5 Feet of Fury

‘You know what journalism could really use more of? Government participation’

David Harsanyi still not famous enough:

Thankfully, the good folks at the Federal Trade Commission are all over it, cobbling together a report aimed at saving newspapers called “Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism. (…)

Let me put it another way
. In 1985, the FTC did not set forth recommendations on how to “reinvent music” and propose a 5 percent tax on compact discs as a way to subsidize companies that produced vinyl records. That kind of intervention would have hindered technology rather than driven it.

Hey, bookstores are going out of business at an alarming rate. No one is suggesting we reinvent “writing.”

So though it might seem tragic to the FTC that the future of journalism may not include every magazine and television station they admire, it’s not the government’s job to alter the trajectory of journalism.