Bailouts for everyone!

Conor is tired of people like Freddie saying that conservatives don’t care about the human cost of letting Detroit’s Big Three fail; as is his wont, Freddie replies in the comments writing that

It’s incredible to me that you would invoke McArdle on this. She has one response and one emotional context when she condemns thousands to enormous economic hardship: glee.

You aren’t threatened, of course, none of you ever are. [Emp. mine]

Freddie’s assertion that journalists don’t exist in the same world as auto manufacturers, however, is nonsense on stilts, and it made me think of Ross’s post on a journalism bailout:

More importantly, what about the journalism industry? What about us – my friends and co-workers, and friends of friends and co-workers of co-workers, who’ve spent the last five years watching our business slowly circle the drain? Doesn’t America need the New York Times as much at it needs the Chevy Cobalt? Isn’t the Star-Ledger as important as the GMC Savana? Sure, GM employs roughly five times as many people as all all of America’s newsrooms combined – but that just means that we’d be much, much cheaper to bail out! GM needs $25 billion, but we’d settle for, I dunno, five billion? Pocket change, in other words!

Let’s look at it this way: Auto manufacturing in America is a dying industry. The cars in Detroit are too expensive and (with the exception of Ford) of too low a quality when compared to their Japanese peers. They are also inefficient gas-guzzlers, a terrible idea in the current economic climate. Detroit has not responded to changes in the marketplace in any reasonable way. They are losing market share to competitors with which they are unable to compete. Our choices are to prop them up indefinitely with taxpayer money or let them reorganize in bankruptcy.

Journalism, similarly, is seen as a dying industry. Subscription rates are in freefall since content is available for free on the Internet. Bloggers are doing work for free that journalists were once paid to do. There’s a general distrust for the MSM’s product–the MSM seal of quality means almost nothing any more. Advertising revenues continue to decline and hundreds of thousands could soon find themselves out of business.

But journalism is adapting in a way that auto manufacturers have refused to. Journalists are turning to the web, working on blogs and breaking news in real time to compete with CNN, Fox News, and the rest of the 24/7 news networks. The old models of distribution are breaking down, so journalistic outlets are adapting to maintain a sound business model. This comes with some measure of pain–witness the layoffs of redundant staff throughout the industry, the buyouts, the demotions, the pay cuts. But it’s necessary to keep American journalism viable.

If, however, journalists turned to the government and said “Hey, we’re the fourth estate: in addition to employing hundreds of thousands of people, we give the people the news and check the government. We’re too big to fail” none of these changes would have taken place. News on the web would still be in its infancy. Journalists wouldn’t worry what pajama-wearing bloggers like Freddie had to say. We wouldn’t adapt to survive, we’d just suckle the teat comfortable in the knowledge that we were going nowhere.

This is why Detroit has to be allowed to fail. Will there be some short-term hardship? Yes, and it sucks. But if these companies are going to be viable private entities in the future–companies that provide a living to residents of Detroit, Ohio, Kentucky, and elsewhere for generations to come–they need to be able to stand on their own two feet and make a product that people want at a reasonable price. Simply pumping the industry full of tax dollars won’t accomplish anything. This, I feel, is the conservative position. It’s not glee at breaking the unions. It’s about crafting a solution that strengthens a major institution on the American landscape.