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Perhaps the lesson of this episode will not be lost on certain other of my colleagues who have been floating the idea of government subsidies to news organizations as a response to the industry’s heavily self-publicized woes. Because unless you’re prepared to subsidize Ezra — unless, indeed, you’re prepared to subsidize everybody — you’re still giving government the power to decide who’s a journalist, or at least who’s an acceptable journalist.

If governments are not to be in the business of deciding who’s a journalist, or discriminating between them, you’d have to subsidize them all

How they respond to the Ezra Test will be fascinating to see. It’s one thing to say you don’t want the government interfering in his right to peddle his bile, but it’s quite another to defend forcing others to pay for it with their taxes: the strange personal vendettas, the recklessness with the facts, the blatant propagandizing, the frequent lawsuits, whether as plaintiff or defendant. It’s inconceivable.

To deny a subsidy to Levant, on the other hand, while doling it out to others, would invite charges of political bias — unavoidably, if not justifiably. As it is, Levant is quick to decry any criticism of his own bias as evidence of it in others, as if the reason he is so widely despised were not his habitual disregard for basic journalistic standards, not to mention common decency, but mere disagreement with his politics. That distinction would disappear altogether the moment governments started handing out funds.

Yet it is equally impossible the government could subsidize everyone. Perhaps its advocates imagine we still live in a media world made up of a handful of large newspapers, or a few dozen radio and television stations. But that world is gone. Never mind The Rebel: the business of journalism cannot now be meaningfully defined without reference to hundreds, no thousands of online outlets, from news and comment sites employing hundreds to individual bloggers. If governments are not to be in the business of deciding who’s a journalist, or discriminating between them, you’d have to subsidize them all. That way lies madness.