Newspapers, you see are dying. As Salon co-founder Gary Kamiya argues:

Journalism as we know it is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate, and the survivors are slashing their budgets. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. No print publication is immune, including the mighty New York Times … 2008 was the worst year in history for newspaper publishers, with shares dropping a stunning 83 percent on average. Newspapers lost $64.5 billion in market value in 12 months.

Australia is not immune. Today the Fairfax group is trading at a share price of below $1.

Increasingly, thinking commentators are forming the view that there may be a role for the public support of quailty journalism and newspapers. In France, President Sarkozy has stumped up a 600 million euro package to do just that.

And in Australia? Here we are fortunate to have a rare working model of just how the donation of public money can suport quality journalistic endeavour. The example is the monthly Australian Literary Review a liftout published by The Australian newspaper — a sterling contribution to Auastralian intellectual and literary life only made possible by public funding of nigh on $500,000 a year. The money comes as an annual grant of around $150,000 from the Austalian government (through the Australia Council) and some $350,000 from various Melbourne University entities.

The Australian is thus, by a mile, the most heavily subsidised publication in the country.

Which is a fine thing. Curious then that the newspaper should editorialise, as it did last week, against the very concept:

The hand-wringers at Crikey are dead wrong. The death of a masthead would sadden all journalists, but companies deserve to fail if they produce products nobody wants, or cannot adapt to the modern world. Newspapers have a special role in democratic societies. But using government money to prop up failing papers would place them in an impossible conflict of interest.

Which is nothing more than extraordinary, hypocritical, breathless cant.

There are tough decisions for media people in the next couple of days, of where public interest ends and mawkish prurience begins, of just how far media can intrude and in whose service it does that. The fact that two people lost in each other and their relief are oblivious to the intrusion of the cameras does not mean the media hasn’t made an unseemly invasion.

Good lord what can they mean? It’s been one of those weeks in which the politics of politics resolutely becomes the story. But here, with this little effort, The Australian has gone to the head of the class. What they mean, of course, is that Malcolm Turnbull has reclaimed the natural ascendency that conservatives have when it comes to the discussion of serious things like Economics. Regular readers will recall the doggedness with which the paper held to the notion through last year that whatever the headline polling figures might say, John Howard’s edge as “preferred economic manager” would see the Liberals through.

Yup. This headline says some troubling things about the quality of our political discussion. The fact is that the only economic debate that seems to count in this country is the meta-chat about who said what in talking the whole thing down, about where inflation came from and under whose watch. There is no particular difference in actual economic approach between the two major parties. There is no discussion, other than the sort of cheap inward looking talk that follows an overlong examination of competing navels.

We’d be better served if the discussion got real. People are poor. Kids sleep on the streets. Houses are expensive. Hospitals struggle to cope. Teachers are paid a pittance. Rivers are running dry. The Australian economy bobs like a cork in a turbulent global pool. Regional communities are dysfunctional and in decline. Malcolm Turnbull has reclaimed nothing.