Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
“Deportation fears grip undocumented parents in Southern California”, a headline at the Orange County Register blares.
Even though the former conservative newspaper is now owned by a hedge fund that happens to be the second largest newspaper publisher in the country, the article is actually taxpayer-funded political propaganda even though nothing anywhere below it discloses that fact.
California Democrats appropriated $25 million in taxpayer money to fund an entity known as the ‘California Local News Fellowship’ which in turn planted radical activists inside local papers like Victoria Ivie who writes about ‘Equity’ at the OC Register and covers “trans students”, “LGBT elders”, anti-Israel rallies, and of course all the “undocumented parents” terrified of ICE.
The growing transformation of the media into state media erodes the already thin line between the government ruling parties and their political allies in the media. The media’s faltering business model led Democrats in states like California to more overtly subsidize the media.
Ever wonder what happened to White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers? The former Clinton official now serves as a senior advisor to Gov. Gavin Newsom and will be in a position to administer $20 million in subsidies from the California Civic Media Program to media outlets.
That $20 million is a fraction of the expected $250 million, down from the initial $500 million demanded by California Democrats, for the media. The only reason that the media has to settle for seizing a paltry eight figures instead of nine from taxpayers is the state’s budget crunch.
California’s massive subsidies for the media are a combination of taxpayer money and corporate blackmail. State Dems had tried to forcibly extract billions from big dot coms like Google and Facebook for their media allies, but had to settle for matching funds from Google, which was set to provide $125 million until Newsom weaseled out of his share, while Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, long a generous donor to liberal causes, pivoted away to Trump.
While California’s efforts to extract billions from taxpayers and tech corps to fund its political propaganda is extreme, similar efforts are underway in Democrat states across the country.
Federal efforts to provide special subsidies and tax breaks failed in Congress, despite the complicity of some Republicans, but multiple states provide tax breaks and credits. While the media already often enjoys a preferential tax status (most states don’t impose a sales tax on newspapers and magazines), New York passed a bill offering $90 million in tax breaks for Gov. Hochul’s media allies while Illinois offered a smaller $25 million honey pot for Gov. Pritzker’s publishing pals, and have expanded into not only direct tax breaks for the media, but secondary tax breaks for the media’s advertisers like that in Washington, Minnesota and other states.
38 media subsidy bills have been introduced in 15 states in just the last few years indicating the growing consolidation of the media into the state as Democrats scrambled to force taxpayers to subsidize their political allies and their political propaganda in the name of ‘democracy’..
The media rarely reports that it is already one of the most subsidized industries in the country. And those tax breaks are all the more troubling because the media is also the most politically connected industry in the country, supporting political candidates and helping to ‘make or break’ their campaigns, and then receiving special tax breaks and subsidies from those politicians.
For example in Minnesota a bill to provide a tax credit for businesses that advertise in the ‘local’ media was sponsored by State Sen. Grant Hauschild (D) who was endorsed by local newspapers like the Duluth Tribune that had also endorsed media subsidies. The Tribune is owned by a company that controls 22 other papers and 4 radio stations. Its current headline reads “Federal agents fatally shoot another Minnesotan; Walz and Frey plead for an end.”
But some states are moving to more direct subsidies. New Jersey’s equivalent of California’s ‘Local News Fellowship’ is its more ominously named ‘Civic Info Consortium’ which has dispensed six figure checks to partisan media outlets like the Jersey Vindicator and the Trenton Journal. The Jersey Vindictator’s current headlines read like Democratic Party press releases.
And that’s why the money keeps flowing.
The head of Rebuild Local News, a group that advocates for taxpayer subsidies for the media, claimed that “newsrooms will get about $74 million in 2026 from state governments.”
Rebuild’s target is $1 billion a year. And then the sky and the wallets of taxpayers are the limit.
Democrats claim that taxpayer funding of local media is necessary to “protect democracy” and stop “local media deserts”. But having the government subsidize the media covering it is the stuff of banana republics, not democracies, and the majority of media subsidies go to papers aligned with the Democratic Party elected officials who also push for these subsidies.
Media subsidies force taxpayers to subsidize the communications arm of the ruling party. Those subsidies don’t benefit local residents, rather they force them to subsidize companies that they have long since opted out of funding. If local residents really wanted to subsidize local papers, they could pay for them. Government subsidies force residents to fund media they don’t want.
The so-called ‘local media deserts’ disproportionately occur in more rural counties and smaller towns where the public stopped patronizing local papers as they turned partisan and radical, and began hiring journalism grad students who lectured them about ‘equity’ and pronouns. Rather than try to win back the older and more conservative readers, the papers instead turned to the liberal politicians they supported, telling elected officials to take money from their former readers and give it to them. Former readers could stop subscribing to a paper, but they couldn’t stop paying for it.
Not if the government and the media had anything to say about it.
The media can’t be allowed to die not because it provides some vital service to its readers, but because it provides a vital service to the cause of the Democratic Party and the Left.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting may have finally shut down, but state media is more pervasive than ever. The partial federal defunding of public media was a notable victory for an old Republican and conservative project, but Democrats and liberals had an equally long project to subsidize not just public media, but all of media, through a combination of tax credits, non-profit status for establishment media outlets, and government/corporate subsidies.
Over the last decade it became obvious that the mainstream media’s business model was doomed. Traditional print, television and radio had depended on user habit and platform infrastructure that limited competition. Social media algorithms and the broader structure of the internet undid these advantages and made the mainstream media into white elephants.
Normally the collapse of a business model wouldn’t be of great concern to anyone outside that industry, but the Democratic Party and the larger liberaleftist political worldview heavily depended on endangered knowledge industry ‘white elephants’ like the media and academia.
The rise of Trump allowed them to link the withering of the media to a ‘threat to democracy’. Social media monopolies were pressured into unleashing a censorship campaign to stop ‘misinformation’ that not only censored political opponents, but privileged mainstream media content and even compensated the media for censoring opponents through ‘fact checks’.
When that failed, Democrats decided to use their political power to just fund the media.
In order to eliminate spam comments that have historically flooded our comments section, comments containing certain keywords will be held in a moderation queue. All comments by legitimate commenters will be manually approved by a member of our team. If your comment is “Awaiting Moderation,” please give us up to 24 hours to manually approve your comment. Please do not re-post the same comment.
