Government Cheese for the Press

With a trillion or so dollars of ripe government cheese out there and the media going into a meltdown it was only a matter of time before they started to float some ideas out about how they could collect some payback for their hard work this last election cycle.

First in Connecticut

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.

You know NPR is on board.

Is The New York Times any less critical to our society than, say, General Motors? Robert Picard, a professor of media economics and director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jonkoping University in Sweden points out that the Swedish government stepped in explicitly to preserve public discourse.

And the budding grad students at Colombia University want to be sure that the $200,000 that mommy and daddy spent on their masters won’t be wasted working the register at Borders.

So, over in the land of Freedom Fries and Jerry Lewis…there’s a new news policy afoot. President Sarkozy is going where the U.S. government has thus far feared to tread: he’s bailing out France’s newspapers.
In the meantime, will any of this prove instructive for the U.S. government and its news industry? Probably not (socialism! socialism! socialism!). But vive la différence, and everything.

Change, thats what its all about, good and fucking hard.