Bail Out Newspapers

Somehow Congress has overlooked one very deserving industry in its eagerness to bail out troubled US businesses. How about a bailout for newspapers?

Enough has been written and broadcast about the plight of this great American tradition in recent months to fill a bank vault. Yet I haven't heard anyone in Washington suggest that at least a billion or so dollars be directed to newspapers. Yes, it's true that newspapers' principal audience is dying off. Folks over 65, it seems, are the daily newspaper's market. It's this age group that relies on newspapers to tell them about what's going on in Afghanistan and down the street, what the weather's going to be like tomorrow, which grocery stores are offering the best prices on eggs, and what new taxation the city council is planning. Okay, television takes a stab at providing all of this news, but, as Walter Cronkite said a generation or so ago, everything he said on the evening news could be easily contained on page one of a good newspaper. Newspapers obviously go into more depth than TV or radio could ever hope to offer.

Neil Postman, the late author, wrote in the 1980s in his book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," that Americans in colonial times were much better informed about the Republic than we are today. People then, he said, understood taxation and public policy because they were provided in-depth reports in the plethora of local and regional newspapers. Americans in the '80s were relying too heavily on flimsy TV news reports to understand what was going on and today, more and more of us rely on a little TV and a lot of Internet snippets for our news.

An informed electorate certainly is less dangerous than an ignorant one. So, let's tell our Congresspersons to remember the Fourth Estate the next time they plan to hand out billions of dollars. If you consider this a stupid idea, think of this. If newspapers keep dying off, not only will we be less informed by professional journalists who print news after fact-checking, editing and re-editing and challenging reporters (unlike blogs like this, which are usually written by CPAs and teachers and unemployed computer geeks in their homes with no one insisting on attribution or backup sources). We would also lose newspapers' widespread support of community efforts and activities. Nearly every newspaper I know of not only contributes substantial money to worthy causes, but also gets behind those causes with large chunks of news space. A paper I worked for in the '90s in Ventura County, stepped up when local stores banned the Salvation Army from stationing bellringers outside their doors (because some subversive group had sought to do so). The newspaper started a column that ran daily about two months before Christmas, listing names of people and businesses that contributed to the Salvation Army to offset the losses from the bellringer buckets. More than $50,000 a year was collected, including a large contribution from the newspaper itself. This is but one example of how newspapers get involved in their communities. The way things are going, those days will be gone, probably before the end of the next decade. Who or what will fill that void?

This bail out scheme might not be as far-fetched an idea as it seems. Certainly better than feeding banks that take hard-earned taxpayer money and then write millions of dollars in bonus checks to the CEOs who created the problems in the first place.