News Media Alliance's Chavern 'Optimistic' About JCPA
News Media Alliance (NMA) President David Chavern is “optimistic” about the future of the proposed Journalism Competition Protection Act and favors changing Communications Decency Act Section 230 to reduce liability protections for tech companies, he told the Media Institute at the group’s virtual luncheon Wednesday. “We’re responsible for the decisions we make; the platforms are responsible for the decision they made,” Chavern said.
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The way antitrust laws treat tech platforms is backward, Chavern said. “Current antitrust laws protect Google and Facebook from us.” The JCPA would create a temporary exception to those laws to allow news organizations to collectively bargain with tech companies for the right to share their news content. It has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, Chavern said. Both parties are concerned about the fate of local news in their communities, he said. Legislators supporting the bill “see a fundamental unfairness” in the current arrangement, he said.
Chavern scoffed Wednesday at the characterization of the collective bargaining as a “cartel,” saying the news organizations wouldn’t have anticompetitive market power compared with “the overwhelming economic might” of a company such as Google. Meta and Google didn’t comment.
The JCPA won’t lead to platforms dropping news content from their platforms and search results because the bill contains provisions “to prevent retaliation by the platforms to de-index or deprioritize news content,” said NMA General Counsel Danielle Coffey in an interview. Tech platforms won’t choose to stop carrying news content altogether because doing so would likely backfire on them when the public is unable to access needed information, she said. “That backlash, and also the economic reality of ‘removing news’ especially in such a large market as the U.S.” makes such a scenario “highly unlikely,” she said. There was such a backlash in Australia after Facebook took down content in response to that country’s enactment of policies similar to the JCPA, she said. Policies similar to those proposed in the bill have been “revolutionary” in Australia, Chavern told the Media Institute.
Chavern said one problem with the way tech platforms handle news reports is that news organizations’ branding “gets stripped away.” “The reader thinks that Facebook wrote it; that’s one of the ways Facebook extracts value out of the content without compensating us.”
Changes to Section 230 would correct an inequity between tech platforms and news entities, Chavern said. News organizations are liable for their content, and tech platforms should be held responsible for the choices they make on what information is displayed in what priority or format, he said. One person’s Google search results look different from another’s, said Chavern. Tech companies “make billions” from editorial decisions without having to face liability, he said.
Chavern said more people are willing to pay to view online news content. “We have just started to understand the capacity and willingness of readers to pay,” said Chavern. “It is much more than anybody ever expected.”
Asked about the fate of proposed legislation to protect journalists from physical attacks, Chavern NMA still strongly supports it, but he hasn’t received any updated news on its progress (see 2202110048).