From Howard Kurtz’s WaPo column this week:

The question of government involvement is not merely theoretical. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino recently arranged a $200,000 development loan to rescue the Bay State Banner, the city’s only black-owned paper, which had ceased publishing.
Menino “knows that he has not purchased biased coverage from the Banner,” the weekly said in an editorial. “He was willing to run the risk of reviving an independent journalistic voice because he knows that at the end of the day, the Banner is good for Boston.” Forgive me for being skeptical about how the paper will cover its patron.

Having established this precedent, what principle would prevent Mayor Menino from arranging a loan for a buyer of the Boston Globe, now that the New York Times Co. is trying to unload it, after threatening to shut it down altogether? In a story on the loan to the Banner, Mayor Menino justified it in economic terms:

Menino told the Globe Thursday that he had offered the loan, and said it was not an attempt to curry favor, but an effort to “help a business that is very important to the minority community.”

Well, isn’t the Globe a business that’s very important to the whole community? Not everything’s a slippery slope, but this sure seems to be.