Obama in his press conference:

In this context, my administration will offer General Motors adequate working capital over the next 60 days. During this time, my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan.
They must ask themselves: have they consolidated enough unprofitable brands? Have they cleaned up their balance sheets or are they still saddled with so much debt that they can’t make future investments? And above all, have they created a credible model for how to not only survive, but succeed in this competitive global market?

Maybe because I keep seeing all this stuff about the government possibly bailing out the newspaper business, I couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if Obama had offered a similar directive to a newspaper seeking a bailout:

In this context, my administration will offer The New York Times adequate working capital over the next 60 days. During this time, my team will be working closely with the Times to produce a better business plan.
They must ask themselves: have they consolidated enough unprofitable sections? Do they have too much foreign coverage? Do they need to merge their book reviews into the op-ed section? Perhaps they need more online content? And above all, have they created a credible model for how to not only survive, but succeed in this competitive global market?

I don’t have any grand point to make, but it’s interesting to think about for all sorts of reasons. Or at least I think it is.