The British are coming! And so are the Arabs, the Chinese, the French, and the Russians. In fact, the age of the SOMSM is upon us. The what? Perhaps I should explain.

As everyone knows, the Mainstream Media (MSM) are in deep trouble. The business model is collapsing, chewed up by the presumption that online content should be free, even as online advertising dollars go elsewhere. So there's little but bad news about the parent company of The New York Times. And the news is generally bad also for Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal and The Tribune Company. And of course, everyone knows that Time-Warner's merger with AOL was a corporate disaster of epochal proportions.

The hope for Big Media companies seems to be in finding new business models or else striking up alliances with newer-media platforms, while they still can. Viacom's MTV has belatedly edged toward music downloads; such downloading, of course was a natural brand-extension that the network should have owned all along, not letting the likes of Apple get ahead of it -- but that's the endemic problem of corporate behemoths. Similarly, the News Corporation spent half-a-billion dollars to snap up Myspace.com; now, Rupert Murdoch's company has to figure out how to keep fickle teens from drifting over to other hot sites, such as Youtube.com. Finally, tens of millions of blogs and chat rooms hold forth on any and every conceivable subject -- each one nibbling away a piece of the former "mass media."

Conservatives and libertarians, long scourged by the lefties burrowed into the MSM, are mostly happy to cheer on this trend toward "de-massification." That is, if The New York Times and CBS News continue to hemorrhage -- well, good riddance, think many on the right. However, those smiles might yet turn to frowns, at least partially, as the post-MSM trend plays itself all the way out.

State-Owned Mainstream Media

So meet the SOMSM -- State-Owned Mainstream Media. You know, like PBS, only more so. Now wait just a second, you might be thinking -- the same governments that gave us the Post Office are going to give us the news? How could that be?

Now I know, these are supposed to be the glory days of borderless-world libertarianism and twilight-of-sovereignty globalism -- the Fall of the Wall and all that -- but things aren't quite working out according to theory.

Don't get me wrong: the free market is working just fine. It is plowing under, with Schumpeterian efficiency and ruthlessness, the institutions of the corporate status quo, both in the media and beyond the media. Some even project that within the decade, there won't be any MSM left at all, only the giant media clearinghouse known as Googlezon.

Here's my prediction: Much of the MSM will, in fact, disappear, but the SOMSM will prove to be not only a survivor, but a big winner. Why? Because as you might have noticed, the era of big government has not ended; indeed, the nation state is doing just fine. The Leviathan State is proving popular in the midst of rising concerns about globalization, immigration, and terrorism.

And as governments worldwide gear up for another century of bigness, they naturally want help with their message. What are world leaders, and would-be world leaders supposed to do -- share their thoughts with bloggers? Will presidents and prime ministers really want to do deal with pajama-clad part-timers? Please. Big Government presupposes Big Media. And if the media get small and dispersed, through the workings of market forces, then states will build the media back up, through the workings of non-market forces. Of course, the government-sponsored approach has a huge additional benefit: If governments pay the piper, then governments call the tune.

The Beeb Busts Out

Exhibit A is the British Broadcasting Corporation, which already boasts 279 million viewers worldwide. It's planning a major expansion. Specifically, the BBC is pushing into the crucial US market, starting on July 3, aiming to establish a 24/7 cable news presence to compete with CNN, Fox (where I am a contributor), and MSNBC. And the British government will be a big winner; our First Amendment makes no distinction between kinds of media ownership, public or private, national or international. Some might note, of course, that the "Beeb" has been at odds with Tony Blair, mostly over Iraq. And while that's true enough, the network and the prime minister have mostly settled their differences -- and in any case, the BBC will long outlast Blair or anyone else.

Indeed, the BBC promises to be edgy: A billboard in Times Square shows photographs of immigrants and gives the viewer the choice: "citizens" or "criminals." Other ads will show American soldiers in Iraq, giving the choices of "occupier" or "liberator." For those Americans who assert that the US media are too conservative, the BBC should be welcome, indeed. So don't be surprised if the BBC does well in the American market.

And if the BBC doesn't find an audience right away, well, it has the deep pockets that allow for patience: a state-provided budget of some £3.8 billion a year. The Beeb may be bureaucratic, but with that much money -- plus a healthy dollop of political ambition -- it's hard to see it failing over the long run.

