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Obama: We Need To Bailout Newspapers To Stop New Media
Taking Over
President says preserving "mutual understanding"
is critical to democracy
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President Obama has stated that he is happy to consider bailing
out the corporate media, expressing concerns that alternative
internet based news outlets will grow in popularity as a result
of the downfall of newspapers.
Obama told editors of the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade that preserving the
print media is "critical to the health of our democracy".
"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," Obama
said.
He also indicated that readers should be made
to pay for online news content in the near future:
"What I hope is that people start understanding
if you're getting your newspaper over the Internet, that's not
free and there's got to be a way to find a business model that
supports that." he said.
Over the past year, scores of newspapers have
gone out of business or shifted to online only output, due to
the rise of the alternative media and the resulting loss of
ad revenue. Several large newspaper corporations have filed
for bankruptcy, including the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago
Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
Obama said he "would be happy to look at"
legislation aimed at providing newspapers tax-breaks if they
were to restructure as 50 (c) (3) educational corporations.
Democratic Senator Ben Cardin has introduced a bill in this
vain titled "The Newspaper Revitalization Act."
Critics may point out that, far from being "critical"
to democracy, a bailed out government subsidized media is the
very antithesis of a "free press".
Government Banking and Government Motors would
effectively be joined by the Government Press if bailouts were
to be granted.
Bailing out the corporate media would once again
constitute rewarding outdated and failing monopolies with more
taxpayer dollars, thus punishing innovative forward thinking
competition.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no basis for
bailing out the newspapers, given that they employ less than
one percent of the labor force in the United States.
The dinosaur corporate media is dying because
it has proven itself to be almost wholly untrustworthy, acting
as an unquestioning mouthpiece for the establishment.
Denouncing all blog based media as unreliable
or without context is laughable in the face of the mainstream
media's recent track record.
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