Marc Joffe
Marc Joffe
Two bills in the California State Legislature propose to transfer wealth from social media companies to local news providers. Although the rhetoric behind these bills sounds worthy, their ultimate effect will be to lower the barrier between the state and a free press envisioned in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
The narrative underlying these bills is well known to media consumers: internet behemoths have sucked the life out of local journalism, depriving residents of information about local governments and community organizations. By taxing firms like Google and Meta and distributing the proceeds to local media, legislators propose to counter this trend.
A big question that such a policy raises is that of which organizations should receive the proceeds. If elected officials and bureaucrats can pick and choose which newspapers and broadcasters to subsidize, they can reward sympathetic journalists. Those not receiving funds at first may change their coverage to favor politically preferred interests to obtain future funding.
To his credit, the author of California’s newest journalism bill, SB 1327, has attempted to make the subsidies formula‐based, constraining the ability of state officials to pick favorites. But the complicated eligibility criteria leave the door open to discretion.
SB 1327 would offer tax credits to local media companies and grants to non‐profit media concerns to the extent that they provide “qualified services,” which are defined as “gathering, preparing, recording, directing the recording of, producing, collecting, photographing, writing, editing, reporting, presenting, or publishing original local community news for dissemination to the local community.”
Although the legislation contains an extended definition of a “local community,” it does not provide a definition of “news.” That omission is especially critical today when journalists have largely abandoned the twentieth‐century goal of objective reporting in favor of mixing fact and opinion. As professors at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism recently observed:
Newsroom leaders are confronting a generation of increasingly diverse young journalists struggling to reconcile traditional news standards with their concepts of “cultural context,” “identity,” “point of view,” and “advocacy journalism.”
If journalists do not even agree among themselves about the distinction between news and opinion, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/should-government-redistribute-media-income