The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Build Back Better Offers Media Billions
If you ever doubted that the Leftmedia is in cahoots with the Democrat Party, wonder no more. The Left’s Build Back Better bill gives Big Media $1.9 billion and the goal is to attack Republicans. Journalist Daniel Greenfield writes:
[Joe] Biden claims that the Build Back Better Act will help ordinary Americans, but the legislation, like so much in Washington D.C., is a collection of pork for corrupt special interests. One of those special interests is the media which suppressed negative stories about Biden and the Democrats, like the FBI investigation of Hunter Biden, while promoting disinformation, like the Steele Dossier, targeting President Trump: Biden’s opponent in the presidential election.
The media operates like a Democrat messaging operation and its partisanship has undermined its business model, especially for local news outlets which, unlike major national outlets, cannot simply ignore their existing readers and viewers to focus exclusively on radical urban leftists.
Congressional Democrats, with the complicity of some Republicans, had previously proposed media subsidy schemes that included tax credits for media companies, tax breaks for subscribing to papers, and even a $5,000 tax credit for taking out an ad in the local paper.
The media subsidy scheme in Biden’s Build Back Better Act offers $1.9 billion to the media with a payroll tax credit covering 50% of salaries, as much as $25,000, for the Democrat propagandists on media company payrolls, and another 30% over the next four years.
While the Democrats claim that this $1.9 billion special interest giveaway to the media is helping “local news”, it’s capped at 1,500 employees. The Washington Post has only a little over 1,000 “journalists” on its payroll. The legislation is written in a typically convoluted fashion, so it’s not altogether clear if the premier propaganda outlet of the Democrats, owned by the richest man in the country, would qualify for these subsidies at a time when Americans are struggling to get by.
That focus on local journalism? Representative Earl Blumenauer declared that the purpose is to stop Republicans. That truck driver who beat the New Jersey Senate president, he said, “never have been elected if he had gotten any scrutiny at all.” Democrats are happy to pay for that “scrutiny.”
Greenfield jokes, “If this dirty deal were any more corrupt, it would be taking place in a brothel.”
He goes on to explain the trouble with some of the biggest players, which now include Good Information Inc., funded by George Soros.
He concludes:
The same radical shift in the media that alienated its readers and viewers also vested the industry with the political power to steal billions from Americans and put it in their pockets.
The media is no longer an independent industry, it’s an arm of the ruling party.
The $1.9 million in media subsidies is a timely reminder that the only thing that the trillions in special interest pork are actually “building back better” is the Democrat Party.