A lifeline

The Build Back Better bill that passed the House of Representatives before Thanksgiving promises to pay the first $25,000 of the salary of local journalists who work at newspapers, websites, radio and TV stations. This assistance is for one year; it is $15,000 for four years thereafter. This subsidy to support local journalism totals $1.67 billion.

It’s a plan that a nation dedicated to freedom of the press should never consider, but, given the reality of the news business in this age of social media, may need to if democracy is to survive.

The problem this federal legislation hopes to address is well known. Between 2008 and 2020, newsroom employees at U.S. newspapers plummeted from 71,000 to 31,000, a drop of 57 percent. Since 2014, 2,100 newspapers have printed their final edition. Across large swaths of the country, especially in the South and Rocky Mountain region, many counties are now considered news deserts. There are 200 U.S. counties that have no newspaper at all.

Think of a county with no newspaper. It is a county without crime write-ups, no high school sports coverage, church schedules or Christmas concert photographs. It is also a county without school board news, a county board report or any objective witness to say what happened when the mayor started yelling at the city council member at last Wednesday night’s turbulent meeting. Without local journalism, democracy, thread by thread, starts to unravel.

We would like to think that a healthy news marketplace should be able to solve all of these ills. We believe in capitalism, markets and competition.

Yet the media market in the United States is not healthy. It is unfairly tilted towards large internet and social media companies, such as Facebook and Google. The unfair advantage these internet companies have over newspapers is part of federal law. Precisely, it is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

What this single sentence does is shield internet and social media companies from lawsuits that keep newspaper publishers and television and radio executives up at night. Newspapers, along with their sibling media, can be sued for wrong, harmful or libelous content. The internet companies can’t. Newspaper owners are publishers. The internet companies are platforms.

This 1996 legal dodge opened the barn door for internet companies to offer content that traditional media would never dare publish, including fake reports, vindictive personal attacks, revenge porn, one-sided political rants, including calls for violence, and content meant to turn children into media addicts. The dodge created giant companies with mass followings and, in turn, huge advertising revenues. Newspapers, along with other media, have suffered.

We would far prefer never to see government sponsor private media. Our druthers would be to see newspapers, websites, radio stations, social media and television stations all compete in a fair marketplace without government subsidies where we are all free to say what we want but also be held responsible for what we say.

But that won’t happen while Section 230 is on the books and, until that bit of law is repealed, we see the need to keep local community papers going, either through subsidizing the pay of journalists or, taking a different approach, making advertising in local newspapers tax exempt.

Here, in central Wisconsin, we are lucky. There are five newspapers in Clark County. There are three in Marathon County, along with a news website and an arts and entertainment news publication. Yet, we all struggle to stay afloat.

With mixed feelings, we appreciate a Build Back Better bill that would throw us, and, in turn, American democracy, a lifeline.

Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review