OUR VIEW
Timeless, even 35 years later.
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” President Ronald Reagan said in an Aug. 12, 1986, news conference.
How right he was, and how wrong our president today is in trying to push through a domestic policy package dropping dollars into our newspaper industry. No, no, no. Do not include a tax credit of $25,000 the first year and $15,000 the next four years to newspaper owners that employ up to 1,500 journalists.
The inclusion is under the guise of a decline in coverage of local news. This is a handout, a move that does nothing to fix the decline of journalism jobs going poof over the last 15 years. A research project at Carolina, when the journalism school ranks among the best in the country, said about one-fourth of the nation’s local newspapers have closed since 2005, leaving roughly 1,800 communities with no local newspaper.
That’s an alarming figure.
That the federal government would provide these tax credits to bleeding companies — and make no mistake, context is needed when talking about companies making money, companies not making as much money as they used to, and companies on life support — is a flag-raiser just on the surface of independent news gathering. Once upon a time, that’s what all or virtually all newspapers were doing.
It was an era and history before the dawn of cable TV, news channels for political preference, and the internet where everybody has a megaphone. We’re not going back to that time when newspapers were as central to everyone’s information pipeline as were radio and three-channel television.
Time and technology have brought on changes. Local news coverage remains, but it is done by a different breed of journalist supervised by a different kind of editor. At the head of its food chain are varying kinds of owners, including those of the hedge fund variety where stripping out the parts and maximizing profit before leaving a bucket of bolts for some gullible soul is more likely than not.
By way of full disclosure, the Bladen Journal and its couple dozen sister papers from here to the Rust Belt and Midwest do not fall into that category. But some of our N.C. Press Association colleagues — in fact, a lot — do go in that group.
And many of them already have crossed the blurred the lines of partisanship beyond the Opinion page onto the news pages. Taking and using money from the government would only further blur the line, creating a conflict of interest and potentially removing the trust of the audience.
The industry needs help. We’ll make no bones about that.
But what’s best is to get politics out of the places it doesn’t belong, not add it in through another avenue. What we need is for more readers and business owners to commit to support, buying subscriptions, advertisements, and placing a demand on objective news reporting.
That is the sustainable model, not a Band-aid that expires in a policy package while pricking away at our independence and being trustworthy.
“I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” the package says.
No, thanks. Not on your life. Ours must live without it.