Spider Seeks Fly for Companionship, Dinner 
By Martin Harris

Recent news reports of Washington’s latest expansion initiative –to furnish bail-out money to in-the-red newspapers, and with that money as enticement, to require acceptance of government oversight via "improved accountability" in reporting—came to my attention just as I was reading, from the same sources, of another just-announced Washington expansion initiative –to extend the National Transportation Safety Board’s reach over all municipal transit systems, via bail-out money with control strings attached, on the ostensible grounds of "safety concerns". Like most of the print media, most public transit is markedly deficit-prone, and for the same reason: potential customers find the information product or transportation service resist-able even though inexpensive.

Watching the present Administration doing its thing "The Chicago Way" for the last 307 days (out of a probable total of 1461) suggested at first that I should describe, in this column, the consiglieri of Chicago-trained pol Rahm Emanuel going to the management of the rapidly-bankrupting New York Times with "a (monetary) offer they can’t refuse", Don Corleone-style, but such a description would be inaccurate because, I’d guess, the Grey Lady, as an historic professional, wouldn’t even think of declining any payment-for-position-taken-and-service-rendered proposition. She didn’t, when Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote repeatedly in the early ‘30’s from Soviet Russia that the starvation of Ukrainian millions there wasn’t happening (and got a Pulitzer for his pro-Communist dispatches) and she didn’t in the early ‘60’s when she chose not to report on thousands of dead Chicagoans rising temporarily from their graves to vote for candidate Kennedy and she didn’t in the early ‘90’s when reporting in fulsome detail on later-proven-false accounts of the Ross Perot presidential candidacy, using techniques later refined in CBS/Dan Rather-style reporting on the Bush and (even more so) Palin candidacies.

Presently, most of  the Fourth Estate (for recent high school grads, the concept of Estates was articulated by soon-to-be-decapitated French monarch Louis XVI in 1789, the First Estate being the clergy, the Second the nobility, and the Third the people, and the notion of an independent press as the Fourth was an 1828 invention of English writer Thomas Carlyle) is like the Times: deep in red ink. Continuing a long-term trend, here are last year’s circulation numbers: Washington Post, -2.5%; New York Times, -3.5%; USA Today, -4.1%; LA Times, -5.5%; Chicago Tribune, -7.3%; and Boston Globe, -9.8%. Of major US print media, only the Wall Street Journal posted a circulation gain, up 2.4%.

I’d guess all except the Journal would take the money (and the government-accountability/content tether) and run as they have been running, as faithful practitioners of left-ideology-favoring reportage. In Vermont, that group would include the Burlington Free Press and The Rutland Herald, although, remarkably, not the St. Johnsbury Caledonian-Record.  Members of the give-us-money group would do a pro-forma protest about Fourth Estate independence, I’d guess, and then demurely agree to be seduced if the price is right. It’s not as if they’ve had much independence to surrender; the Herald is already heavily dependent for its op-ed page content on re-runs of Grey Lady editorials.

With that as background, my thoughts turned to another early-19th-century Englishperson (a little PC-lingo there) named Mary Howitt, who was the author of "The Spider and the Fly" in 1829. Contrary to what we were taught in grade school back in the Dark Ages, the theme of enticement-into-doom using exemplary insects practicing all-too-human behaviors wasn’t one of Aesop’s fables, but it’s sufficiently well-known, even amongst recent high school grads, that I need not recite the poem’s seven stanzas here. However, there’s a basic difference between the fly, which presumably has some aversion to being enticed, entrapped, and consumed, and such once-iconic leaders of the print media as the now-already-broke Philadelphia Inquirer, which would doubtless be delighted to achieve the nearest condition to immortality –becoming a quasi-governmental agency like a regulated public utility-- and secure a permanent paid place on the taxpayer payroll for doing what it already does quite effectively: using both op-ed opinion and selectively managed news content to advocate for progressively (pun intended) greater governmental involvement in ever more aspects of the American culture.

The basic pattern has long been established: designated public utilities like CVPS and GMP are formerly- independent free-market businesses now heavily regulated by government, which sets not only their areas of monopoly service but what level and quality of services they provide, in return for which pleasantly safe servitude they are guaranteed a ratepayer schedule which will insure them a Return on Equity in the 10 percent range. Heck, to make that kind of money, most contemporary newspapers would even report, if required, as did the Grey Lady during the hard times of the Depression, that (to quote from Walter Duranty’s Progressive fellow-traveler Lincoln Steffens’ admiring evaluation of the Soviet Union) "I have seen the future and it works". 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights