The New York Times featured research by CCLP Director Geoffrey Cowan and Senior Fellow David Westphal, which found that though American newspapers have relied on government subsidies since this country’s founding, that support has dropped sharply in the last four decades. “The knee-jerk reaction tends to be that government can’t get involved,” Cowan said. “We think it’s important for people to understand that the government has been involved from the beginning, and that the subsidies were much larger in the past.”