Former member of the liberal media and new Obama appointee Rosa Brooks wants the government to bailout the dying print media industry.

Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping “direct government support for public media” and creating licenses to govern news operations.

“Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off,” she wrote in her parting column on April 9.

Brooks said this would help rescue the industry from a “death spiral” and left the government unaccountable to the journalists who must keep it honest. “[I] can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed,” she wrote.

I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the media is controlled by the government.  Of course, her entire premise is false.  Media is not collapsing; old media is collapsing.  This is what happens in a dynamic economy, the old dies and the new takes its place.

The old model of heavily filtered news delivered by liberal journalists is a loser.  It’s going the way of the dodo, and for good reason.  The government should not step in to protect this old format anymore than it should have to protect horse and carriages with the arrival of the automobile.  Trying to codify old business models into law will only prevent the new business models that otherwise would have developed from doing so, losing us the primary advantage of a dynamic economy: innovation.