HEY, AMERICA: IT’S A LOAN

By Joel Thurtell

Can we get something straight between Detroit and America?

What the newspaper industry is seeking in Washington is a loan,  L-O-A-N, as in something you borrow and then pay back — with interest.

This is not a gift, a grant or a handout. It’s a loan,  the kind of thing financial institutions used to do before they all had to scurry to Washington for their own bailouts, which have been far bigger and subjected to considerably less scrutiny than this loan that the newspaper industry desperately needs to keep operating — and keep millions of people employed.

The only other time in the storied history of this bedrock industry that one of its companies had to ask Washington for help was in 1970 when Congress, under intense pressure from newspaper industry lobbyists, granted the newspaper industry — though not the car industry, not the financial industry, not the steel industry nor any other industry — immunity from the nation’s anti-trust laws with a creative euphemism since known as the Newspaper Preservation Act. This act of Congress allowed newspaper publishers to collude in gluing together monopolies where two of them owned newspapers in one town if they could establish through sham government procedures that one of their number was failing and headed to perdition in what came to be known as a “downward spiral.”

In Detroit, such a two-headed monstrosity was born in 1989 when two newspaper chains, Gannett and Knight-Ridder, teetering on the brink of credibility, were granted a monopoly to operate the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News in a 100-year arrangement that supposedly would generate money like pizza at a Redwings hockey game. Now that only one of those companies — Gannett — owns both newspapers and has added to its Detroit monopoly the suburban Mirror and Observer & Eccentric newspaper chains, it’s clear that public confidence in newspaper monopolies — preserving two editorial voices controlled by a single corporate entity — has been amply repaid.

Why, with a newspaper monopoly, we can trust the newspaper company higher-ups to construct front-page editorials like this one touting loans for near-bankrupt car companies whose advertisements help keep newspaper companies alive.

Of course, some people may have seen state-condoned newspaper monopolies as an investment in America. Now the country can return the favor. With a LOAN to endangered newspaper monopolists.

Times have changed, sure, and we’re talking about a loan for the newspaper industry, not a monopoly. But it’s still a loan, a borrowing of needed funds with a promise of repayment-plus.

Now it’s true that if the newspaper industry pockets the largesse and goes on its merry way donating its product free on the Internet with no viable plan for recouping overhead including loan repayment through payments for Internet ads, then America will experience with their billions in loans what they see every day when they press the lever on their toilet.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com