If one good thing has come of the year 2020, it is that now no sentient person takes the liberal news media at face value. Who could forget “journalists” like Omar Jimenez and Ali Velshi standing in front of burning buildings as they brazenly lied about “mostly peaceful” Marxist riots? Big Media being definitively exposed as a propaganda operation will accelerate the welcome collapse of its business model.

However, leftists reject free will. They don’t need your voluntary patronage to keep afloat — not if they can beseech their god Big Government to take your money by force:

H.R. 7640: The Local Journalism Sustainability Act was introduced in Congress, backed by a coalition that includes Report for America and the National Newspaper Association, and would offer tax credits for newspaper subscriptions and tax credits for paying the salaries of the radical activists working there. There’s also a $5,000 tax credit for advertising in newspapers.

If this flies, but fails to keep the dying industry breathing, direct cash subsidies will soon follow.

The word “local” is used in the Orwellian sense. This is a bailout for Big Media.

While Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who introduced the bill, claims that it will fund “local newspapers”, those local newspapers are largely owned by national operations and hedge funds. While actual local businesses go out of business, Democrats are proposing a bailout for media investors.

The worst of the worst are pushing this, including representatives of McClatchy, USA Today, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Pernicious social engineering firms such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation also lend their support. The bill’s many sponsors include left-wing Congressmen Ted Lieu, Raul Grijalva, Eric Swalwell, and Andre Carson.

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act is testing the business model for converting the media into a bunch of political non-profits backed by taxpayers and lefty donors. …

As the Left sets up new complex interplays between corporate media and its non-profits, the line between journalism and political advocacy blurs into a strange twilight zone in which non-profits subsidize media operations and taxpayers subsidize corporate chains as if they were non-profits, while creating something that looks very much like a state media operation.

It’s not Soviet communism. But the integrity of journalism will be the same.

A majority of Americans don’t like and don’t trust the media. They’ve divested from it.

That’s why coercive funding is required. People don’t know what’s good for them. Only the experts do. By “the experts,” I mean the people with a seat at the Democrat table.

Imagine a world where the only media outlets that can compete are subsidized by the bottomless pockets of the deficit-spending federal government. Every channel would feature the pretentious moonbat pabulum that characterizes public broadcasting. Liberals would love it.

On a tip from R F.

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