America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
DIDN'T MARK ZUCKERUNT ELECT THE WORST PRESIDENT IN MODERN U.S. HISTORY? - Senator Josh Hawley Opposes Media Cartel Plan
Exclusive — Senator Josh Hawley Opposes Media Cartel Plan
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) will oppose the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), his spokesman told Breitbart News on Tuesday night.
Hawley’s formal opposition to the JCPA represents one of the final remaining Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who was not formally on record in favor of the proposal or against it. Hawley’s spokesman, Phil Letsou, confirmed to Breitbart News that the Senator is opposed to the bill on Tuesday evening. Hawley has also apparently been skeptical of the plan for a long time, and opposes antitrust exemptions like the one the JCPA would create for media outlets.
Hawley joins several others, including Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), and more from the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposing the legislation. He also joins other top Republicans like House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy in his opposition to the plan.
Some establishment Republicans like Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—as well as Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)—have signed on to the legislation. Kennedy, the lead GOP sponsor of the bill alongside lead Democrat sponsor Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the U.S. Senate, has however expressed concerns with the deep structural flaws in the proposal as Breitbart News reported earlier on Tuesday. Kennedy’s office challenges the characterization that he expressed concerns with the bill, but admitted that he pushed for several changes to the original plan—an admission by his office that the senator himself knows that the plan he proffered was flawed and unworthy of conservative support from the outset.
Several Republicans and conservatives believe that the changes made to the bill make the plan even worse and do nothing to help conservatives. In fact, one that Kennedy’s office highlighted in conversations with Breitbart News earlier on Tuesday would create a private right of action for outlets not included in media cartels that the antitrust exemption would create so they could sue in court for being excluded. While Kennedy’s office—who insists the senator still supports the proposal but claims he admits it was flawed from the outset—points to that as some kind of conservative victory, in reality, the addition of the private right of action is an admission by the bill’s lead GOP sponsor in the U.S. Senate that this proposal will in fact discriminate against conservatives and others with viewpoints that veer off the mainstream of what the establishment media believes.
The JCPA in theory would allow various media organizations an antitrust exemption to be able to collectively bargain payment plans from big tech companies that carry their content on their platforms. The thinking from proponents is that it would allow media outlets to band together to challenge the power of big tech, but critics worry that it would only embolden two of arguably the worst industries in the United States: the media and tech giants. Proponents of the plan have scrambled under intense criticism to keep reviving the effort over and over, and despite dying many deaths over the past calendar year and since the proposal’s introduction last spring, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is formally considering the legislation at a markup on Thursday of this week.
The proposal’s consideration in the wake of an astonishing speech from Democrat President Joe Biden, who lambasted supporters of former President Donald Trump as threats to democracy, last week is only sure to heighten critics’ concerns. It also comes after the Biden administration had to disband its “Disinformation Governance Board” at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this year. This JCPA bill offers few answers to questions on matters including who decides who is a news organization, who gets to be part of these deals, who gets excluded, and whether the best negotiated deals would apply to everyone—or not.
The big question procedurally that remains is whether this bill will pass the full U.S. Senate after the Judiciary Committee considers it later this week. The highly controversial proposal still only has a handful of GOP cosponsors, not enough with unified Democrat support get past a 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Chamber. But, it is unclear with some rising progressive opposition if even all Democrats would be united behind it. What’s more, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer supports the plan, even its proponents wonder how much he does—and if he does become its full-on champion, how effectively Schumer will manage it. Some are concerned that less controversial antitrust proposals could be sacrificed if proponents of this plan go all-in for it, and they worry that Schumer could end up with nothing at the end of the process if he plays this one wrong.
Then, even if the bill passes the U.S. Senate, it still has not moved in the U.S. House. House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who has fueled conservative and GOP opposition to the plan with his claims that its passage would help fight “disinformation,” has not yet moved on a markup of the plan. Then, even if it were to be considered there, the full House would have to pass it too. With much else to do in September for Congress as a whole, then campaign season hitting full swing in October ahead of the November midterm elections, and then the holidays interspersed with a lame duck session of Congress in November and December, the calendar days where it is possible for the prospect of a bill making it through both chambers of Congress to the president’s desk this Congress are getting slimmer.
Big Tech and Big Law dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Case in point: After Facebook's Zuckerberg recently confessed to censoring the New York Post's explosive Hunter Biden "laptop from Hell" story (evidencing a compromised and most likely criminally culpable Biden family) before the 2020 election in response to FBI pressure that the social media giant treat real news as "Russian disinformation" (thereby corroborating that the national security Deep State helped rig the presidential election), the FBI superciliously responded with the equivalent of a teenaged shoulder shrug and a haughty "so what?" According to the FBI, our domestic spy agency regularly encourages censorship and secretive control over the free flow of information. No big deal!
