The Conflicting Interests Of ‘Media Reform’
The next time you hear the FCC, the FTC and their allies in the “media reform” movement waxing eloquent about how government subsidies can save journalism and thus save democracy, remember this (via Instapundit):
Today’s new-media ethical quandary: Should a nonprofit news outlet dedicated to public-interest investigative journalism extract substantial amounts of funding from the government it’s covering?
That’s the question being confronted by the award-winning San Francisco Public Press, which, according to director Michael Stoll, is now paying the salary of one of its editorial employees with money from a San Francisco jobs-stimulus program.
The day the government starts subsidizing the news is the day that conflicts of interest like the one in San Francisco will become commonplace — and investigative journalism will be the worse for it.
[...] this the first shot in the foolhardy revolutionary war to put journalism in the hands of government: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, looking to counter what it sees as a decline in local [...]
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