CIA to buy Knight Ridder?

This is a very interesting articile in slate magizen. What do you all think. Should the goverment run a news paper business?


Sell Knight Ridder to the CIAOr, how spooks are like (and unlike) reporters.By Jack ShaferPosted Friday, Dec. 9, 2005, at 9:38 PM ET
Now that a major Knight Ridder Inc. stockholder has put the company into play, I suggest the Central Intelligence Agency purchase the 32-newspaper chain. Now, I anticipate the predictable protests from readers that a press controlled or owned by the government is but a propaganda organ, and the objections of Knight Ridder foreign correspondents made skittish by the prospect of becoming the targets of kidnappers and assassins. But the acquisition complements the Open Source Center founded last month to "track and manage unclassified data" from CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The new operation will gather and analyze such unclassified information as Web sites, blogs, mosque sermons, databases, and even T-shirt slogans. The center will absorb the CIA's existing open-source holding, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, set up in the 1940s to translate foreign publications and broadcasts for the agency.
Knight Ridder employees don't have that much to fear. The company has a stellar reputation because—unlike the CIA—it has never toppled a foreign government, attempted to poison a foreign leader, or doped an unsuspecting U.S. citizen with LSD to see how he would react. As long as the agency keeps its newspaper operations separate from its clandestine work, we shouldn't expect to lose more than five or six reporters to hostile forces each year. It sounds bad, but under current market conditions, it's a better deal than a buyout.


http://www.slate.com, to read the whole story.