Scottish Government Moves to Prop Up Media

(MoneyWatch)  The government of Scotland, like most governments, buys advertising in local media about social programs and issues. Now as reported in The Sunday Herald they are looking at expanding their use of this advertising to include tourism, development and health services. This is not even a broad expansion of that as a lot of U.S. government entities already do things like that. One of the reasons given is interesting though. They would do this to make up for the lack of private advertising available with the downturn in the world economy. Think of it as a media bailout. There has been joking in the U.S. that the legacy media, especially print, would be asking for a government bailout after the banks and automakers. People in Scotland seem to be already thinking of something like that. I guess they could just buy the stations and nationalize them.