Free Flowing Internet Not the Bogeyman of Newspapers' Demise

Free Press

Big Media Myopia

by Timothy Karr

It’s hard to empathize with struggling newspapers when those running them continue to suffer from the short-sightedness that got their industry into a mess.

The editors at the Washington Post put on a display of such backward thinking on Saturday, when they published an op-ed by two lawyers from the influential D.C. firm Baker Hostetler.

In writing this op-ed, the lawyers hide certain conflicts of interest that should weigh heavily against their analysis. The Post ’s editors might have connected the dots for readers, but didn’t.

But the piece is just so stunningly stupid that it falls apart all by itself. In it, Esq. Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown call for reactionary legal measures that would stifle access to news and information and return us to the grand old days of consolidated ownership, bloated media giants and information gatekeepers.

To save journalism, Brown and Sanford argue, we must “eliminate ownership restrictions” and open floodgates to a new wave of media concentration.

We should also “grant an antitrust exemption” for consolidated media, allowing them to join together and wall off content from users. “Antitrust immunity is necessary because most individual news sites can’t go it alone,” they explain in the op-ed. “Readers will simply jump to sites that are still free.”

They urge readers to support more stringent copyright restrictions that would bar bloggers, Web sites and all others from the online sharing of even a small portion of mainstream media news content.

Nowhere in this silliness do they see the consolidation and walling off of news for what it is: more the real culprit in the demise of newspapers than is their favorite bogeyman — the free flowing Internet.

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