Report | How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century
Our democracy depends on a free and independent press. As news organizations continue to pursue major layoffs and more and more media outlets disappear altogether, public access to reliable information declines and our democracy is threatened.
A new report from the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute shows this does not have to be the case -- that the breakdown of journalism's business model is not the result of inherent features of the internet or of digital technology, as many believe. Rather, the crisis largely derives from wide ranging policy failures over the last 40 years, abandoning fair competition and antitrust law, that the Biden administration is already taking steps to correct.
A complementary paper from Open Markets Senior Legal Analyst Daniel Hanley provides an expanded narrative of the historical background by closely examining how antimonopoly has been a critical feature of the American competition policy in the media, communications, and information industries.
Historically, Americans used a broad range of government policies to ensure that access to advertising revenue flowed primarily to journalists and others involved in production of creative content, rather than to gatekeepers, as they do in the digital age.
These policies included extensive use of antitrust enforcement and other regulation to ensure that owners of key communications infrastructure, such as the telegraph and telephone, did not engage in adjacent line of business such a news gathering, publishing or advertising, while also being prohibited from selling their users’ personal information to marketers or giving some users terms of service than others.
Today, governments around the world are already moving to restore fair competition on several fronts. These include major U.S. Justice Department lawsuits charging Google with monopolizing digital advertising technologies and breaking fair competition laws in order to become the dominant search engine. The Supreme Court will also hear cases this session that could have broad ranging implications for the political economy of the internet and journalism.
New laws and legislative proposals in many countries would also, importantly, address surveillance advertising and help news publishers negotiate with platforms for fair compensation. The Center for Journalism and Liberty tracks and examines the progress of fair compensation laws and legislation globally.
If we once again apply tried-and-true competition policies to our media and communications sectors, we can make enormous progress in sustaining the free and independent journalism on which our democracy depends.