I thought Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, did a nice job on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” show addressing the contentious question of whether government should be regulating food advertising in order to somehow make American kids healthier. Todd pointed out how the advertising guidelines currently being developed are anything but “voluntary” and noted that there are many causes of childhood obesity. Watch the clip here:

Importantly, Todd also notes that there are First Amendment issues in play here. Commercial free speech is not completely without constitutional protection, as I noted in my recent Charleston Law Review article on “Advertising, Commercial Speech & First Amendment Parity.”

Finally, as we always note here about regulation generally — especially restrictions on advertising — there is no free lunch (excuse the pun in this case!). Advertising has traditionally been the great subsidizer of media and information in America. It has also kept competitors on their toes and kept prices in check.  These benefits are lost when we regulate advertising. So, while some nanny state-ers would like to convince us that they simply have the best interests of our kids in mind, the reality is that the regulations they favor will likely drive up costs for families and limit their choices of both products and media platforms, both of which are subsidized by advertising.

I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.”  After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or any other agency the ability to force private media providers to fund their public media competitors.  Moreover, it takes a lot of chutzpah to try to spin NPR’s recent Juan Williams fiasco into an excuse for private media providers like Fox News to fund NPR, but, shockingly, that’s exactly what Coll does. “The Williams imbroglio is teachable, but its lessons actually point in the opposite direction: America’s public media system, including NPR, requires more funding, not less.”  Hmm… that’s not exactly the lesson most of the rest of the world took away from this episode!

Coll first argues it makes sense for private media funds to be transferred to NPR becuase “In this time of niche publications and cable networks that thrive on ideological anger, we should be seeking to strengthen NPR’s role as a convener of the public square, a demagogue-free zone where all political and social groups — including conservatives and others opposed to federal funding of public media — should be welcome on equal terms.”  This is indicative of the all-too-common “progressive” impulse to force media upon us that we don’t want or even find offensive.  To be clear, I am not one of those people who finds NPR to be a hopelessly biased bastion of Leftist thinking.  While I think it’s clear to everyone that many of NPR’s stories and reporters do lean that direction, I also think there’s some outstanding reporting to be found there.  But if Steve Coll and his colleagues at the New America Foundation want to see NPR get more funding, they should do the same thing I do:  Open up their wallets and make the voluntary choice to fund it. To force everyone else to do so is despicable.

Second, Coll wants to pretend he’s doing private media providers a favor by forcing them to fund NPR.  “Continuing to force profit-seeking licensees to tack public interest work onto their commercial enterprises is a fool’s errand. It would be far more rational to let commercial enterprises respond to market incentives as they see fit, while leaving the construction of public interest journalism to organizations and leaders who want to do nothing else – among them, NPR.”

How arrogant. Coll is basically saying there’s no other good news out there besides what’s on NPR.  Perhaps he’s just not listening to anything else?  Moreover, to suggest that private media providers should welcome the opportunity to fund their public media competitors because that will take a burden off their shoulders is absurd.  That’s not Steve Coll’s decision to make and it certainly shouldn’t be the government’s either. Whether he feels his preferred mix of views is accurately represented elsewhere is utterly irrelevant.  That does not justify forcing those other media providers to fund the one outlet he feels does provide the right mix.

Astonishingly, Coll never addresses the fundamental unfairness of his proposal to private providers.  After all, in case he didn’t notice, many private media operators are fighting for their lives right now in the hyper-competitive modern media marketplace.  Coll not only ignores that but he then somehow rationalizes what would, in essence, be a new discriminatory media tax that would undercut private media operations at a time when they can ill afford it.  This raises fundamental fairness issues. Not only has public broadcasting and non-commercial media been siphoning off more and more market share from private news media in recent years, but, by placing such a tax on private media to fund its competitors, Coll’s proposal would essentially put private operators in double jeopardy.  It’s hard to see how that’s in “the public interest.”  It’s like the government signing the death warrant for private media.

Elsewhere, I’ve written much more about how such discriminatory private media taxes are seriously misguided.  See, for example, this paper I wrote on what’s wrong with using broadcast spectrum fees as a slush fund for public media.  Also, similar discriminatory tax and regulatory schemes are critiqued in this 79-page filing that my former colleagues Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I submitted to the FCC as part of its “Future of Media” proceeding.

Needless to say, their won’t be much of a “future of media” — at least for private media providers — if Congress took Steve Coll’s advice and imposed this massive media income redistribution scheme on the market.  Again, fund your own media.  Make your own choices.  Don’t try to impose your choices on others.

We’ve talked here before about the dangers of a government-subsidized press as a way of “saving journalism.” But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite as eloquent on the issue as Seth Lipsky’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “All the News That’s Fit to Subsidize.”  Mr. Lipsky is a member of the adjunct faculty at the Columbia Journalism School. In his essay today, he warns of the very real slippery slope associated with proposal to have government step in and somehow bailout newspapers as they find themselves in a time of crisis.Specifically, Mr. Lipsky addressees a new report (“The Reconstruction of American Journalism“) by Leonard Downie (former executive editor of the Washington Post) and co-author Michael Schudson (also of Columbia Journalism School), in which the authors call for a mixture of legal and regulatory changes as well as government subsidies to help prop up failing news operations.

Mr. Lipsky argues that they have “stepped onto an exceptionally slippery slope”:

I take no comfort from the analogy the authors of this report draw with government funding for the arts. In New York City, there came a time when the leaders the voters entrusted with their tax money concluded that what was being done with it in the arts was so abhorrent they tried to stop it. This happened in 1999, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani confronted the Brooklyn Museum over its display of a depiction of the Madonna that had been splattered with elephant dung. A federal court wouldn’t let the city stop funding the museum. […] Even if one could get around this sort of thing, I’ve come to the view that the real protection of press freedom is in the idea of private property. Press freedom in Soviet Russia was lost precisely on this issue when, as American journalist John Reed told the story in his famous book, “Ten Days that Shook the World,” a proposal was put on the table to restore the press freedom that had been suspended on the first day of the Bolshevik revolution. Lenin shouted it down with a diatribe about how that would mean restoring to capitalists privately owned printing equipment, paper supplies and ink. I don’t mean to suggest, in any way, that Mr. Downie is a Bolshevik. I do mean to suggest that the best strategy to strengthen the press would be to maximize protection of the right to private property—and the right to competition. Subsidies are the enemy of competition…

Amen brother.  Read the whole thing.