Where's mine? Obama open to newspaper bailout

If President Obama bails out every struggling industry, where does that leave capitalism?

From The Hill:

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Here's the scary part:

Obama said that good journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy," but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting -- especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

I guess that includes me. But let's take a look at the Chicago Sun-Times, which is under banrkuptcy protection. The Sun-Times, and there are many newspapers just like it, has about a half-dozen local political columnists writing for it, but not one of them is a conservative.

Of course that is not the only reason the Sun-Times is bankrupt, but I think it figures in.

But for Obama, the most liberal president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, the current situation serves him well.

Technorati tags: Chicago chicago sun times Democrats Barack Obama Obama media economy