Even before this country's birth, the media has served as a watchdog, a fifth estate keeping the government in check. Even though journalists may fail to achieve their ideal of objectivity - and some may fail epically, as we saw last election cycle - it is still the journalism world's self-imposed task to help keep the government in check, working on behalf of the readers.
However, the ongoing economic problems have some in the newspaper business wondering if they should lobby the government for a cut of the bailout pie to relieve budget woes. What happens if the vanguard of American print journalism, The New York Times, was to announce that it was $1.4 billion in debt, with only $46 million in cash on hand, and needed our tax dollars to prop it up? In light of slumping advertising sales, declining circulation, and a general poor economic climate, there are some people wondering if the Grey Lady's days might be numbered, and if the government should swoop in, saving the day by buying out the newspaper industry, just as it bought control of several banks and the domestic automobile industry in the past.
Nothing good can come of government control of the newspaper industry, whether it be financial or editorial control. I'm not against government-funded media outlets such as National Public Radio or public television stations, not by a long shot. I love my Car Talk and Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! just as much as anyone else. But, while giving Democrat-controlled Congress free reign to reshape the free press in its image may seem like a good idea now, what happens when control of the Congress changes hands, as it inevitably will? That's something for the liberals in the audience to muse on, in case bailing out the Times seemed like a good idea.
Hate it or love it, the Reagan administration got at least one thing right. The Fairness Doctrine, which required radio stations and newspapers to give equal representation to contrasting political views, was finally eliminated in 1987. Its goals sound innocuous enough, right? Wrong. Media outlets that didn't meet their quota of contrasting views ran the risk of getting shut down by the Federal Communications Commission; the owners of many outlets decided to avoid the pain of talking politics altogether. As recent as a few years ago, Congressional Democrats tried to resurrect the Doctrine, but thankfully failed. More recently, Dick Durbin, John Kerry, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi all have expressed support for bringing government control of the media back from the dead. Worse yet, 47 percent of Americans polled support a return to the days of regulating the opinion page and the radio dial, and 31 percent supported expanding the Fairness Doctrine to the Internet.
Nothing good can come from either of these threats looming on the horizon. A free press that actively roots for one political party over another is one thing, but a press that is tied to the government it's supposed to be watching is a whole different animal. Would Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have broken the story about Watergate if their paychecks came from the government they were exposing? In the 1990s, would Saturday Night Live have made skits about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky if the writers lived in fear of making a joke that offended a Fairness Doctrine enforcer? Of course not.
Government has no role exerting control of the media, whether that control is financial or ideological. Such attempts at media control should be abhorred by Americans, if only to ensure that we have opinionated columnists to rail against and complain about in the letters to the editor section.
4 Opinion
Jesse Hathaway
