Not surprising

New appointee calls for newspaper bailout.

Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping "direct government support for public media" and creating licenses to govern news operations.

"Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off," she wrote in her parting column on April

Let me state again, I am against the government bailouts, but any interference in the news just scares the hell out of me. The news has shifted to a new medium. Before print it was the town crier, not to mention papers have come and gone for ages and will to continue to be around, just not in the form you want.
I would also like to ask her a question. When she says foolish policies, is she talking about left leaning tilt of the papers?
This next statement struck me as funny;

But critics say her proposal would spell an end to the independent media and make journalists reliant lapdogs.

As if they weren't already were:

A columnist for four years at the Times, Brooks this week joined the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, the principal adviser to the Pentagon's top brass. She retains her post as a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and during the Clinton administration served as a senior adviser to the State Department.
As jobs are axed and papers felled across the country, many journalists have sought work elsewhere. A number have gone to work for the Obama administration, including Chicago Tribune correspondent Jill Zuckman; Time magazine's Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney; former L.A. Times reporter Peter Gosselin; and Warren Bass, once the Washington Post's deputy editor.

When 90% of the reporters vote for one party and can go from working for papers to Dem. Administrations, to back to working for papers it kind of tells you what lapdogs they really are. With more and more former newspaper people working for the new administration, I can see some kind of "bailout" coming down the pipe. Maybe not this year, but soon, when the heat is off, snuck into to some omnibus bill, that will dramatically affect the future of reporting. This must not happen. A press beholden to the government is not a free press.
/soapbox put away