The Underground Conservative

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

We all knew this was coming. Now they’re talking about government bailing out newspapers about to go under.

NEW YORK (al-Reuters) – 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.

Nicastro represents Connecticut’s 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. “The media is a vitally important part of America,” he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them.

Let’s see. Here’s our bailout checklist:

• Banks? Check.
• Other mismanaged financial institution? Check.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Check.
• AIG? Check.
• Automakers? Check (only temporarily).
• States? Check (coming with the ultimate stimulusapalooza bill coming this spring).

Now newspapers want their bailout. All of these bailouts using federal money with federal control is tantamount to nationalization. Once the federal government gives you money, they now gain a certain level of control. That means telling you what you can and cannot do. The ninny-nannies pushing government-run health care and who will wind up running it very well will be able to tell you what you cannot and must do, what you cannot and must eat, how you must live, etc.

The proposed Car Czar will be able to tell Detroit what kind of cars it has to make, whether or not the American people want to buy those cars. When that becomes inconvenient, the Car Czar will take steps to limit consumer choice to only what he dictates.

Welcome to the world of the government-run newspaper. Not that the Drive By Media hasn’t served as the Fourth Branch of Government unofficially for some time now as well as the House Publication of the DNC, but having federal money propping up and bailing out failing dead-tree news sources makes the First Amendment irrelevant.

How can a newspaper bailed out by government and owes its very existence to government fairly and objectively cover that government? It can’t. Pure and simple. It becomes beholden to the source of the bailout.

With the new fascists planning to move to shut down talk radio as well as bringing us nationalized broadband and thus being able to regulate content on the Internet, their move toward being able to control the flow of information and thus the debate rolls on merrily unabated.