This truly is a horrible idea:

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is such a bad idea, but I will nonetheless.

If you let the government bail out newspapers you’re making the latter dependent on the former. This even though it’s newspapers’ role in society to scrutinize every little thing the government does. Do you think that they will bite the hand that feeds them? I think not.

And politicians are and will always be politicians. Once they realize they push newspapers around, they’ll use them as propagandists. In fact, Obama is already hinting at what he wants the newspapers of the future to do:

Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.

Right. Of course the real problem according to Obama isn’t that people are ‘shouting’ at each other or that there’s little to no ‘factual reporting.’ Let me be clear, that’s all true, but that’s not despite Obama and his friends but because of them. The MSM only scrutinizes everything conservatives do, write, say and think, but ignore everything leftists do. If the MSM would do ‘serious reporting’ Obama would be even less popular than he already is and the Democratic Party and allied organizations would be thoroughly discredited.

That’s not what Obama wants, of course. No, he wants newspapers to ‘investigate’ and discredit every conservative person, organization and group. That’s what he wants to use the MSM for – that’s what he believes newspapers should do. They should help him further his agenda and silence the opposition.

Only a fool would consider it alright for such a man to bail out newspapers. Newspapers are in trouble because there aren’t enough people willing to buy them because most of them are extremely biased. If they would actually investigate liberals as well as conservatives they wouldn’t be in the trouble they’re in. The only way for newspapers to save themselves should be for them to do what they are meant to do in a democracy; function as the fourth estate, not as the Democratic Party’s propaganda machine. As Kim Priestap puts it at Wizbang:

Real journalism is dead, which is why the newspaper industry is going out of business. Instead the blogosphere and talk radio are doing all the real reporting. The media refused to report on Van Jones until they were forced to. The media refused to report on ACORN until they were forced to. The whole idea that newspapers need to be bailed out because they are the only remaining vestiges of journalistic integrity and real, nose to the grind stone investigative reporting is so brazenly false, I can’t believe he actually said it with a straight face.