“California Democrats have just orchestrated a deal in which Google and California taxpayers will shell out $250 million to state-approved news outlets over the next five years,” notes Tom Hebert of Americans for Tax Reform. California’s news media, already the nation’s most left-wing and shrill, will get even more left-wing and biased. As Tom Hebert explains at Townhall:
Conservative outlets operating in California may be drooling at the prospect of getting their piece of the pie. Still, Democrats have structured the agreement to ensure that conservatives would not get a crumb. The bailout money will pass through the “News Transformation Fund,” which pledges to use the funds to support “underrepresented groups.” The left-wing University of California administers the News Transformation Fund, which counts labor unions and far-left journalism outfits as members. Does anyone doubt the direction in which the News Transformation Fund would transform the news?
Democrats are actively working to nationalize California-style bailouts of their favorite media companies……
The Los Angeles Times, California’s biggest newspaper, is very biased. It supports increases in already high levels of government spending, more indulgent treatment of repeat-offender criminals, racial preferences, racial set-asides, and policies that are soft on violent criminals and thieves.
California’s newspapers almost uniformly supported the racial preferences and set-asides that California voters rejected in 2022, when California voters defeated an attempt to repeal the state constitution’s ban on race-based affirmative action (which is widely flouted by state college officials). The Democrats want to prop up these biased, left-leaning “news” entities with taxpayer dollars.
Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik routinely launches baseless personal attacks on people who disagree with left-wing policies popular at the Times. Media bias and misinformation web sites rate the Los Angeles Times as left-biased (such as AllSides.com, which is not a conservative web site) or “skews left.”
A think-tank “conducted a study of media bias in the coverage of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. The study looked at pieces published in the Los Angeles Times” and four other major newspapers, of which the Times is the most biased in favor of left-wing policies. It found that “there was considerable bias in who was quoted, with Democratic officials, progressive advocates, and borrowers quoted significantly more than taxpayers or taxpayer advocates. Democratic officials were quoted more than four times as often as Republican ones….81% of quotes were from Biden administration officials and other Democrats, and 19 percent were from Republicans…Just over 3% were attributed to individuals identified as taxpayers or taxpayer advocates. 62% of quotes supported loan forgiveness, 24 percent were critical, and 14 percent were neutral toward loan forgiveness. The choice of quotes that are primarily from those who support forgiveness shows bias by omission.”
Canceling student loans, as Los Angeles Times columnists have advocated, is a bad idea. It encourages colleges to jack up tuition, by making it more attractive to take out big loans to cover college tuition. When students are willing to borrow more to go to college, colleges respond by raising tuition, and then spending more money on administrative bloat. The Daily Caller notes that “each additional dollar in government financial aid translated to a tuition hike of about 65 cents,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Canceling student loan debt is “regressive and unfair,” says Katherine Abraham, a former adviser to Obama who served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Clinton administration. As Greg Price points out, “Only 37% of Americans have a 4-yr college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees, and a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school. Biden’s plan to cancel it would be like taking money from a plumber to pay the debt of a lawyer.” Even the liberal Washington Post called Biden’s student-loan bailout “a regressive, expensive mistake.”
Student loan forgiveness also is inflationary. Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Biden’s plan to cancel student loans “reckless.” Furman said, “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning [was] reckless.” Student loan forgiveness plans increase inequality, tuition, and the national debt.
