there is mutual understanding (perhaps codified) that funders have no influence on editorial decisions.
There are differences in the way Americans and Australians donate (perhaps it is altruism versus generosity) and Australia does not have the wealthy foundations that exist in the US. But I would like to believe there are concerned individuals and foundations here that would donate to an ethically and professionally established investigative outfit if there were tax deductibility much like donating to a charity, gallery or museum.
Here, the Public Interest Journalism Foundation has requested a meeting with the federal government to clarify whether it supports tax deductibility. The creation of several investigative centres and tax deductibility for donations to financially struggling outlets would increase diversity, improve the quality of investigative reporting and be a plus for our democracy, as well as providing serious additional content for mainstream outlets.
A co-operative approach by media proprietors, journalists (perhaps newly redundant), philanthropists and the government is needed to make it happen.
Bill Birnbauer is a senior lecturer for the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies, in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.
This article originally appeared in The Australian.