Washington Monthly - How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism
Policy Director Phillip Longman publishes a featured piece largely based on a pivotal report published by Longman/Open Markets and the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets on how the breakdown of journalism's business model is not the result of inherent features of the internet or of digital technology.
WASHINGTON - Open Markets Institute Policy Director Phillip Longman has a new piece featured as the Washington Monthly’s first cover story of 2024: “How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism.”
Longman’s piece is largely based on a pivotal report published by Longman/Open Markets and the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets on how 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, such as abandoning fair competition and antitrust law, that the Biden administration is already taking steps to correct.
The report, entitled “How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century,” was originally released at a September 2023 Center for Journalism and Liberty event featuring U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge, who leads the implementation of Canada’s journalist compensation law. The report examines why philanthropy, paywalls, and voluntary payments from Big Tech to a handful of major outlets like the New York Times is not nearly enough to protect and sustain the independent news content on which an informed, democratic citizenry relies.
“By repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press,” Longman writes in The Monthly.
Instead, government must step in, as it has many times in U.S. history, in order to prevent further corporate control over the health and sustainability of essential communications and independent news (A complementary paper from Open Markets Senior Legal Analyst Daniel Hanley provides further analysis on how antimonopoly has been a critical feature of the American competition policy in the media, communications, and information industries throughout U.S. history).
"On current course, by the end of 2024 the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. In more than half of all U.S. counties, people either have no access to local news from any source or have to rely on a single surviving outlet, usually a weekly newspaper,” Longman’s piece reads.
Fortunately, as Longman points out, the Biden administration is already taking important steps to repair the damage, as are governments around the world (learn more from the Center for Journalism & Liberty’s Fair Compensation Frameworks Tracker).
“But perversely, the press itself barely covers the story while many reporters and editors, including some of the industry’s “thought leaders,” remain focused on individual actions or on small-bore reforms that are not remotely adequate to the problem,” Longman writes.
“It’s time to wake up and join the big fight.”
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Read full article here.