No Thomas Jefferson Bailout

With Congress preparing a $15 billion Christmas tip for Detroit, a more basic American industry is slowly going under.

“If I had to choose,” Thomas Jefferson famously said, “between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

The “latter” is in the grip of the financial squeeze and advertising losses in a failing economy as the company that owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun files for bankruptcy protection today, and the New York Times is reportedly planning to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building to ease its cash crunch.

Some bloggers who hate the MSM will no doubt show little more sympathy for newspaper makers than the most of the public does for the car industry. Yet their downfall threatens us all in an age when we are awash in tip-of-the-iceberg news, while fewer and fewer journalists are helping us see what’s going on under the surface.

Read the rest of this entry.