New York/Paris: A group of eminent economists, including Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoglu, have sounded the alarm over the looming “collapse” of the public interest media sector, calling for urgent government intervention to sustain quality journalism.
In a joint statement released via the Forum on Information and Democracy — a body established by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the French government — the group of 11 economists from leading U.S. and European universities warned that independent journalism is at risk amid job losses, shrinking revenues, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
“Governments around the world are chasing the AI dream, pinning their hopes on these technologies to drive economic prosperity,” the statement said. “Yet they are not investing sufficiently in a foundational resource that underpins our 21st-century economies — independent, verifiable information.”
The economists highlighted how the traditional business model of selling advertising to fund news operations has been decimated since the internet boom, with tech giants like Google and Meta capturing the lion’s share of digital ad revenues. The emergence of AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has further deepened the crisis by reducing direct traffic to media websites.
“The informational good that public interest media provide is being captured for private profits by these companies,” the group said, arguing that reliable information should be treated as a public good.
They urged governments to take a more active role in “investing in and shaping the media ecosystem” — including through subsidies, legal protections, and regulatory interventions — to safeguard the future of independent journalism.
Failure to act, they warned, risks “continuing on a path where public interest journalism looks set to collapse, with enormous consequences for our economy, our society, and our democracies.”
The intervention by leading economists adds momentum to ongoing debates in several countries about fair revenue-sharing between tech platforms and media houses, as well as new models for financing journalism in the digital era.
