Cracks in the Pay Walls

[Thaddeus]

Cracks in the Pay Walls
http://www.savethenews.org/blog/09/08/24/cracks-pay-walls

Over the weekend, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times published a column urging Congress “to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival.”

Rutten is half-right. There is indeed a legitimate and an increasingly pressing need for government to intervene in the journalism crisis. But the policies Rutten prescribes would actually undermine the goals he professes to champion. Suspending antitrust protections to allow digital collusion, whereby newspapers erect online price-fixing schemes and place their content behind “pay walls,” is exactly the wrong policy to encourage democratic discourse.

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We need policies that rescue good assets from bad owners, return media production to the communities they serve, and transition old commercial media into a new public service media system.


Victor Pickard, SavetheNews.org