Obama and some Democrats are looking favorably at the idea of bailing out failing newspapers.
You don’t have to be paranoid to dislike intensely the idea of government subsidizing the press. Is anyone so naïve to think that will not affect reporting on the government? That it will not increase government control over the news media?
The New York Times and Washington Post are too much like Pravda as it is.
And The Dear Leader Obama clearly likes the idea of affecting news reporting:
I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.
Yes, we must help the masses “understand” things. We must counteract those nasty blogs.
But “all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context” – isn’t that what the “mainstream” news media is guilty of? Isn’t that what blogs have exposed? Should the government subsidize those truly guilty of “all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context”?
But that is the sort of thing totalitarian regimes do, isn’t it. So why does Obama want to do it?
Not only is there the issue of government control over the press, most of those failing newspapers deserve to fail. YID With LID sums up the situation quite well:
There is a reason that these newspapers are failing, they are not addressing the needs of their readers. Newspapers tend to have a liberal slant, it is no coincidence that they are going the way of liberal talk radio. Readers are tired of the bias, and now they can get their sports scores on line.
While the number of newspapers (and readers) have fallen, the number of news sources has grown, including the internet, cable news, and radio. Maybe they should concentrate on giving straight news instead of op-eds made to look like reporting.
Hear, hear. And maybe the federal government should stop bailing out its cronies and subsidizing failure.
2 comments:
And won't a bailed out newspaper be more likely to write articles that portray the government in a favorable light?
Actually, it is the blogosphere that provides context, something you don't see in the MSM....
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