Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia
University, host to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and
newly appointed head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, says
government should get into the business of subsidizing
journalism. Like other Obama appointees, he says he is concerned
that, with the changes in the financial structure of journalism,
Americans might be deprived “of the essential information they
need as citizens.”
It’s not difficult to imagine that one of those “needs”
would be a more “balanced” view of President Obama. Can anyone
doubt that an administration that was willing to Madoff General
Motors’ bondholders in favor of its own union supporters would
not exercise maximum bias in subsidizing the press? Mr.
Bollinger, practicing the glib and oily art to speak and purpose
not, is a harbinger of Venezuelan-style gangster
journalism.
Bollinger
writes, “American journalism is not just the product of the
free market, but of a hybrid system of private enterprise and
public support.” It is?
“In the 1960s,” he writes, “our network of public
broadcasting was launched with direct public grants and a mission
to produce high quality journalism free of government propaganda
or censorship.”
Is there anyone in the room who thinks NPR (National Public
Radio, supported by the U.S. government) is not an organ of the
liberal intelligentsia?
Is there anyone who does not understand why liberals
agitate for the return of the “Fairness Doctrine”? That’s the
government regulation that used to require radio and television
stations to broadcast as much liberal programming as conservative
programming.
The problem for liberals was, and is, that liberal
programming is not popular, which is why a liberal radio station,
Air America, couldn’t survive in the broadcast marketplace.
Conservative talk radio, on the other hand, is hugely popular.
Whatever the effect of the Fairness Doctrine when it was first
promulgated in 1949, the point of reinstituting it now would be
to hobble conservative radio. Because stations would have to
broadcast as much unpopular (i.e., money-losing) liberal
programming as popular (i.e., money-making) conservative
programming, it would make sense not to broadcast either kind,
and to use the time instead to broadcast popular programs that
had no ideological content. Everyone, roughly speaking,
knows that. The Fairness Doctrine was — and may be again — an
example of brazen government manipulation of the media.
Who can think it would be any different if the ideas of
people like Lee Bollinger were put into effect to subsidize print
journalism?
Bollinger writes: “There are examples of other institutions
in the U.S. where state support does not translate into official
control. The most compelling are our public universities and our
federal programs for dispensing billions of dollars annually for
research.”
We must hope this man Bollinger is only naïve. When I was
general counsel of the Department of Education in the early '80s,
we sought to have an open competition for the awarding of
millions of dollars to organizations that did research on
educational issues. When Congress found out about the proposed
competition, it blocked it, and required the department to
continue to fund the organizations that had been awarded grants
by the Carter administration. In other words,
the point of the program was not research. It was payola, to
favored constituents. Is it really possible that a university
president doesn’t understand that?
Government financing without government
influence? It can’t be done. Who decides which
organizations get the money? What are the odds Bollinger and his
colleagues would have financed upstart William F. Buckley Jr.’s
upstart magazine, National Review (described by George
Will as “the most consequential journal of opinion
ever”) or its modern-day equivalent? About the same as
finding a chaste maid in Cheapside.
Bollinger writes: “Trusting the market alone to provide all
the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown
— a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in
the balance.” Come again?
It would be comforting to say that this is the most
extraordinary statement from a government official we have seen
in a generation.
Alas, it is not so. Dr. Donald Berwick,
who, in a recess appointment, has just been made head of the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has said things just
as extraordinary. Daniel Henninger collected a great swatch of
them in a
piece for the Wall Street Journal, which I
referred to in my own piece on Berwick.
Said Dr. Berwick: “I cannot believe that the individual
health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper
configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care.
That is for leaders to do.”
And: “Please don’t put your faith in
market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible
hand would do a better job of designing [health] care than
leaders with plans can.”
And this: “A progressive policy regime will control and
rationalize financing — control supply.”
There are many more Berwick quotes — Henninger’s piece is
one of the most important to be published this year — and they
clearly demonstrate the mindset of this administration and its
cronies, and, no doubt, of the experts who would be involved in
“designing” journalism for the American people.
Berwick, of course, is talking about health care, which is
important: it is one-sixth of the U.S. economy. But is it as
important as journalism? Surely not. Journalism is what
permits a democracy to function in any polity larger than a
village. That’s why the Founding Fathers included freedom of the
press in the First Amendment.
All the more reason, then — for socialists like Berwick
and Bollinger and Obama — to have government finance the press.
That will enable the leaders of a progressive policy regime to
design the proper configuration of the free-press system, which a
free market has failed to do.
Besides, putting government in charge of the press may be
the only way to get Obama’s popularity numbers up.
On the other hand, that hasn’t worked for Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela.
