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Obama Appointee Suggests Radical Bail Out Newspaper Plan For Creating Licenses To Govern News Operations
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 It's Official:
[link to www.blacklistednews.com]
Published on 04-17-2009 ~ Source: LA Times
Influential Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks has hung up her journalistic hat and joined the Obama administration, but not before penning a public proposal calling for some radical ideas to help bail out the failing news industry.
Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping "direct government support for public media" and creating licenses to govern news operations.
"Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off," she wrote in her parting column on April 9.
Brooks said this would help rescue the industry from a "death spiral" and left the government unaccountable to the journalists who must keep it honest. " can't imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed," she wrote.
But critics say her proposal would spell an end to the independent media and make journalists reliant lapdogs.
"The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy," said L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group.
Bozell said licensing journalists would violate American traditions and was a form of "intellectual prostitution."
"Since when did our Founding Fathers envision that ... you could exercise your right to freedom of speech provided you had a license from the federal government? This is the kind of stuff you have revolutions about," he told FOXNews.com.
Attempts to reach Brooks by phone and e-mail were unsuccessful. A columnist for four years at the Times, Brooks this week joined the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, the principal adviser to the Pentagon's top brass. She retains her post as a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and during the Clinton administration served as a senior adviser to the State Department.
DaJ Note: Qualifications = nil.
Some in the government are already looking to assist the industry. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., proposed legislation in March that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt nonprofits as long as they don't endorse political candidates. The move was heralded as a positive step toward finding a fix but condemned by critics for potentially making newspapers beholden to the government.
Brooks is not the first journalist to support a broadsheet bailout, but she is the first member of the administration to publicly declare her support for the move, which appears to be gaining momentum. Complete story at posted link...
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