In fact, the BBC already has its own local media rivals running scared, as everyone confronts the reality of convergence, when everything is digital and the distinction between TV, radio, and the Net has collapsed. Just as private companies complain when state-supported firms "dump" their product into the market, so The Telegraph has complained about the predatory tactics of this SOMSM. "The BBC is tough to compete with, and we don't have the subsidies that they have," lamented Edward Roussel, online editorial director to The Wall Street Journal on May 26. Even The Guardian, which is ideologically in tune with the BBC, has expressed alarm about Beeb-gemony.

Indeed, the BBC aspires to be the king of all media; Mark Thompson, its director-general, declares that he wants his taxpayer-financed conglomerate to take on Google and AOL.

Beyond Britain

The BBC is benefiting from a revival of plain old nationalism. Countries have always been nationalistic, of course; anyone spending five minutes watching the World Cup has been reminded of that stubborn reality. The latest expression of nationalist fervor is the idea of "national champions," which has taken root in the minds of both statesmen and corporate men. Critics argue that an alternative spelling of "national champion" is b-o-o-n-d-o-g-g-l-e, as in spending a lot of tax money on dubious national ego-trips. But the idea proves popular, nonetheless, for the same reason that people like to paint their faces in their flag's colors at soccer games. For better or for worse, it's the way people are.

So other countries, too, are raising up SOMSMs of their own. The financing of Al-Jazeera has always been murky; suffice it to say that the Arab-language network exists for political reasons, independent of commercial considerations. And the same holds true holds true for China's CCTV. Free-marketeers and civil libertarians both have a right to be jointly horrified by these dirigiste "news" outfits. But from a great-power perspective, the Arabs and Chinese are being coolly rational: How can it be a good idea for them to just sit there and let the world do its business in English, according to Anglo-Saxon values? Shouldn't non-whites get a piece of the media action and the mindshare that goes with that action?

And more governments are getting in the SOMSM act. The French are about to launch CFII. And the Russians, too, are starting one.

The Arabs, Chinese, French, and Russians have all figured out what the British figured out 80 years ago: The best way to polish your image is with the polished diction of an announcer, announcing the news in your tongue.

American Media

Here's the proof that SOMSM is the wave of the future: The US is doing it, too. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently trashed his government's communication skills: "If I were rating, I would say we probably deserve a D or D+ as a country as how well we're doing in the battle of ideas," he told an audience at the Army War College in March. Rumsfeld was no doubt sincere in his criticism, but his words also contained this encrypted message: "Don't just rely on the State Department's public diplomacy operation, even if it's getting big increases. Give the military, too, more money for media outreach."

Rumsfeld asked, and he has received. The Pentagon's robust communications apparatus continues to expand; there's now a fulltime video stream called, appropriately enough, "The Pentagon Channel."

Most conservatives (although maybe not libertarians) are probably happy to see the military developing its own clear-channel signal. But conservatives and libertarians both might be alarmed by the further developing of another lobe of the Uncle Sam's SOMSM: the rise of domestic public broadcasting.

President George W. Bush, having never vetoed a spending bill, is no threat to public financing of anything, including TV and radio. This is a rich country, getting richer; nobody seems interested in spending the political capital needed to cut spending.

So the SOMSM keep growing, along with the rest of the state. The biggest winner within the SOMSM realm has been NPR. Not only does public radio get a steady stream of government revenue, but it also gets lots of tax-deductible cash. Most profoundly, the $200 million that NPR received from the estate of Joan Kroc has enabled public radio to play in the big media leagues. "We're probably the only major national news organization on a growth curve," says spokeswoman Andi Sporkin. "We're on a hiring binge, expanding bureaus, expanding beats."

So the US, too, will have its SOMSM.

The Future of Media

This is the future of media: Some elements of the MSM will survive, probably. Bloggers will thrive, of course, but 99.9 percent of them are amateurs, without so many as one full-time employee. What will survive and thrive for sure, however, is the SOMSM. Every country with ambitions on the international stage will soon have its own state-supported media.

If war is too important to be left to generals, then news is too important to be left to reporters. Governments, including ours, have their own ideas, and they want to share them with us, the people -- like it or not.

In addition, around the world, states will want to "help" their media. Not satisfied with what the free market is bringing about, politicians will offer to help out the invisible hand -- help it, that is, with their own iron fist.