Dan Riehl
Riehl World View
Thursday, December 3, 2009
…From the private sector, to health care, and now media, the federal government under the progressives wants to take over and run the whole damned thing. One should not underestimate how serious this is, nor how serious they are. We need to start ending public options from business, to health care and, of course, as regards media. They already have PBS and we know where that has gone.
We can not allow this to happen. I’ll give them my keyboard when they take it from my cold, dead hands. And it won’t be the only thing I’m carrying if they try to come for it! It’s time to start drawing lines in the sand around our freedoms and our Rights. It isn’t only felons and degenerates that have them. That’s the America the progressives want, not an America for us. We need to stand up against what’s going on in Washington now more than ever and turn things around beginning with the mid-term elections in 2010.
Rep. Henry Waxman trekked from Capitol Hill to Federal Trade Commission headquarters today to deliver a message to journalists and news consumers: All of you need to reach a consensus about working with the government in order to bail out the struggling news industry.
The California Democrat, who chairs the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, didn’t say it quite so bluntly, but his point was clear. “Government’s going to have to be involved, in one way or the other,” to save journalism from an ongoing “market failure” that will only worsen without intervention, Waxman said.
He spoke at the second day of an FTC workshop on how journalism can survive in the Internet era.
Waxman bemoaned the demise of newspapers across the country, including in Denver and Seattle, and warned that the troubling media trends will continue. “This recent depression in the media sector is not cyclical,” Waxman said. “It is structural.”
“Congress can’t impose a solution” to that structural problem, he said. But the government should partner with the media industry to ensure a sound future for journalism. Waxman praised the record of “independent” reporting in U.S. history and said it has implications for democracy.