Obama Appointee Wants Soviet-styled Media

It’s bad enough the Obama administration has pledged trillions to “bailout” the bankers and has made moves to control business in the private sector. Now they want a Soviet-styled media financed and run by the government.

	Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping "direct government support for public media" and creating licenses to govern news operations.

“Influential Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks has hung up her journalistic hat and joined the Obama administration, but not before penning a public proposal calling for some radical ideas to help bail out the failing news industry,” reports Fox News.

Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping “direct government support for public media” and creating licenses to govern news operations.

“Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off,” she wrote in her parting column on April 9.

You can only imagine how such licenses would govern Infowars and the alternative media.

In the former Soviet Union, Pravda was an organ of the CPSU Central Committee, while Izvestiya was published by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Ms. Brooks is advocating a likewise scheme here in America, formerly a land that respected the idea of an independent press and the First Amendment. She would put an end to all of this once and for all with her suggestion that media be licensed by the state.

Brooks said her authoritarian scheme would help rescue the corporate media from a “death spiral” and left the government unaccountable to the journalists who must keep it honest. “[I] can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed,” she wrote.

Why is the corporate media in the process of collapsing? Because a growing number of people get their news from the internet and alternative media sources. Large numbers of people no longer trust the corporate media to tell the truth. Corporate media is a dinosaur that needs to either reinvent itself or go the way of the Brontosaurus.

Instead, this Obama appointee wants to turn the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (where she worked before joining team Obama) into Izvestiya.

But then the argument is academic. The New York Times and the rest of the corporate media is owned and operated by the same corporatist and Wall Street leviathans that financed and supported the Soviet Union.

This article was posted: Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 7:44 pm

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