The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).
In early May, Gibbs said that while he hadn’t asked the president specifically about bailout options for newspapers, “I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it.” “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,” he said.
I don’t know about you, but I feel a little tapped out at the moment.
Thank heavens a press beholden to the government would still be free to attack the hand that feeds it.
Or maybe disagree politely.
Or maybe write neutrally.
Or perhaps damn with faint praise.
Or perhaps just have a smiling Obama on the front cover quarterly instead of on 25% of the issues.
WORST IDEA EVER… and there is a lot of competition for this from this administration and congress
Once again, it will be the major stockholders and board members being “bailed out”, not the business itself. The papers’ workers will still loose jobs or take pay cuts. And paper execs will still get a pay raise or bonus.
I lost a good paying job at a local steel plant. Nobody talked about saving it, or bailing it up. Or even rescuing it from the under priced competition of foreign made steel. As far as I know, we still use steel in the US. So it’s not like the demand has gone away, as with print journalism. But the government and bank just allowed domestic steel to fail, in favor of foreign.
The difference is, I’m guessing, that the “blogoshpere” isn’t something that the banks and major investors can switch their wealth over to. It’s not a foreign business, with lower labor costs, no retirement funds, and not fewer environmental restrictions. It’s electronic media, that they’d have to beg to be investors of. And they don’t like being on the defensive. So they’re hoping the gov. will just bail out their existing publishing empires. So they don’t feel the pinch of 21th century obsolescence.
Phydeau, first you bemoan the loss of newspapers, then you complain that the newspapers we have aren’t doing their job(which I agree with).
So if these corporate owned papers aren’t doing their job, why give them more money? Let them close, and be replaced by ones that do the job right.
The point about the NEA, was that it is a story the newspapers aren’t covering, and an example of the government influencing the entity it is funding, which is what would happen with newspapers.
#63 The point of allowing there to be non-profit newspapers is to do what you say in the second paragraph, replace the corporate-owned newspapers with non-profit ones that do the job better, that won’t be beholden to their corporate masters.
#61 Thank heavens a press beholden to the government would still be free to attack the hand that feeds it.
And a press beholden to big corporations is better?
And no matter how many times you say it, allowing newspapers to reincorporate as non-profits is not a government bailout. There are lots of nonprofits out there, and no one is saying the government is bailing them out.