REPORTING FOR DUTY
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Dec
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CRA For News Organizations?
December 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment
After reading this account of discussions at the “U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age,” it occurs to us that legacy media might just slash and burn the First Amendment, shredding it to pieces on their journey to statist organ status.
What are we talking about? As newspapers and other legacy media distribution channels collapse, they will anchor themselves to the public teat to stay alive.
Federal and state officials this year have explored how the government might play a role in helping ease the financial travails of news organizations. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D., Md.) this spring proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt institutions. [MORE - WSJ]
If news organizations go 501(c)(3), will they be subject to the same restrictions on political activity as the churches?
No matter, the only way they will be allowed to stay anchored to the public teat is if they agree to have their testicles removed, and placed in a jar, on a stool, in the corner.
There will be a host of restrictions placed on these future state organs:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked the Department of Justice to consider a broad range of market factors in antitrust reviews, a step that could help clear a path for mergers of struggling papers. Congress has held several hearings about the financial challenges facing the industry. [MORE - WSJ]
Can you say CRA for news organizations? How much do you want to bet newspapers are going to have to meet specific hiring guidelines based strictly on race and gender quotas?
Who has time for trivialities like merit when there’s political correctness to be suffered?
The editorial and executive boards of publicly supported “news” outlets will be chosen by the public in the form of local ‘citizen news and information committees’.
Anyone want to guess who will control these local committees, and thus be empowered to grade the merger worthiness of news organizations? If you guess anything other than community organizations, you only get your news from the New York Times.
The Federal government is going to lay down a smothering blanket of regulation on the world of publishing, defining and thus restricting the “how” and the “what” of news reporting, journalism, and editorial opinion making.
The government will have to do these things in order to define their new working relationship with the publicly controlled-supported entities. Or is the Federal government going to spend our tax dollars on failed businesses without a peep of legislation on the matter? That wouldn’t be very progressive.
