Not a day doesn’t go by when Jacob’s trumpet isn’t being sounded outside of the hallowed walls of journalism and the newspaper industry that pays them. Dire warnings about the chilling effects on democracy that letting newspapers fall by the wayside are being echoed on Capitol Hill and the Oval Office.

Among the many plans being mentioned to prop up the current status quo of the news business is the one being promoted by Sen. Ben Cardin, The Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would in effect bestow nonprofit status on the newspaper industry. This would allow for newspapers to be tax exempt and contributions to support news organizations to be deductible.

There is one rather big fly in the ointment that many people are pointing out, that being the fact that newspapers would no longer be able to make political endorsements. As Leena Rao at TechCrunch points out

The first is whether newspapers supported with government funding should be barred from making political endorsements.

Political endorsements by newspapers and media organizations are a very essence of freedom of speech. Readers often find value in seeing a newspapers evaluation of the candidates given that the paper has in-depth coverage of political candidates throughout the course of a campaign. Putting a muzzle on journalists in this capacity is a step in the wrong direction.

I would argue though that this is really a misleading point to be making. The original assessment is correct but it ignores a fundamental part of the whole news media, print and video, principal reason for being.

Where at one time it might have been argued that newspapers through their reporters and journalist may have been apolitical the truth of the matter is far different. From the point when newspapers progressed passed the point of being a single person small town single pressing leaflet they have become either directly, or indirectly the voice for their owner’s political beliefs.

For as long as anyone today can remember there have always been left leaning news organizations as well as left leaning ones. Newspapers have never been truly apolitical. whether it be from the simple reporting of town hall meetings to mass demonstrations the news has always reported those events in such a manner that matched the political leanings of the news media’s ownership.

If the point were to come that newspapers were indeed classified as nonprofit organizations they would have to undergo a much more radical change than anything the Internet or blogs could ever force upon them. In fact the change would have to be to such a degree that those changes required by becoming nonprofit would drive more of a nail in their coffin that anything else.

The Internet and blogs are not the enemy of the newspapers. Their enemy in reality is themselves, their pleas for government intervention and their obstinate failure to recognize that the Pandora’s box they want to open is far worse than the one that is already open.