Jeff Jarvis is attending the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands' Institutions of Democracy and discussing the First Amendment and government support for media with mass communications professor Timothy Cook (Gov Giveth and Gov Taketh Away).

Various ideas were raised by respondents that made my spine shake: taxing ads to support publications with fewer ads, giving postal subsidies only to publications below a circulation threshold, government search engines.

There is insight here: the government shapes our communications environment far more than we realize. However, these ideas for direct subsidy seem to do both too much and too little. Too much in that they invite all sorts of governmental decisions about what sort of content and media should be subsidized and too little in that they don't address the structural and architectural elements of our communications infrastructure.

Telecomm (and I'm not talking about the distraction about "media ownership") and copyright law are the real powers that shape our communications environment. You want to talk about government helping media, that is where you have to look.