QotD: Bailing out newspapers

I have never had anything but contempt for America's "greatest" newspapers. During my lifetime, a little over six decades, they have never been anything but contemptible. Everything that was foreseeably harmful to individual liberty — or later proven to be so — they have championed. Everything that would have been good for it, they have opposed.

Regarding a small, exceptional handful of dire matters of life and death — the ugly little war in Vietnam comes to mind — where they finally aligned themselves with the proper, decent, moral, and Constitutional side of the issue, they were opinion followers, not leaders.

Now, according to the "new media" to which I happily switched ten years ago or more, in preference to being libelled, threatened, and lied to on a continuous basis as a member of the nation's Productive Class, America's "greatest" newspapers, on the brink of financial collapse as millions of other readers and advertisers make the same change I did, are looking to be "bailed out" by the current political administration. They've agreed to stop making political endorsements, giving us to wonder what good they'll be after they seal this devil's bargain.

L. Neil Smith, "No Bailout for America's Newspapers!", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-03-29