Five ways Obama may tax you to pay for the government's 'reinvention of journalism'
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
06/03/10 4:26 PM EDT
Bureaucrats at the Federal Trade Commission have just released a new "staff study" containing a host of recommendations on how the federal government can put itself at the center of the "reinvention of journalism" campaign now gathering momentum on the Left.
Translated, "reinvention of journalism" is codespeak for "Repeal the First Amendment's prohibition on Congress doing anything to abridge the freedom of the independent press to find and report all of the facts about what politicians, bureaucrats and their allies in the private sector are doing, are planning on doing, did in the past, or are thinking about doing to the rest of us and with our tax dollars.
My column on the FTC's staff study in Tuesday's edition of The Washington Examiner has attracted a fair amount of attention, but I am far from the only journalist who has been watching this pernicious project develop at the FTC and elsewhere in the nation's capital.
Dan Gainor, the Boone Pickens Fellow and vice president for business and culture at the Media Research Center, has been tracking the project, studying its documents, and analyzing the content and likely consequences of the FTC reinventing journalism project.
Gainor, a former desk editor and columnist for The Baltimore Examiner and before that, the Washington Times, is an experienced journalist who has covered government and politicians for years. He knows horse puckey when he sees it.
Among the things he has found is the FTC staff study includes five new taxes the federal government could use to create a new fund it would then dole out to favored media organizations.
Of course, any media organization that accepts one penny of government "aid" thereby loses the right to call itself an independent media outlet because, as anybody who knows anything about federal aid can attest, when bureaucrats fund something, they use that funding as the pretext to regulate and control it.
Here's Gainor's key graphs:
<<< "Of course, anything coming out of the Obama administration is also automatically about taxes. This working paper mentions some form of the word 'tax' 95 times in 47 pages. If government wants to make the media dependent on it for cash, it has to tax us to do so.
"The paper listed five possible new taxes to pay for a 'Citizenship Media Fund.' Those include a $4 billion tax on consumer electronics like your TV or iPod; a $5-6 billion advertising tax; and a tax on both ISP and cell phone bills.
"It also listed a host of other possible solutions for the problems that impact journalism – everything but the free market. That concept is foreign to the same administration that seized control of Wall Street, Detroit and our health care system." >>>
You can read the rest of Dan's column here.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com |
