A Life Saving Attempt On A Dead Horse

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a "paper" that recommended several proposals to save the dying newspaper industry and television news media in America. In essence, they are proposing a government-controlled media. (Actually, I already thought it was!).

One of the FTC's great ideas is to tax popular news-oriented websites, like the Drudge Report, and then filter that tax money back to the forest-raping paper media. Of course, I am sure that the tax will be applied unequally to websites based on their political orientation.

Another is to create an AmeriCorp for journalists whereby the reporters would actually work for and be paid by the Federal government. I think they had that in Russia during the Cold War. It was called Pravda. Talk about a means of totally killing any criticism of the current Congress/Administration or any Federal agency or policy!

Lastly, the FTC proposes a tax on everything from TV's to radio to laptops and eReaders in order to salvage the dead mainstream media.

What the FTC and their left-wing head fails to understand is that the news media is becoming extinct because of bias. While sources such as NBC news and the New York Times are dying, outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are flourishing. Newspapers are in real trouble because they are buried in paper. If they were smart, they would embrace the new media like the iPad and the Kindle by downloading an entire "paper" to each of these devices every morning. To make that happen, they will have to charge less for the electronic version.

To me, a news agency like AP is so biased to the left that I hardly ever read many of their stories anymore; especially if I see that they were written by certain AP staff writers. What's worse, is if you read any newspaper or go to any main stream media website, many times AP is the persistent source so you're never able to get an unbiased or, at the very least, opposing viewpoint.

News is no longer just news. All of it has become a story with opinion woven into it. For that reason, the free market system is working and the FTC should not get involved. Unless papers like the New York Times start getting "real" with the news, they will continue to lose readers and they will ultimately die. But, hopefully, before that, they will become less biased and regain the readers they have lost. The main stream media is in turmoil because it has abandoned political neutrality. It needs to die and become, once again, the Fourth Estate that Americans can rely on as a counter-balance to government, business, and a world that has gone wild. We need truth returned to journalism. We don't need an extension of the liberal viewpoint that is promoted by the journalism schools of this country.