The scandal of the week might be called Subscription-gate. It was unveiled that the currently shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development was spending millions of dollars in lavishly priced subscriptions to "Politico Pro," one of those government-insider news products no one outside the bureaucracy reads.
Over there at The New York Post, Real Clear Investigations contributor Benjamin Weingarten snagged attention with this headline:
Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward their lapdog media
Weingarten writes:
AS the federal government’s outrageous spending draws the Trump administration’s hugely deserved scrutiny, one of this week’s many scandals is that We the Taxpayers have been shelling out millions to buy bureaucrats subscriptions to left-leaning media sources.
Yet as offensive as these expenditures are — and as grotesque as is the appearance of government rewarding its friendly propagandists with our money — it’s just a footnote to a far graver and more consequential scandal: That the feds have showered incalculably greater benefits on de facto regime media outlets by seeking to systematically suppress conservative and independent competitors through the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
Exactly.
There are two outrages here that Americans need to focus on.
The first is this business of using taxpayer dollars to “buy bureaucrats subscriptions to left-leaning media sources.”
Can you imagine…can you imagine????….if it were discovered that taxpayer dollars were being funneled to pay for bureaucrats subscriptions to any….say again any….conservative publication? Just imagine the heated indignation from the editorial pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post if it came to light that taxpayer funds were being paid for subscriptions to The American Spectator (where, full disclosure, I hang a hat) or National Review or The Washington Times or The New York Post or were somehow being used to support NewsBusters or the Media Research Center?
It takes no imagination to know the liberal outlets, upon learning that - not to mention learning federal dollars were buying positive media coverage for lefty policy - would, as the saying goes, freak out.
And here’s the kicker. If that were the case they should freak out.
The second problem is that federal tax dollars were being used to trample “free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms,” coercing social-media companies and other third parties “to moderate, de-platform or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
Which is exactly why President Trump has made it his business to sign an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Which aims to get the federal government out of the speech-policing game and deprive the censorship regime of the taxpayer dollars that are its lifeblood.
One of the problems generically with the federal government is that not every problem - every outrage?-gets caught by the media and winds up in headlines. Too much…way too much…slinks silently under the radar, hoping to be either ignored if not undiscovered entirely.
The investigation that Weingarten has written about in The New York Post is exactly an example of leftist bureaucrats hoping no one will notice their dalliance with federal censorship, not to mention hoping no one will notice they have been having their lefty media choices paid for by taxpayers instead of …ahem…themselves.
