They're coming for your newspaper

I wrote a few days ago about a proposal in the Federal Trade Commission to tax some parts of the new media and use the money to prop up the failing old media. The power to tax and fund is always accompanied by the power to control. One wonders how this jibes with the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of the press ...

Dick Morris, the columnist and commentator, weighs in:

Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of Obama’s Federal Trade Commission, is at the epicenter of a quiet movement to subsidize news organizations, a first step toward government control of the media. We reported that he had commissioned a study to examine plans for a federal subsidy for news organizations. Among the measures under consideration are special tax treatment, exemption from antitrust laws and changes in copyright laws.

Now Leibowitz has begun to pounce. A May 24 working paper on “reinventing” the media proposes that the government impose fees on websites such as the Drudge Report that link to news websites or that it tax consumer electronics such as iPads, laptops and Kindles. Funds raised by these levies would be redistributed to traditional media outlets.

While Leibowitz distanced himself from the proposals for the taxes, calling them “a terrible idea,” his comments appear to be related only to the levies proposed in the working paper. Nobody is commenting on the other part of his proposal — a subsidy for news organizations. 

Indeed, Leibowitz sounds reasonable about things, and I can find no smoking gun in his public comments. However, it is his agency that produced this proposal, and he can't escape responsibility.

Here's something interesting about Leibowitz: he''s married to Ruth Marcus, who joined The Washington Post in 1984 and is currently on the editorial board. She has said:

"I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama."

And Obama made her husband chair of FTC. It's oh so cozy.

Image: your FTC chairman full of himself