One could argue that the White House press corps are an institutional form of subsidy for the media. The White House can effectively control who gets access to the President or his spokesman and who doesn’t. Leveraging access to powerful people can have its effect on media coverage every bit as pervasive as direct subsidies. After all, it constitutes an indirect subsidy!

For that matter, the sports section of many newspapers is effectively subsidized by the government too. That’s because much of any sports section will have references to high school and college sports. These sporting events are invariably subsidized by taxpayers, to the extent that it should actually be called a form of socialism.

In other countries, there are professional soccer teams in minor cities that take same niche that college teams do in the United States. For that matter, baseball teams still have farm clubs as a relic from another era! If one considers the institutionalized subsidy of developing sports talent delivered by government subsidies, not to mention how stadiums are routinely financed by sales taxes, professional sports shoudln’t be considered to be anything close to a free enterprise system.

Unless and until one considers how access to White House briefings or college sports constitute de facto subsidies to the media, opposition to socialized media would be a matter of semantics. Besides, if the New York Times were owned by the federal government, would this necessarily lower the quality of its work? Or even change it? It would hardly be any worse than the prospect of the Mustang Ranch getting run by the IRS…