By Lee Williams
Joe Biden has found a way to guarantee positive news stories from legacy media reporters. He wants to help pay their salaries, despite the ethical questions this would raise.
Gun owners and anyone else who don’t want to lose their civil rights and individual freedoms are especially at risk.
As part of his nearly $2 trillion budget reconciliation bill, Biden wants to give massive tax breaks to newspaper chains, which are struggling to compete and maintain their relevancy in a digital age. Television stations and news websites also would be eligible.
Biden’s plan would allow media organizations to claim a $25,000 tax break for each journalist during the first year, and then $15,000 per person over the next four years.
As Fox News pointed out, the country’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, would be eligible for more than $127.5 million over the next five years.
You would assume Gannett’s highly touted code of ethics would prohibit their taking handouts from the government. Specifically, their promises to:
- Be vigilant watchdogs of government and institutions that affect the public.
- Remain free of outside interests, investments or business relationships that may
- compromise the credibility of our news report.
- Avoid potential conflicts of interest and eliminate inappropriate influence on content.
- Remain free of improper obligations to news sources, newsmakers and advertisers.
While these are lofty goals, having met the folks who run the company, I know full well they would sell their own children to receive $127.5 million in savings over the next five years.
Times are hard for print journalists. Most of the country’s newspapers have sold off their properties and now rent space in strip malls or office buildings. Print circulation has plummeted. Some once-daily newspapers now publish only two or three days per week.
Staffing levels have dropped significantly. Some papers now have 10% of the personnel they had 10 years ago. Digital subscriptions, once seen as a panacea, have proven incapable of sustaining daily operations since they cost next to nothing compared to a print subscription, or, as one friend described the push for digital over print subscriptions: They’re turning dollars into dimes.
Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures, and the legacy media is definitely desperate. Gannett has shown it has no problem ditching its ethical principles for cold, hard cash. As we first pointed out, their flagship newspaper USA TODAY has an ongoing partnership with The Trace – the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire.
In short, the paper allows anti-gun activists to report, edit, and illustrate news stories that appear in print and online. The newspaper giant also partnered with Facebook to provide fact checkers, for which Gannett received millions of dollars in compensation. However, taking handouts from the Biden-Harris administration would be a new low, even for Gannett.
Accepting Biden’s handouts would radically alter how his administration is covered by the media. In essence, reporters would be on the government payroll, becoming the president’s paid propagandists.
The timing of Biden’s plan is very revealing, too. The mainstream media have given Biden and his crew of bumblers a free pass for the last 10 months. There has been zero accountability regardless of how badly the administration has stumbled and fallen. Only now are mainstream reporters starting to ask real questions, which the White House finds uncomfortable.
Millions of dollars in tax breaks going to the mainstream media would stop these questions from ever being asked. The White House press corps “watchdogs” wouldn’t be allowed to bite the hand that is literally feeding them and their corporate owners.
The press is the only thing holding the Biden-Harris administration remotely accountable, and they have done a poor job of it. The majority of the national scrutiny is coming from just one young reporter at Fox.
If the media takes Biden’s deal, beware. Any meaningful scrutiny will end. Biden and his crew have repeatedly shown they won’t allow the Constitution to get in their way of their plans. By muzzling the watchdogs, the White House can resume their war on guns or anything else that’s on their totalitarian agenda without worrying about what we the people think of their plan.
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This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.
Our mainstream media has been garbage for nearly two decades.
Now the bastards are going to be paid with our tax money!
Just fucking wonderful!
“If the media takes Biden’s deal, beware. Any meaningful scrutiny will end.”
C’mon, Alan G: Do you think the media will be even more in the tank for the leftists if they’re getting more government assistance???
It’s a preposterous move and likely un-Constitutional if what the article states is true, but it won’t move the media any further left. How could it? They’re already about as far as they can be without actually coming into your house and forcing you to listen to them.
HOLY FUCK. Well, I know why they rigged the dementia guy in. To Hell with it, let’s just do (all the dirty things) it and let the doddering old man take the fall.
Brandon wants an American version of TASS….. on the payroll so the Dems can control every word. Why, he has better now, they make up excused and alternate words to F. J. B., why change?
Figures…cash payments to Leftard dims or worse. Huge layouts to illegal aliens. As “Murica gallops toward bankruptcy.
Jim Crow Gun Control democRat joe proves once again how worthless to America he is.
I’ve got an opinion on that utterly worthless excuse for a human being but if he gets paid to talk then I should get paid to talk so I need to see some money up front before I start talking.
Doubtless that’s part of the plan — if you won’t talk unless you’re paid, all they have to do is not pay you to shut you up.
Millions of dollars in tax breaks going to the mainstream media would stop these questions from ever being asked
While Braindead and his cohorts quietly conspire to tax money you might make as well as savings, retirement and investment accounts possible “future” earnings and they want a per mile driven tax on EVERY American (though I’m pretty sure they will exempt themselves from all of the above)… Shrewd bastards those progressives…
The government controlling the media with our money.
Freedom
Control what the public sees/hears, remove weapons from the populace, control the “constabulary’ (de-funding the “police” in this case), create a “need” of security – sounds like all the things the British did wayyyy back then.
Jen Psaki Edition:
Uh huh, this my sh&#
All the girls stomp your feet like this
A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
‘Cause I ain’t no circle-back girl
I ain’t no circle-back girl [2x]
Now do Myorkis, he did the “circle back dance” a half dozen times in front of Senators on Monday…
That mother fucker sits there with his nose up in the air telling us “The border is closed the border is seuure” I can’t put into print what I want to do with this bastard. Safe to say his nose would be pointed down afterwards.
Only one question: Why did it take “them” so long?
Barry could have mad this happen without anyone knowing.
Barry didn’t need it, Braindead is losing some of that support..
I wonder what would have been said if Trump did this….
Impeach him!
I thought every already knew the Democrats were paying the media. Or is it the other way around?
I think it’s mostly the other way around. The Marxist-addled midwits running the Democratic Party couldn’t get any of its crazy shit done if the national legacy media weren’t smoothing the road, making it sound less stupid, and manufacturing fake consent — and the DCC knows it. They get the media on board first…then they move.
They don’t do anything without media buy-in. And if the legacy media continues to slide into irrelevancy as more truthful and robust alternatives gain strength, their entire empire of lies is at risk.
Only Obiden is so stupid he would rent something he already owns.
Neat. Always wanted to live in a corrupt third world shithole.
Sooooo, what exactly would change,,,
Try living in a liberal state , they already champion the Democrats,
All FIDENs going to do is raise their salaries.
The M S M in my state already kiss the ass of any Liberal with a soap box.
BINGO! As far as I’m concerned, this is a nothing story that will change nothing.
And of course it will only be the wealthy organizations footing the bill for the small, struggling organizations, right? I mean that’s how this socialist thing is supposed to work, right? They aren’t really going to ask small, non-media business owners to foot the bill for this after they told them to stay home and hide from Covid are they? /s Of course they are.
Heil Biden! Lets Go Brandon!
Previous comment awaiting moderation for some reason. If a tax break can’t be applied to every business, then it should be illegal. This is a big part of what’s wrong with this country. No one ever talks about it. It’s worse than the coverage issue. The media already lies for them and refuses to cover the relevant bad stories. Notice how fast they moved on from Afghanistan.
Prostitution
Wow…maybe he could spread some of that TIT money around to the rest of us that actually worked for a living…instead state/union…whoops…I say that out loud?? prickster sucks!!
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