Will Obama Protect the Media From Pig Flu?

No matter what the crisis, Barack Obama and his do-gooder administration seem ready to personally save whatever is in trouble: car companies, banks, even people without jobs and people who cannot afford their house payments.

But in one crucial department, this young new president offers no solution, no bailout. When it comes to newspapers, Obama has been silent.

Now that the terrible pandemic looms over America, it is time for the president to make the hard choices and announce to the world that his first priority must be saving Washington journalists from the H1N1 flu.

How would people know about the Mexican Influenza if not for our nation's better newspapers? It was Thomas Jefferson who, so long ago, said he would rather watch everybody in the United States burn alive than see this great nation without its daily newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson didn't even like newspapers, as the periodicals of his day were almost exclusively dedicated to chronicles of his sex exploits with his slaves. And yet he knew those humble periodicals were more important to our young republic than anything else, ever.

Contrast that with this flashy new president who is so quick to perform for YouTube or minority television networks. One wonders if he even understands freedom, which is simply shorthand for "freedom of the press."

Barack Obama has one last chance to save America's newspapers. He must make a public pledge to spend all available resources on the protection of not only the news publishing industry, but the people who make it so very important.

We hear reports of schools closed because of the pandemic, and I wonder, Do schoolchildren report the news? On Friday, an airplane filled with tourists was forced to make an emergency landing in Boston because a woman onboard was sick with flu-like sympotms. And I wondered, Does she write an op-ed column for one of our better newspapers?

As the nation "flips out" over this latest epidemic, the Twitters and the MySpaces and the iPhones and the Sega Dreamcasts are curiously silent about the only thing that really matters to Democracy. American newspapering is in peril, and it is a crisis far more tragic than any dozen global pandemics over recorded history.

How many newspapers have died in America, just since the new year? Four, five, nine? Whatever the number, it is that number too many.