For over three years, The Paris News (and it’s parent company) repeatedly asked subscribers to urge their elected U. S. officials to vote “yes” to subsidize newspapers.
You’ve read that correctly.
Two (2) bills that later died in Congress called for government funding of newspapers: The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was buried in the 2,135-page tax-and-spending bill (in Section 138516). It gave a refundable tax credit based on a newspaper’s total wages; thereby, subsidizing the ownership’s profit.
The credit could have been used for tax reduction of $25,000 for up to 1,500 employees the first year; decreasing to $15,000 per employee after the first year. All in all, allowing $1.67 billion in tax credit over ten years.
The Paris News claimed it would help small local newspapers survive.
Gannett, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains (employing over 4,000 journalists at USA Today, and such local papers as The Arizona Republic and Detroit Free Press), would gain as much as $127.5 million over five years, called the effort “a good shot in the arm.”
The chain never specified how the money would be used, but it’s very likely that this “small” newspaper would find a way, as would other major news outlets.
In 2016, Forbes Magazine reported that 15 Billionaires owned most of the nation’s news media companies.
When a leftist haven, such as Harvard, warns that American media is no longer a traditional national information highway, self-regulated to prevent government intervention over the news and to ensure a free press, we can no longer claim ignorance of what has and is going on: We have to include stupidity.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1930’s that whatever government subsidizes it can control (by regulation). Today, our government is subsidizing – controlling – everything.
The real enclaves of socialist thought are in our schools, colleges, legislative halls, courts, and the national news media.
They’ve done a wonderful job of selling citizens on the glories of human misery and enslavement. Around 42% of us are willing to try it (or are too ignorant to know or too stupid to understand what’s going on); and the socialism – a push for party dictatorship or whatever it is – has divided our nation.
We have been seduced, piously begged to meet in the middle, to compromise on issues – to completely forget principles – and “come together for the common good.”
By setting aside principles of proven value, in order to accept issues of dubious value, what have we accepted? When good is mixed with evil, what remains – after all the good is gone?
We’ve met in the middle too many years too many times on too many issues; otherwise, how could we be over $30 Trillion in debt?
As with the “national” media, the Paris News folks have, like parrots, mindlessly regurgitated every socialist issue they’ve been sent by the Associated Press, USA Today, Reuters, and the left-wing Texas Tribune; then, they’ve shown their own confusion on the “Voices” editorial page. They’ve – it – has echoed the babbling calls of the emotionally disturbed and mentally deranged – about “extremists, domestic terrorists, white racists, Uncle Toms, and other deplorables” – in general, those who believe in Constitutional government – while complaining about a loss of readership.
In recent national elections, Paris and Lamar County voted for candidates who promised to vote for limiting government’s reach by an almost 2 to 1 margin.
Yet, the Paris News, like the nation’s media, wants to blame those who value a respect for the principles of the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights – the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution – as the reason for its demise.
And feels entitled to demand those whom it belittles and insults to give it money?
It seems they are unable to make a logical connection, but want to change the nation’s Constitution. They never, however, have a replacement for it.
Does the Paris News know that government “Diversity Officers” – controllers of the spoken and written word – are now placed in federal agencies and in the military?
Does the Paris News know that “Diversity Offices” are already in corporations not part of the Big Business-Big Government socialists cronyism, to make sure they do not run afoul of speech and thought requirements of the federal government?
Sound familiar? It should. Russian KGB Officers with the same responsibilities were in every USSR military, government, industrial and business entity.
Today’s wake-up call is the media’s socialist bias: It’s very close to being our homegrown equivalent of Pravda or China’s Xinhua News Agency.
Yet, while claiming to serve the community, it repeatedly condemns a majority of the community voters.
The Paris Texas Chamber received an email from a Razorback fan, in which he was giving kudos to the Gold Hogvillain of Rodgers, Arkansas for the following, which should be a required preface on every piece of local, state, or national “pending” legislation:
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.”
Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.“ 
After 14-years, they still do. Every time we say it, the local organizational bureaucracy react as if we had called their mothers a bad name (or told the truth about them).