Democrat Alex Padilla Silent on Leftist Calls to Oppose Media Cartel Bill

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) has remained silent on leftist calls to oppose the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a bill that has been decried as benefitting media conglomerates and subverting independent news outlets.

The Re:Create Coalition wrote to Padilla, “The controversial & unrelated JCPA shouldn’t be attached to must-pass legislation like the NDAA  @SenAlexPadilla , can Americans still count on you to reject the JCPA’s enrichment of media giants & its subversion of independent, minority-owned & local news?”

The Re:Create Coalition wrote to Padilla as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has moved to include the JCPA, a bill that would create an antitrust exemption allowing the media to form a cartel to negotiate with big tech, into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Padilla and his office did not respond to a request for comment regarding the leftist campaign to block the JCPA.

Dr. Benjamin Chavis, the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), which represents the interests of the black press, wrote that many black and minority news outlets are independently operated and that the JCPA would “line the pockets of massive media conglomerates and hedge funds, and lead to the proliferation of harmful misinformation.”

Chavis wrote that hedge funds, private equity firms, and media conglomerates such as Gannett, Lee Enterprises, and McClatchy have been swallowing up outlets across the nation. The outlet noted that media “behemoths” would benefit from the JCPA, while small, independent outlets would be excluded from the bill:

Now, these same media companies and hedge funds are a step closer to receiving huge payouts – without any accountability or transparency to direct funds to local journalism and journalists. The JCPA would require tech platforms to carry and pay any eligible news publisher for “access” to content. While this may, again, seem well intentioned at first look, upon deeper inspection the law defines “access” so broadly it will require payment for simply crawling a website or sharing a link. Similarly, while a number of conglomerates are scoped into the bill, true independent or small newspapers are explicitly excluded from the legislation because the bill says that an eligible publisher must earn more than $100,000 per year.

“Congress and the Senate should reject the current draft of the JCPA and go back to the drawing board on real solutions for America’s local news problems – solutions that benefit all Americans, instead of just giving handouts to the biggest media corporations in the nation,” Chavis concluded.

Progressive organizations such as Fight for the Future and Public Knowledge, along with the ACLU, and over 25 organizations have launched a campaign to stop the JCPA.