SAVE THE LEGACY MEDIA, PART 4

"Each year at budget time, the Fourth Estate would scramble to be worthy in the eyes of Capitol Hill for increased support."

Old media is in trouble, as I and others have written about quite a bit in the past. Sales are down, subscriptions are down, advertising revenue is down, and many are folding or on the way. Newsweek looks to be on its last legs, even huge standards like the New York Times only have survived by a huge cash influx from investors. The reasons for this are many and have been well documented, but what most concerns some is how to keep the business alive. They aren't so much concerned about news as about how the competition for legacy media news is typically not so leftist.

I've written in the past how the Obama administration might use new laws and a system of activist complaints to cripple competition to left-leaning news, and I've written about how I believe newspapers could save themselves by slimming down, being less fancy, and writing more local. Congressmen have proposed subsidizing news to keep the business afloat, since many of them largely owe their jobs to the careful filtering of information and opinion by the legacy media.

None of these things have much chance of making it to fruition so far, but there is one trick which might make it. According to a Washington Times editorial, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking at ways to "reinvent" news media:

The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC's policy staff fears this new reality.

"There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism," the report states. With no faith that the market will work things out for the better, government thinks it must come to the rescue.

The ideas being batted around to save the industry share a common theme: They are designed to empower bureaucrats, not consumers. For instance, one proposal would, "Allow news organizations to agree jointly on a mechanism to require news aggregators and others to pay for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses."

In other words, government policy would encourage a tax on websites like the Drudge Report, a must-read source for the news links of the day, so that the agency can redistribute the funds collected to various newspapers.

This would also hit aggregator sites such as Digg and Redditt, not to mention humor sites such as Fark and might even affect blogs such as WATN. And they have other ideas as well:

The report also discusses the possibility of offering tax exemptions to news organizations, establishing an AmeriCorps for reporters and creating a national fund for local news organizations. The money for those benefits would come from a suite of new taxes. A 5 percent tax on consumer electronic devices such as iPads, Kindles and laptops that let consumers read the news could be used to encourage people to keep reading the dead-tree version of the news. Other taxes might be levied on the radio and television spectrum, advertising and cell phones.

Now, aside from the clear conflict of interest from having government-paid newspapers, you have to wonder why anyone would think its the job or desire of the federal government to keep any industry static and in business. This is like the federal government working to save Hupmobile or the horse drawn buggy business. Jobs are at stake!