Big Tech vs Free Speech: Breitbart Exposed the Masters of the Universe in 2018 Townhall
Nor can we forget the role being played by the tech giants, who are using IT as a weapon for social control and the destruction of privacy.
4. Congress, he argues “is a joke.” Our government is run by “The cogs and lickspittles in the bureaucracy, led by a small elite in corporations, above all in Big Tech and finance, will determine all important policies, foreign and domestic.”
The GOP leadership in the House of Representatives has condemned the bill, with GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) calling it the “antithesis of conservatism,” and Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) warning it will be used to suppress competition.
“They [the media] will use it, in the end, to discriminate against people who don’t fit into their category, who aren’t defined as ‘the press’ — and who’s going to determine that definition?” said Jordan.
Zombie Media Cartel Bill Back and Worse Than Ever: Would Strengthen Legacy Media, Punish Anti-Establishment Outlets
A new version of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is circulating that is worse than the original. It allows mainstream, legacy and left-wing media to form exclusionary media cartels and then empowers them with extraordinary collective-bargaining power to collude with Big Tech companies. The amendments serve only to spell out in greater specificity how to exclude conservative and anti-establishment media from any alleged benefits.
Specifically, the new JCPA contains a provision that allows “eligible” media companies forming a cartel to “create admission criteria for membership unrelated to the size of an eligible digital journalism provider or the views expressed by its content, including criteria to limit membership to only eligible publishers or only eligible broadcasters.”
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, co-CEOs of NewsGuard (D Dipasupil and Stephen Chernin /Getty)
U.S. House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) ( Alex Wong/Getty Images)
That provision is significant especially for its specificity. These mainstream and left-wing media cartels may not exclude based on size or “views expressed by its content.” But that is not how the exclusion happens or will happen.
These self-appointed mainstream and left-wing media cartels ARE allowed to exclude based on the usual, totally subjective, factors they always do, such as: “trustworthiness,” “fake news, “extremism,” “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “conspiracy,” “correction policy,” “expertise,” “authoritativeness,” etc.
All of these terms are viewpoint neutral, yet when interpreted by leftist NGOs, “media watchdogs” like NewsGuard, and the fact checkers and content moderators of Big Tech, inevitably end up targeting just one side of the political spectrum, with only the occasional token reprimand of the corporate mainstream media.
Despite misleading the American public for years – even winning a Pulitzer for their efforts – most of the news companies that pushed the discredited “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to receive a “green” approval rating from NewsGuard, while news outlets that debunked the conspiracy theory, like Breitbart News and Fox News, are smeared as untrustworthy and unreliable.
It is easy to imagine a news cartel pointing to NewsGuard criteria – or the criteria of any organization presenting itself as an “independent watchdog” – as an allegedly viewpoint-neutral excuse to exclude conservative and independent media.
The bottom line is that any conservative or independent, or any free speech advocate, much less any Republican who does not see this fatal flaw is whistling past the graveyard and is not worthy of political support.
All they are doing by supporting this amended bill is rewarding mainstream, legacy, and left-wing publishers and Big Tech by allowing them to exclude whomever they deem not part of the club – and who do they think that will be?
Fortunately, several important voices are speaking up against the lobbyist-fueled JCPA. Numerous witnesses have testified to the bill’s failings before the Senate and House, including award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, former local journalist Dan Gainor, and former federal antitrust enforcer Dr. Daniel Francis.
The GOP leadership in the House of Representatives has condemned the bill, with GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) calling it the “antithesis of conservatism,” and Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) warning it will be used to suppress competition.
“They [the media] will use it, in the end, to discriminate against people who don’t fit into their category, who aren’t defined as ‘the press’ — and who’s going to determine that definition?” said Jordan.
Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, and the legal scholar who worked on President Trump’s proposed Section 230 reforms have also warned of the dangers of the legislation.
It’s not just conservatives opposing the bill — the JCPA is so transparently aligned with the interests of corporations that even some progressive think tanks have spoken out against it.
These include Public Knowledge, which called it a gift to “Wall Street media executives,” and Fight for the Future, which argued it enables an internet-killing “link tax,” and Free Press, which called it a bailout for Rupert Murdoch. The left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation also opposes the bill. All emphasized how the bill would benefit America’s largest, wealthiest, and most corrupt media companies.
Despite this widespread opposition, lobbyists have brought the JCPA back again, with amendments that should leave the public in no doubt that this is a bailout for the legacy media.
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