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Dear Mr. Tribune: As a woman who toiled 20 years as a journalist, I beg of you. Be the adult in the room. Do not let the bullies beat up the weaklings. Be the wise farmer. Do not sell your chicken coops to foxes. In your case, you are not selling just newspapers. You are selling out the American people. Journalism doesn't pay anything, but I was never in it for the money. It was the love of the thing, and what I was taught about just how much journalists mattered to our way of life here in these United States of America. There are too few un-manipulated journalists now. An army of trained journalists with years of unafraid experience is even more critical to defend and maintain our democracy than is the military. Journalists, unlike most politicians must refuse to be steered away from the public good by special interests. Money should not be an issue. But the kind of journalist I am talking about is going extinct. 1.) because money is an issue, and 2.) because they are being hunted and targeted into extinction, by those who can overpaint the truth as being far too "liberal." And most Americans nowadays have no clue as to why this matters. It matters because they no longer get what they need to know. They get what they want to know, and what they already agree with. There's no corner on the truth on the Internet. Little of the information bomb is crafted by the honest trade. Free speech is not the same as a free press. We have too much of the former and very little of the latter. That's why government can barely function now. Parallel universes are forming that damage us all. Sell, and democracy as we know it rots some more. More sound government is flushed by those who want to do whatever they damn well please without anyone looking over their shoulder. Freedom for those in charge, yes. Freedom and justice for all, no. If it weren't for our fore-parents, government oversight, and unions, we too could be compelled to toil for $38 a month sewing the clothes we pay top dollar for in stores while buildings collapse all around us. Freedom for a few to to make a huge profit? Yes. Freedom for hundreds of dead garment workers? No. But some of us would do it …if we got hungry enough. Real journalists are democracy's doctors. If you were ill, would you abandon yours for an untrained tobacco industry executive? One who stood to make money if his "medical advice" actually made you much sicker? That is the kind of "specialist" we are handing our democracy to. Where is the army that will defend us from that? Who will remind us that we can be convinced to feel more outrage about a disability claim paid to an able-bodied depresso, than we feel about a bunch of billionaire bankers bilking the economy out of its riches and our retirees out of pensions in pyramid schemes. Which will go to jail? Who will put things in perspective when workers who make $200,000 per year believe they are over-taxed, while some billionaires bank offshore and pay nothing? No, Mr. Tribune, please do not take us there. The regulations that would have stopped you selling us out were likely lobbied away by some industry trade groups. No good journalist on your payroll would have participated. But on the other hand, the Koch brothers might have a shot at getting more of their position out there, as if they needed more help with that. The real value to the Koch Brothers, and the Grover Nordquists, and the ALECs, and the dwindling number of Americans scaling their own private piles of cash ever higher above us, is that such ownership moves us one step closer to driving the solid journalist, and in turn freedom and justice for all, one step closer to permanent extinction. When you tell me we are safe from that, we can talk about global warming. Fritzie Borgwardt Going Extinct