Alaskan Newspapers Stand Against Private Weather – Do yours?

I was pleased to see an Anchorage Daily News editorial coming out strongly against Sen. Santorum’s weather privatization (S. 786 ) bill reprinted in the Juneau Empire.

It was especially pleasing to see that both papers agree on the central issue:

This is privatization ideology run amok. Critics note the public already has paid for weather information once, when the government collects it. It shouldn’t have to pay some private sector middleman for the privilege of seeing it.

Cost isn’t the issue here. Thanks to the Internet, it costs the government very little to make information widely available. The issue is that a politician wants to hamstring a legitimate function of government so it’s easier for somebody to make a buck. Let the nation’s weather forecasters do their jobs without political interference. In Alaska, that work is particularly critical.

Have any of your state’s papers taken a stand for or against allowing private companies a monopoly on providing weather information? Let us know in the comments field!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.