Desperate to fend off online competition, lobbyists for corporate media companies have renewed their efforts to pass the Journalistic Competition and Protection Act (JCPA), a bill that would create a media cartel in the United States with the ability to mass-press big tech companies. bail they are out financially.
The bill, which was previously in limbo, was due to be reviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week and was delayed until September.
Newsmax now supports a bill that would force tech companies to provide more revenue to companies like BuzzFeed. The newspaper “The New York Times, and Washington Post, those who have spent the past year and a half branding the conservative movement as rebellious enemies of democracy.
Newsmax boss Chris Ruddy (ABC/Screenshot)
(JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
Proponents of the bill say it’s designed to bail out local news outlets, but many of them are owned by both national and international conglomerates whose publications spread fake news like the Russiagate narrative.
Newsmax’s owner and CEO, Chris Ruddy, posted a column on the channel’s website defending the JCPA, arguing that it’s a tribute to conservative media, with tech companies, censorship and algorithms manipulation.
In this space, the media overwhelmingly supported the censorship of independent media and the artificial distribution of their own content, to the point of fueling advertisers’ boycotts of Facebook for inadequately censoring conservative content.
The day after Ruddy’s article, Newsmax published a second article promoting the cartel law by Mike Davis, founder of the Internet Accountability Project (IAP).
The IAP is an advocacy group based in Washington, DC, allied with the enemies of big tech, but many of the enemies of big tech, such as the big media companies that pushed this bill, are not necessarily enemies of censorship.
As Breitbart News previously reported, Davis worked at Google as a liaison officer with GOP lawmakers before becoming a crusader against big tech.
Davies’ work resonates with Ruddy so much that it is as if it were a rewrite of Ruddy’s. It even starts with the same folktale about the newspaper on your porch.
From Ruddy’s article:
Gone are the days when journalists on bikes dropped newspapers at your door.
Today your news brings in billionaires from big tech companies who most likely check what you see, cover up news they don’t like, and even make a lot of money doing it.
From Davis’ article:
Twenty years ago you probably went out on the porch to get the morning paper or turned on the TV to watch the news before work.
Ten years ago, you probably went straight to your favorite news site to find out what was going on in your community and across the country.
Right now, you’re probably browsing Facebook, Twitter, Google or YouTube to keep up to date with the latest happenings.
Supporters of the JCPA, which includes the world’s largest and most liberal media companies, know they need ten Republican senators to pass any bill.
As such, they presented the law to conservatives as a blow to Big Tech, even though it would deepen the collusion between Big Tech and the corporate media, which has been relentlessly censoring it for the past five years.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), both of whom opposed the bill, drew attention to the fact that the bill allows collusion between media and big tech companies.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) also opposed the bill, saying it would lead to more censorship by conservatives.
GOP House leadership also opposed the bill, with GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) denouncing it as “the antithesis of conservatism” and senior Judiciary Committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) criticized Senate Democrats for reviving the bill.
Normally, this level of opposition from the Republican Party would be enough to kill such a bill, which is a moderate priority for Democrats. But well-funded media lobbyists have been raising him from the dead for the past two years, and Newsmax articles are the latest example.
Few people, apart from media lobbyists and charity-seeking news companies, supported the bill, which received criticism from all sides and from all ideological lines.
Conservatives oppose the bill. Earlier this year, Dan Gaynor, vice president of the Center for Media Studies and longtime journalist, told senators that the JCPA has helped major media companies destroy both local and independent media. Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Symington and President Trump’s chief technical expert Adam Kandeub also oppose the bill.
The left opposes the bill. Public Knowledge, a progressive nonprofit founded by Biden’s far-left FCC candidate Gigi Son, also opposes the bill. In a message to its activists, Public Knowledge echoed the Media Research Center’s argument that the JCPA supports the largest media companies – a rare partisan deal.
Liberals oppose the bill. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the leading liberal nonprofit on Internet policy in the US, agreed, saying the bill supports “near-media monopolies”.
The world’s most respected journalists oppose the bill. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald testified against the bill in 2021, warning of collusion between America’s biggest media companies.
Antitrust experts oppose the bill. At a later hearing, former federal antitrust regulator and Harvard attorney Dr. Daniel Francis said of the national media cartel that would create the JCPA “couldn’t think of anything the country needs more now or always.”
Despite this, media lobbyists continue to revive the law, a sign of how desperate they are for government-approved help from tech companies.
Source: Breitbart
