Hostages

Jack Schafer of Slate.com has a good article on the hostage taking that is done by government and big media regularly these days. First he takes government to task for holding essential services hostage (ie. Fire-fighting or Crime-fighting) in order to preserve the tax revenues that support other crappy/unnecessary services (ie. community centers/social services), and then he moves to big media claims of their importance to freedom of speech and how it's necessary to continue to patronize them in the face of better and more reliable sources of information. It's an interesting comparison.