Without a bailout, newspapers will lay off staff, fewer journalists will report important stories, there will be no Fourth-Estate check on state and corporate power, and the country will suffer. So goes the pro-democracy case for government and/or altruistic investors to save the newspaper industry with an infusion of cash.

It takes a lot for us to start feeling sorry for high-flying financial executives who, left unregulated by an administration that believed the free market should be free to do anything it wanted, destroyed our nation’s economy and wiped out our 401(k)s. But when politicians whip up such a frenzy of hatred against...

Thomas Frank is one of America’s most astute and witty political observers, and his latest best seller, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, exposes the Republican hard-liners’ transformation of the federal government into both a fount of privatized plunder and a nest of truly spectacular incompetence.