(FreedomBeacon.com)- The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), according to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), should be opposed by conservatives because it will increase censorship.
The Journalism Competition and Protection Act (JCPA) enables the media to bargain with major digital companies. Conservatives should oppose the special treatment of favored industries because a cartel will increase censorship.
The conservative from Arkansas spoke before the Senate Judiciary Body hearing on Thursday during the committee’s discussion of the proposed legislation.
Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, claimed that the bill’s passage “relies” on democracy after postponing the bill’s markup last week.
According to Senator Klobuchar, even though she’s a newspaperman’s daughter, she won’t give up the struggle for local news. “Our democracy relies on it,” she said.
Despite its name, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would grant the media sector an antitrust exemption, enabling media conglomerates to bargain with major digital platforms for more advantageous advertising contracts.
Sens. Cotton, Mike Lee (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and other conservative senators argue that the media sector shouldn’t be given special consideration and that the bill would further restrict free expression.
Lobbyists and other supporters of the measure have claimed that it will be used to stop “misinformation,” as Breitbart News Senior Technology Correspondent Allum Bokhari has documented.
These self-declared mainstream and left-leaning media cartels are permitted to exclude content based on the standard, utterly subjective criteria they always use, including “trustworthiness,” “fake news,” “extremism,” “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “conspiracy,” “correction policy,” “expertise,” “authoritativeness,” etc.
Mike Lee added that the JCPA might act as an “Obamacare for the free press” and would probably violate the Constitution via compelled speech.
According to Lee, a conservative who opposes the measure, “the JCPA is simply a mechanism to transfer income from a politically disfavored group to a politically favored one under the pretext of supposedly improving competition.”
