Over one hundred representatives from corporate media companies around the country will be in DC this month, pushing Congress to once again take up the repeatedly-nixed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a bailout bill for the legacy media industry, and perhaps one of the most-revived bills of all time.
The bill would allow some of the nation’s largest legacy media companies to form a legal cartel, immune from antitrust law, to pressure tech companies for special favors. The cartel could force tech giants, through arbitration, to funnel massive amounts of ad revenue to media companies owned by the likes of Hearst and Gannett — giant corporations with billions of dollars in revenue. A similar law in Canada recently prompted Google and Facebook to shut down all news links in the country.
Despite the media’s relentless lobbying for the bill, it has become widely derided across the political spectrum, with both conservatives and progressives opposing it. So too have non-partisan experts, including a former antitrust enforcer who told Congress that there is “nothing this country needs less” than a media cartel.
Allies of the legacy media in Congress have tried every trick in the book to get the JCPA passed, including a failed last-ditch attempt to add it to the annual defense spending bill at the end of 2022. Despite the defeats, the media is determined to get its bailout.
Communications Daily, a journal tracking communications regulation, reported earlier this month that the media industry would send a swarm of representatives to lobby Congress this month, with hopes of reviving the JCPA before the end of the year.
Via Communications Daily:
Advocates for the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) will kick off a renewed push for the bill’s passage later this month with a fly-in of 100 representatives from newsrooms all over the U.S. to talk to lawmakers, said News Media Alliance President Danielle Coffey in an interview. Supporters are aiming for the bill to have an early reintroduction in September or October — possibly bolstered by Facebook’s recent blockage of news links in Canada — but the Republican-controlled House is a major hurdle. “We’re not going to see any antitrust legislation come out of the House Judiciary Committee in the foreseeable future,” said Josh Rogin, Computer & Communications Industry Association’s vice president-federal affairs.
The Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), has said that despite Democrat efforts, the JCPA is “dead in the House.”
The bill has numerous other Republican opponents, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Steve Daines (R-MT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), Mike Braun (R-IN), Katie Britt (R-AL), and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Ben Cline (R-VA).
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.
