…for the Seattle Times, that local bastion of patrician conservatism, to reprint an essay from The Nation, that national bastion of defiant liberalism?

It takes a long screed in favor of government assistance to newspapers, direct or indirect.

Its co-author, Robert McChesney, is a scholar of media history and a longtime advocate against corporate consolidation in news and entertainment. What nobody except me seems to remember is he was a co-founder of The Rocket, the local rag that proclaimed the hotness of Seattle rock bands back when Seattle Weekly still ignored anyone born after 1950. It can be hard for younger or more recently-arrived folks to imagine a Seattle where the leading “alternative” paper was more culturally conservative than the local dailies. The rise of Seattle rock in the late 1980s was as much about DIY media as it was about DIY music.

After McChesney went off to Wisconsin for his Ph.D, he expanded his beliefs in indie media into a scholarly history, in books and essays, of U.S. corporate media and its discontents.

So it’s strange to see his words interpreted, by their placement in the Seattle Times, as a plea to bail out organizations like the Seattle Times.

Anyone familiar with McChesney’s larger body of work knows that’s not his real goal.