Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask Congress for Help With Their Newspapers
Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask
Congress for Help With Their Newspapers
By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun | July 10, 2017
It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily
trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich
individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better
negotiating power against other rich individuals.
Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special
treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos
(worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York
Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren
Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a
helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin
($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion).
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president
and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives
of Bezos-Slim-and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an
economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the
effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.”
Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of
the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he
bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to
the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of
bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test.
In respect of the Times, it’s particularly comical,
because, as an editorial matter, the paper generally favors stricter antitrust
enforcement. The newspaper that less than two years ago was editorializing that
Congress “should also study whether there are ways to strengthen the antitrust
laws,” now is backing the move for what its own columnist describes as “an
anticompetitive safe haven,” “a limited antitrust exemption.”
One of Robert Bork’s scholarly insights was that if
there’s any logic to enforcing antitrust laws or enacting them in the first
place, it is with a eye toward protecting consumers. The publishers contend
that news is a kind of special case because consumers are harmed by a decline
in news quality. Or, as the Times quoted Mr. Chavern, “If you want a free news
model, you will get news...But it will be garbage news.”
I’m a paying, seven-day-a-week print newspaper subscriber
who earns a living as a journalist primarily on the basis of people’s
willingness to pay for news. So I sympathize on some level with what Mr.
Chavern is saying. But even I can see that his argument is, to use his own
term, “garbage.”
Some excellent news — the CBS Evening News in its Walter
Cronkite heyday, “60 Minutes,” — is and was “free” to consumers, who paid with
their willingness to be subjected to commercials. In this past election, the
prediction model of the expensive, paid New York Times was just as wrong as
that of the free Huffington Post. Nate Silver had a better prediction over at
ESPN’s free website.
Even if you buy the questionable idea that more expensive
news automatically equals better news, it’s a further, and even more tenuous,
logical leap from that idea to the notion that Congress ought to interpose
itself on one side of a set of business negotiations to make it easier for the
publishers to make their news more expensive to consumers, or their ads more
expensive to advertisers.
If publishers want to permit competing suppliers to
negotiate prices and terms on a cooperative basis, then let them support
changing the law to allow it in every industry, without special treatment for
journalistic enterprises.
The Google-Facebook world has taken advertising and
subscription revenue dollars out of publisher pockets. But it’s been a huge
boon to marketers and to readers. Advertisers can now reach targets more
efficiently at a fraction of what they used to pay for print ads, and readers
can now get news from a variety of sites and editors and journalists, from Matt
Drudge to Mike Allen to Glenn Reynolds, rather than having to rely on the
judgment of their one hometown newspaper editor.
Not even Congress has the power to turn back that clock
to the old days. Nor would anyone with any sense want it to, other than someone
lucky (or unlucky) enough to have inherited a newspaper, or foolish enough to
have overpaid for one.
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