That said, the industry wouldn’t turn down some help from Congress, says John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.

Testifying at a House hearing this morning, Sturm says his group does like proposals that would let newspapers–and other businesses–change some of their accounting practices related to tax refunds (via net operating-loss provisions) and pension plans. Oh, and he’s in favor of a proposed law that would let papers operate as nonprofits while still generating advertising revenue.

The complete text of Sturm’s opening statement is embedded at the bottom of this post, and if you want to watch the hearing, organized by Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, it was streamed live (albeit choppily) here.

My political handicapping skills are nonexistent, but that said, I think there’s no chance of Congress passing a bill that singles out newspapers for aid. Local papers are still vitally important to local lawmakers, but many of those lawmakers’ constituents hate their papers, for all manner of offenses, real and imagined. I just can’t imagine what they’d do if they were told their tax dollars were going to support their local rag.

Still, I wouldn’t rule out some politically motivated pressure being applied to bogeymen like Craigslist and Google (GOOG), in the form of antitrust scrutiny or other arm-twisting.

JFS-Statement-Joint-Economic-Committee-092409-Hearing –

Here’s an unpleasant bouquet for Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes from Google CEO Eric Schmidt: An accounting move that places the value of Time Warner’s AOL at $5.5 billion, at least for now.

The move comes via Google’s (GOOG) fourth-quarter earnings: The company said it had written down the value of the $1 billion investment it made in AOL three years ago by $726 million.

Given that Google’s 2005 investment gave it a five percent stake in AOL and valued the service at $20 billion, the write-down pegs AOL’s new value at about $5.5 billion.

This is no big deal for Google, which also wrote off $355 million of its investment in Clearwire, the wireless provider. The losses are on paper, and the company certainly wasn’t banking on the investments for financial purposes.

And Schmidt didn’t sound broken up about it on the company’s earnings call this afternoon: “Both deals made sense to us then and make sense to us now.”

But this can’t be positive for for Bewkes, who had been trying until recently to get something like $7 billion for AOL. It’s not clear that Time Warner (TWX) or anyone else–chiefly Yahoo (YHOO)–thought anyone would pay that much after the economy collapsed this fall.

But it’s one thing to think that, and another to see it in black and white.

For instance, in 2002, Time Warner had to take a $54 billion write-down connected to its disastrous AOL deal. Today, the company has announced a $25 billion write-down, which is in part connected to… its disastrous AOL deal.

To be fair, most of that charge has nothing to do with AOL, but with problems in its cable business; spin-out company Time Warner Cable (TWC) announced a $15 billion write-down of its own. But while Time Warner doesn’t elaborate on the charges in its release–it just says they are “related to goodwill and identifiable intangible assets at the Cable, Publishing and AOL segments”–I’m told that some of the write-down does indeed relate to the original AOL deal from eight years ago.

Other problems at Time Warner aren’t of its own making: The company says it will also take a hit of $50 million to $60 million from a “restructuring of a lease for space in the Time & Life Building, held by a lessee who recently declared bankruptcy.” That tenant, I’m told, was Lehman Brothers.

In any case, as astonishing as these numbers look in print, they don’t have much to do with Time Warner’s performance as a company, in the present tense. But Time Warner had worrisome news on that front, too: “The economic environment has proved somewhat more challenging than the Company previously expected, particularly for the advertising businesses at the AOL and Publishing segments.” Sigh.