Here’s a new holiday cocktail for you: Combine one part bailout seasoning with another part perennial journalistic self-pity, pour it out over the Christmas/New Year’s publishing interregnum and presto!—it’s time for patriotic men and women to get behind a government rescue of what was until very recently one of the most profitable sectors in the United States: The newspaper industry.
“We’re more worthy of a bailout than the jokers on Wall Street,” argued Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock on Dec. 20. “You can’t have a democracy without us. If newspapers are dying, so is our system of government.”
Quite. Without Whitlock in the trenches covering the Big 12 North conference, how is the Republic to survive?
It’s just blatantly untrue that you can’t have a democracy without newspapers. You can’t have one without a free and active press, but that hasn’t been identical to “newspapers” since about 1920 (i.e., KDKA) and the fact that it’s even less true now is the REASON newspapers are in trouble.
It just makes all this bailout stuff worse that so much of the rationale for it is based on lies about the importance of a given industry or company, that a child ought to be able to see through.