Lipsky on a Press Subsidy

My former New York Sun and Forward colleague Seth Lipsky has a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing against a government subsidy for newspapers. "I've come to the view that the real protection of press freedom is in the idea of private property," he writes. "The best strategy to strengthen the press would be to maximize protection of the right to private property—and the right to competition." One point that Mr. Lipsky neglects is that some newspaper companies have already received government subsidies. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which now owns the Wall Street Journal, received a $20.7 million subsidy in 1996 from New York city and state and a $24.4 million subsidy in 1998 for a new printing plant in the Bronx for the New York Post. The New York Daily News received a subsidy of more than $35 million from New Jersey when it moved its printing plant there in 1993, according to Good Jobs New York, a group that is a watchdog on these special corporate tax breaks. And the New York Times received a subsidy of $28.7 million for a printing plant in Queens in 1993 and a subsidy of $18.7 million (the Times itself put the figure at $26.1 million, and noted that opponents said the subsidies could be as large as $70 million) in 2001 for its new headquarters building near Times Square in Manhattan. These subsidies have been given without the dire consequences for press freedom of which Mr. Lipsky warns in his article, though they did precede a decline in the profitability of the local daily newspaper business in New York. This is not an argument for a subsidy of newspapers, although, if the taxes of working newspapermen and their owners are to be taken to subsidize investment bankers (Citigroup, Bank of America), automakers (GM and Chrysler), insurance companies (AIG), doctors and drug companies (through Medicare and the "public option"), and alternative energy providers and their hedge-fund and private-equity-fund owners, at a certain point one wonders whether an industry that refuses a subsidy on principle is just a sap. Mr. Lipsky's new book The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide is in stock and shipping at Amazon.com. (FTC disclosure: Amazon gives FutureOfCapitalism.com a small cut of the revenue of readers who click through and order the book.)