Nudge, nudge...

Neomarxist Behind the Obama/FTC Attacks on Bloggers and Drudge-Type Aggregators

There is a powerful movement to re-direct news in a controlled fashion in the United States. For all practical purposes, it would be a takeover by government of news media reporting using the "nudge" style method of control favored by the Obama Administration.

His influence at the Federal Trade Commission is alarming. According to Mike Riggs, a recent report from the Federal Trade Commission entitled, “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.” sounds like it was written by McChesney, himself.

Riggs writes:

If you look at the 47-page discussion document that the FTC just released, many of those ideas were borrowed directly from McChesney or Free Press.

Those ideas, many of them culled from McChesney’s book The Death and Life of American Journalism (co-written with the Nation’s John Nichols), include:

The establishment of a “‘journalism’ division of AmeriCorps” to “ensure that young people who love journalism will stay in the field”

Providing “a tax credit to news organizations for every journalist they employ”

“Establishing citizenship news vouchers”

“Increasing postal subsidies for newspapers and periodicals”

A tax on news aggregators, or even a policy to make news aggregation sites, like the Drudge Report, illegal

The allocation of roughly $35 billion in public news subsidies

A five percent tax on consumer electronics

A ISP cell phone tax

A revision of the tax code to allow for more nonprofit media

This is the "nudge method" of takeover specifically aimed at destabilizing new media such as bloggers and aggregators. Nudge a little here, nudge a little there. It calls for charges on the use of links provided by such web sites as the Drudge Report, at the same time providing subsidies to news outlets that the government(Read:Obama)deem "worthy". Eventually, government is in control of what Americans read and view.

Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/06/neomarxist-behind-obamaftc-attacks-on.html