Exclusive: Lead GOP Sponsor of Media Cartel Bill John Kennedy Has Expressed Concerns with Proposal

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), the lead Republican co-sponsor of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) in the Senate, has been raising questions about the bill, several senior congressional sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News.

Two senior congressional aides with knowledge of the bill’s deliberations confirmed Kennedy’s apprehensions heading into a scheduled markup of the proposal in the Senate Judiciary Committee later this week. “Senator Kennedy, who is the lead Republican sponsor of the JCPA, has privately raised questions about the broadness of this legislation, and how it could help Big Media companies, harming conservatives,” one of the aides told Breitbart News.

Kennedy’s office would not deny these revelations of the senator’s concerns with the proposal on the record, and instead chose to reiterate the senator’s support for the bill and argued he achieved at least some additions to the legislation his team claims would help conservatives even though the flawed structure of the broader proposal remains as such — and as Breitbart News has reported, the amended version of the bill released by the office of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) exacerbates the bill’s worst problems.

The JCPA, which has been repeatedly pushed by lobbyists for the nation’s largest and wealthiest media companies over the past two years, would create a cartel of news companies in the U.S., empowered to collectively bargain with Big Tech for special favors.

In essence, the bill is a bailout for the same corporate legacy media that has made an industry of smearing Republicans as extremists, bigots, and worse, pushing conspiracy theories like Russiagate while ignoring legitimate stories that harm their preferred party, like the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Kennedy would not deny on the record that the Senator expressed concerns with the bill in its current form, but on background insisted he still supported his own bill.

“Sen. Kennedy successfully added protections for conservative and smaller outlets into the JCPA while ensuring that large, mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post will not benefit,” said the Kennedy aide. “He continues to work with other conservative co-sponsors of the legislation ahead of markup to expand support for the commonsense, conservative priorities that this bill advances for local, honest journalism.”

It’s not only Republicans that JCPA supporters have to worry about. Even if the Senate Judiciary Committee moves the bill out of committee, its future is uncertain beyond that.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) support for the bill is according to some congressional sources lukewarm, with some telling Breitbart News that JCPA supporters are concerned with the extent to which the majority leader backs the bill. Many question his effectiveness in managing it.

Schumer mishandling this highly controversial proposal could jeopardize other, less controversial antitrust measures, and some Senators who support the JCPA and other antitrust bills are concerned the Democrat leadership could undercut support for those other bills if they push too hard for the JCPA. Some even want the JCPA to get cut and for the Senate to focus on a broader and less divisive package of antitrust bills that would win big bipartisan support.

The new version of the bill gives wide powers to the proposed media cartel to pick and choose which news companies may join it and reap the benefits of its negotiations with tech companies, on virtually any criteria they can imagine.

As Breitbart News explained in a recent article, the new provisions will almost certainly result in conservative and independent media being excluded from the cartel.

Via Breitbart News:

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.

A Kennedy aide pointed to a provision in the bill that allows a private right of action for media outlets to sue the JCPA-created cartel if viewpoint discrimination is suspected. But court cases alleging viewpoint discrimination on the part of tech companies and other corporations have all largely failed, a sign of how easy it is for companies to use supposedly viewpoint-neutral standards to shut down conservative voices. What’s more, the admission in the plain text of the legislation that viewpoint discrimination can happen as a result of this bill — an admission made because the authors create an avenue to supposedly challenge it — is particularly damning to the broader cause of JCPA proponents.

The bill’s obvious purpose — to entrench the power of the anti-conservative press — has led to the GOP leadership in the House, including GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) condemning it.

In the Senate, the bill has been condemned by a growing number of Republican senators, including Marsha Blackburn, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Mike Lee.

Earlier on Tuesday, Sen. Cotton again voiced concerns with the legislation, adding to his previous criticism.

“It would result in more censorship, and every conservative should oppose it,” said Cotton.

“Other industries don’t have the special privilege of being exempt from antitrust law: why should conservatives give the media and big tech a handout?”

“Any conservative considering this bill should note that Jerry Nadler is a lead sponsor and cites “widespread misinformation” as a rationale—in other words, they know this cartel will censor conservatives,” continued Cotton.

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.

UPDATE 7:08 p.m. ET 9/6/22:
After the publication of this article, Kennedy’s office reached out to Breitbart News again with an updated statement challenging the core of the story which is that he has raised concerns about the JCPA.

“Sen. Kennedy has not raised concerns with the current bill,” a Kennedy aide told Breitbart News after the publication of this story. “He successfully added protections for conservative and smaller outlets into the JCPA while ensuring that large, mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post will not benefit. He continues to work with other conservative co-sponsors of the legislation ahead of markup to expand support for the commonsense, conservative priorities that this bill advances for local, honest journalism.”

Technically speaking, this aide’s claim that Sen. Kennedy has not raised concerns with the legislation’s deep and serious structural flaws is inherently untrue and factually inaccurate because of the fact that the aide also admits both in the original statement and the subsequent one that Kennedy has pushed for several changes to the bill, changes his office claims would help conservatives. That he has pushed for such changes means that Kennedy knows the bill was flawed from its inception, and that he raised concerns with it enough to push for structural changes to it.

In response to all of this, Breitbart News has offered Sen. Kennedy the opportunity to explain himself on all of this in an on the record interview–something he, through his staff, has as-of-yet not agreed to, but would be easy for a senator to do were he proud of the work he produced legislatively.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.