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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Paul Greenberg
It had to happen. At a time when we've seen the birth of
It takes nerve to suggest that the way to preserve a free press -- the very phrase connotes a press free of government -- is to have government get into the news-and-opinion business. With your money, naturally, Gentle and much abused Taxpayer.
Under such a proposal, newspapers that accepted public funds would no longer be allowed to run their own editorials, at least openly. They'd have to do what
The advocates of ever more government may not have noticed that Washington is a little short of funds these days. Note the federal government's trillion-dollar deficit -- but it can always borrow still more. From us and our posterity.
This year's record for chutzpah, which might be loosely defined as nerve to the nth degree, may have been set by the CEO of
How's that for gratitude? We the (taxpaying) People bail out his failing company, but it irritates him to acknowledge it.
Sir, there was a simple way to avoid being labeled
A close runner-up in this Chutzpah Derby was Robert Benmosche, AIG's CEO.
You may remember AIG. How could anyone forget it? It was at the center of the bubble that went bust during the Great Financial Panic of 2008-09, sharing billing with those evil twins,
That giant insurance company had to be bailed out because it was trading in credit default swaps without sufficient collateral. Now that it's been rescued by the government -- that's you and me -- its CEO regularly complains that the new financial rules adopted to protect the markets against another such collapse are too restrictive. Why, they could force his company to raise enough capital to cover its bets in the derivatives market. Like that's a bad thing. This guy sounds like chutzpah personified.
Another entry in the Chutzpah sweepstakes is Lee Bollinger, president of
Lee Bollinger makes his case on the same grounds the journalistic establishment was citing half a century ago: Newspapers are failing, the sky is falling, and all is lost unless the government subsidizes the press. Much like President Bollinger today, those earlier diagnosticians of the press didn't foresee the rise of new, competing and highly successful institutions that would fill the gap as old media gave way to new.
Those doomsayers of the last century failed to take into account the innovative spirit of Americans when facing new challenges. Much as Lee Bollinger overlooks the power of the World Wide Web, the profusion of bloggers, and the dynamism of the free market. Joseph Schumpeter's term for it was creative destruction.
The masterminds who propose a
Lee Bollinger confuses the sad fate of failing newspapers -- some of which, let's face it, deserved to fail -- with that of journalism itself. Much like someone worrying about what's going to happen to the buggy-whip business once those awful horseless carriages take over the road.
As an example to follow, President Bollinger thinks the British system is just dandy, complete with its requirement that the public be obliged to support the
Mr. Bollinger can't see that the Internet has moved the press back to the uninhibited, robust and wide-open days of the founding fathers, when anyone with a printing press could publish his own news and opinion, advertisements and manifestos. Today they may be bloggers, or, as one outraged and outdated TV executive called them, guys sitting in their living room in their pajamas. And occasionally taking down an imperious Dan Rather.
The little people are definitely getting out of hand when they start exposing American journalism's leading pomposities. What's worse in Lee Bollinger's chummy little world, these amateurs are ... uncredentialed! Much like John Peter Zenger or Elijah Lovejoy or H. L. Mencken or ... well, name your own journalistic hero. Strangely enough, none of those champions of a truly free press were subsidized by the U.S. government.
Available at Amazon.com:
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future
The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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