Posts tagged with 'newspapers'
What Role Will Government Play?
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Lawmakers are increasingly stepping up to address the crisis in the journalism business. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter in March 2009 to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the Justice Department to consider an antitrust exemption to help newspapers survive. The public benefit of saving newspapers might outweigh historical concerns about anti-competitive behavior. In Connecticut, among other places, lawmakers are also intervening to keep newspapers alive. Pelosi’s letter prompted a House Judiciary Committee hearing the following month about problems in the newspaper industry.
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen. “There is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems,” said Sascha Meinrath, Research Director for the New America Foundation, during a speech at eComm in March 2009. (more…)
