Call for Government Intervention for Mainstream Media

by jill ~ March 30, 2009

President Obama, who knew you’d have so many industries to take over in just the first 100 days of your presidency?  Today, of course, the auto industry.  Tomorrow… maybe the mainstream media.  This must be FoxNews’s biggest nightmare ever.

According to this story on NewspaperDeathwatch.com that outlines the suggestions found in a forthcoming book Saving Journalism by John Nichols and Robert McChesney, “the public watchdog function is vanishing with nothing to replace it.”

From NewspaperDeathwatch:

“This trend isn’t new; cost-cutting in the newsroom began in the 1970s when media tycoons began to form quasi-monopolies under the umbrella of government protection. Today, the media is a pathetic shadow of its former self, doing “almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spar[ing] not a moment to update us on the ‘Octomom,’” the authors write.

Government already subsidizes media to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually through mailing discounts, government advertising, monopoly broadcast, cable and satellite licenses and copyright protection. However, private interests have taken advantage of those subsidies to create wealth, and in the process are destroying the services they provide the public, Nichols and McChesney assert.

And they get specific about what needs to be done:

• Eliminate postage for periodicals that get less than 20% of their revenues from advertising;
• Give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers or online sources that meet certain quality criteria;
• Allocate funds to enable every middle school, high school and college to have a well-funded student newspaper, a low-power FM radio station and accompanying substantial websites.”

Check out the full story here with lots of links and more information:

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/call-for-government-intervention.html