When I lived in the USSR, there was a government paper called Pravda, which meant Truth. It was the truth as the old Politburo guys saw it, and that’s what you got. The government’s involvement in media is never a good thing.

I hope this talk of bailing out any media doesn’t pan out. The media wrecked itself, and the people have turned to other sources of news. That’s called the free market, and if the masses aren’t interested in your product, why should taxpayers fund a losing venture? Government funding of media is the start of something bad. Government meddles in our lives enough as it is. Do the people *really* want the government getting its hands on any media?

Imagine newspapers having to turn in quarterly reports to the government. (When you get any kind of funding, you have to do a lot of reports to justify the funding, and add to the paper trail so the government can pretend to show the program works. The economic bailout not included..that sounds like they just get big boxes of money with no strings attached.)

If a newspaper or any other media cannot make it financially, there’s a reason. Readership, viewership, listenership. The numbers are down, there aren’t enough people interested in the product. If the government gives them some money, it’s not going to change the bottom line: the people have lost interest or lost faith. Is the government going to put a newspaper on everyone’s front porch and tell them they have to read it?

Even the Soviets didn’t do that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under A Nutter's Prattle, Cookie Cutter Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.