Say No To Newspaper Bailouts

by Michelle Malkin - December 3rd, 2008 - Creator's Syndicate

It was supposed to be a joke. As an endless parade of corporate beggars marches to Washington in search of handouts for their beleaguered industries, some of us in the news business snarked that journalists would be next in line. I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after The New York Times Company's bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal.

The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise of preserving the "public interest." But now, in a rather unfunny turn, the newspaper bailout push has actually come to pass.

The Republican governor and the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut went on the record last week in support of government intervention for failing local newspapers.

No one is better than Michelle Malkin at writing seriously and ridiculing her opponents in the process. How can anyone not laugh at the idiots who are proposing that we bail out the "dead tree press". (I love that name!)

She points out in the article that another option would be to resurrect the "town crier" and subsidize them as well.

ROTFL