What's antitrust got to do with journalism?
22 Apr 2009
The Guild Reporter
 Bernie Lunzer testifies. (photo by Andy Zipser) |
If Congress holds a hearing and no one comes, did it happen?
That pretty much describes Tuesday's events on Capitol Hill, when the handful of Representatives who showed up for a hearing of the Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy were outnumbered by the panelists addressing them. Nor was the audience much larger, although at one point a group of high schoolers filled the hearing room to overflowing--then left less than 20 minutes later.
The apparent lack of interest rebuked the frequent claim made at the hearing that nothing less than the fate of democracy itself is at stake. And while "A New Age for Newspapers: Diversity of Voices, Competition and the Internet," was held to question whether newspapers should be exempted from antitrust restraints to ensure their survival, it quickly became a venue for one speaker after another to offer his (all were male) passionate praise or condemnation of journalism, newspapers or "the press" in more general terms. Even paper-less Fox News became part of the mix.
Most on point was Carl Shapiro, a deputy assistant attorney general comprising a panel of one. Acknowledging that newspapers are facing "significant pressures," Shapiro noted that antitrust enforcement exists to promote competition and innovation -- which, indeed, is now occurring within the newspaper industry, "with different participants adopting different strategies for survival and success."
"This is the essence of the competitive process that the [Justice Department's antitrust] division is dedicated to protecting," he said, before concluding that the department's approach "is forward looking and flexible enough" without any changes in existing antitrust laws. The assertion essentially rebuffed a trial balloon floated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on behalf of MediaNews and Hearst, which want antitrust rules relaxed in northern California so they can combine some of their operations.
Yet while Hearst and MediaNews were the catalysts for yesterday's three-hour talk-a-thon, neither of those large newspaper chains was represented at the hearing. Instead, the sole publisher on the second, six-man panel was Brian Tierney, chief executive of Philadelphia Newspapers, who avoided mentioning his extremely short-lived newspaper career while playing up two aspects of his situation that bear no relationship to either Hearst or MediaNews: that he represents local ownership of hometown newspapers, and that he's in bankruptcy court.
Also on the panel were Bernie Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, who contended that further relaxing antitrust restrictions will only accelerate newspaper monopolies, thereby perpetuating a downward spiral of layoffs and closings. John Nichols, self-styled "American journalist," asked the subcommittee "to recognize, as did the founders, that journalism and democracy are closely linked" and that with the former under attack, so is the latter. He was off-set by Dan Gainor of the right-wing Media Research Center, who argued that much of the mess in which newspapers find themselves is of their own making because of their rabid liberalism -- and a pox on them all. Treading a more scholarly middle ground, complete with extensively foot-noted testimony, were Ben Scott of Free Press and C. Edwin Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The eclectic mix and lack of focus resulted in a remarkably wide-ranging litany of ills and just a smattering of possible responses. Depending on who was speaking, the newspaper industry is in dire straits because of near-criminal mismanagement, crushing debt burdens, the internet and its impact on advertising revenue, the current recession and its impact on advertising revenue, rampant ideological bias and consequent loss of public trust -- or, in Tierney's view, the inability of publishers even to talk to each other for fear of antitrust prosecution. Several panelists contended that it's really not newspapers but journalism itself that's at stake, and that if some way could be found to save the latter, a loss of the former wouldn't be all that much of a tragedy.
The big stumper, at the hearing as throughout the news industry, is figuring out a business model that can underwrite the kind of extensive reporting that newspapers have historically provided and which no other medium has been able to supply at a comparable level. The apparent lack of such a model provides much of the economic impetus to the newspaper industry's consolidation and collapse, and it's also the reason why at least some members of Congress are beginning to question whether government has a role to play. In Scott's words, "The future of journalism is a policy issue" -- an assertion that alarms many journalists and politicians alike.
Government help for the media is hardly a novel idea. As pointed out by Baker, for example, the Founding Fathers recognized the importance of subsidizing newspapers by creating postal subsidies that today would be worth $6 billion. A modern alternative, he added, would be to give newspapers a tax credit for half of each journalist's salary, to a maximum of $45,000 a year, creating a disincentive for newsroom layoffs. Nichols, meanwhile, observed that some European countries allow taxpayers to deduct the cost of their newspaper subscriptions, which encourages newspaper readership "without sending that money down the rat hole of existing newspaper companies."
Notably absent during the hearing was any questioning of the applicability of antitrust law, which is grounded in economics, to the essentially political question of how newspapers can be preserved -- in subcommittee chairman Hank Johnson's words -- as a "fourth branch of government." And while Rep. John Conyers Jr. said he was intrigued by the suggestion that some sort of national strategy is needed to save newspapers, he and the few other House members attending the hearing expressed uncertainty about how such a strategy might be developed. On that score, the politicians are no more astute than the businessmen or the journalists.