Rock and Roll Conservative

Can't see any potential problems with this one...

Given that almost everyone has received some stimulus money from the Obama administration it shouldn't be a surprise that those who haven't want in on the action. The latest to cry for some cake? Journalists.

In an editorial which ran in yesterday's Washington Post, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols argue that journalism is so important that public money should be used to subsidize it.

A cynic would argue that any media organization taking money from the federal government would eventually be beholden to it but given how the majority of the press already treats the Obama administration it might not be that much of a threat.

That said, what the two editorialists failed to address was what happens after media outlets begin to rely on the money merely to survive, as eventually happens to any entity that gets access to that "free", sexy money from the Beltway? The decline in public consumption of newspapers and many mainstream media outlets is a fact confirmed by the media itself. That means their budget would gradually see a greater and greater share coming from the feds. Journalists have been bitching for years about how the Chinese Wall between the ad department and the newsroom has been slowly eroded, would they bitch too when a Democratic administration made it quietly known how they wanted a story to be treated?

We know, after all, that a Republican administration could never dictate terms to the unbiased corps of brave journalists who work in the Beltway...

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