Poor old-media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition.
What to do . . . aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work?
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering. . . .”
It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!
For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.”
It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”
Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths.
How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Forcing You to Pay for Bad News”
Right on, right on, right on!
If I have to pay for the government subsidized news, then I should get to choose the name, PRAVDA, lest there be any misunderstanding about the nature of the news that is being splattered on us.
Once again, you are the smartest man in the room, Mr. Jacob!
The lefts message is being rejected by more & more Americans. NPR, the publicly funded propaganda system, is as bad as MSNBC. NPR just uses a more sophisticated vocabulary. There is no reason to keep paying for NPR, let alone for additional stations or public dole operations. We already know what a newly funded left wing media would say. (Hate conservatives. Hate Republicans. Only the government can fix all that is wrong that only Republicans broke. We did nothing at all wrong & did not contribute in any way to this nations problems.)
Free speech, will require media outlets to thrive or die based on the publics response to their product. This is true of all business, except those the leftists want us to subsidize. In short, why should taxpayers fund another bailout where leftists get to decide who is the winner & who is the loser?
Actually Drik, “Pravda” today has far more credibility than Newsweek, NYT, WaPo, Time, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC etc.they tend to be far more factual and down to no-nonsense than our “flagships”…