Obama “Happy To Look At” Bills That Would Bail Out Newspapers

No, he hasn’t expressed support yet, but the fact that he isn’t rejecting these bills as a completely inappropriate relationship between the “4th estate” and the government tells us all we need to know. He supports them, he just haven’t figured out how to sell them to the public yet.
Of course he’d be on board with this. He’s on board for the same reason he’d been on board with every other bailout. “Hey Obama, would you like to get your hooks into another industry? This time the one principally responsible for reporting to the public on everything else you do?”
What politician would say no to that?

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.
“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

For a political party that just put a man in the White House who campaigned on “change,” the Democrats sure seem to hate actual change. We can’t allow any change in the financial markets, so we prop up mismanaged companies so they won’t fail. We can’t allow any change in the auto industry, so we prop up automakers that should probably go the way of the Dodo.
We can’t allow the media to change and adapt to new ways of communicating, so we must essentially subsidize failing newspapers with a special tax status.
What’s scary is that, once on the hook to the government for this special tax status, any newspaper that has it would be compromised. The newspapers in question would have to toe the government line in order to keep their special tax status. If you don’t think this is true, look at all the political and religious organizations that routinely end up in court or at the receiving end of a bureaucratic inquiry if they get too political. Newspapers would be the same way.
Anyone who thinks that a politician in the cross hairs of a crusading reporter, or a cantankerous editorial board (not that many of either of those even exist any more), wouldn’t look at using the paper’s tax exempt status as leverage is fooling themselves. We cannot trust the government to wield this kind of power over the newspapers. Nor can we let the government use the collapse of the newspaper industry to make that kind of power grab.