The Latest Candidate For Bailouts...Left-Biased Newspapers!

The dinosaur media apparently has a new mantra: so what if people won't read our biased garbage and don't trust us anymore? Let's just all become the BBC and make the rubes pay whether they like it or not:

Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut's 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. "The media is a vitally important part of America," he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route.

Providing government support can muddy that mission, said Paul Janensch, a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and a former reporter and editor.

"You can't expect a watchdog to bite the hand that feeds it," he said.

Note that the article picks a teensy weensy paper in Connecticutt to showcase as a beleagured Watchdog for the Public - and ignores what a precedent here could mean for Leftist icons like Pravda on the Hudson ( AKA the NY Times), The Baltimore Sun,Chicago Trib, Miami Herald and the LA Times.

You know, the same people who did such a sterling and unbiased job in the last election cycle.

In case you think I'm exagerating,check out James Patterico's annual review of the Los Angeles Times more blantant examples of bias and shoddy journalism and prepare to be astounded at how bad this major metropolitan newspaper actually is. And the Times probably isn't even the worst of the lot.

Maybe the Alphabet networks can get in on some of the loot as well.

It makes political sense that the Obama Administration would toss some of your tax money at the people who were largely responsible for helping him get elected. And just imagine if they can kill off the blogswith internet regulation and gut talk radio with a revised 'fairness' doctrine or local content rules..it'll be just like the old days again, where the Left has a monopoly on what becomes news and how it's reported.

The proverbial fly in the soup is that having been exposed now to a free press, people are no longer going to settle for some subsidized government lapdogs. And when a society can't trust the press,they end up not trusting the regime and a lot of other institutions in society...and it becomes very easy to become disillusioned with this democracy stuff.

The next step along the path is that people start looking for a guy on a white horse with a lot of easy answers who will Fix Things Just Fine. After all, if political liberty is a joke, why bother with the semblance of it when you can have efficiency and order, hmmm?

Think about it.