The usually reliable David Carr pulls his foot off the pedal and guns the engine in his Monday NYT column. He's so dismayed by the horrendous business decisions made by major newspapers in recent years that he's prepared to see them go down in flames, serious reporting along with them, sooner than let the government come to the rescue of independent journalism.

Well, he wouldn't put it that way. But here are his actual words, speaking of last week's Senate hearings on what to do about the sinking ship of journalism:

Steve Coll, a former managing editor of The Washington Post and now a writer for The New Yorker, suggested that Congress should look at easing the restrictions of journalistic institutions trying to morph into nonprofits and begin replacing lost reporting by financing a beefed-up Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

After watching the previous administration treat the C.P.B. like a cat toy, it's hard to imagine that government would do any better job as publisher than many of the other state-controlled news media around the globe.

I've been hesitant to go whole-hog toward government subsidies, for the obvious reasons, but my sense is that we're running out of alternatives. We don't have to think of "the government" as all of a piece. Financing can be heavily insulated from control. Let's move to the next level and entertain some concrete ideas about how to do it. Instead, taking the Bush mob as the prototype of government subsidy for news
is like taking their Iraq expedition as the model for foreign policy. As Coll points outin the text of his testimony, Congress and the FCC already regulate broadcasting--not well enough, God knows, but the principle has been in place since 1934. The sociologist Paul Starr has amply demonstrated that America's vaunted independent journalism relied from the start on government subsidy in the form of the post office and below-market distribution rates.

Because George Bush installed the Reader's Digest veteran and thoroughbred breeder Kenneth Tomlinson to take charge of the CPB, does this mean that all government subsidy for journalism is tainted? That would be like saying that we should disband FEMA because Michael "Brownie" Brown was an incompetent. Give some control over a CPB board to a range of voices, including nominees by Congress, and you'll have taken a long stride toward improving the odds that decent reporting, a national need, survives the ineptitude of newspaper publishers.

As for global models of hands-off government subsidy that can be insulated from Big Brother's control by layers of autonomous professionals, the BBC and CBC are nothing to sneeze at. Neither is Britain's Channel 4, which set up an ingenious system for walling off commercial sponsors from program control.

Carr resorts to stick-figure cartoons when he insists: "Government bailouts, including special tax status, seem likely to kill independent journalism, not save it." A system of tax advantages for nonprofit newspapers owners, and a national endowment that pours money into serious reporting via local boards dominated by professional (platform-neutral) journalists does not amount to Carr's caricature of "a free press that serves at the pleasure of its government."

There never was a golden age when (in Carr's words)

publishers' business interests and the greater civic interest were perfectly aligned.

Coll is dead on when he writes: "The current crisis in journalism is not fundamentally a crisis in readership--it is a crisis of profitable readership." Leaving it to the inept, greedy, unlucky, and floundering managers of the nation's newspapers to save journalism without help would be like leaving it to the investment wizards at AIG to rescue the global credit system on their own.