Marsha Blackburn: JCPA Allows Big Media and Big Tech to Collude on Censorship

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) condemned the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) for a second time after Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) released an amended version of the legislation that exacerbates the worst problems of the media cartel bill.

In a post on Twitter, the Tennessee Senator said the push by media lobbyists and Democrats to pass the JCPA — which has been revived repeatedly over the past two years — fell in line with recent attempts to discredit, demonize, and censor conservatives.

“Biden said that Trump supporters are extremists,” said Sen. Blackburn. “Then more evidence exposed the WH worked with Facebook to censor conservatives.”

“We can’t allow the Dems to pass the Journalism Competition and Protection Act, which allows the liberal media and Big Tech to silence conservatives.”

Blackburn’s comments come after the recent publication of an amended version of the JCPA, which would allow the media cartel it creates to write its own criteria to exclude independent and conservative news outlets. As Breitbart News previously explained, protections in the bill against “viewpoint discrimination” do little to prevent discrimination in practice.

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.

Far from alleviating Republican concerns with the bill, the amendment only seems to have exacerbated them.

Sen. Blackburn expressed similar objections to the JCPA in 2021, when the first draft of the legislation appeared.

“The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act will give even more power to the mainstream media and Silicon Valley,” Blackburn told Breitbart News at the time.

“We need to protect our small newspapers and ensure they are compensated for their content. This will allow big tech to further consolidate power and make it even easier to censor conservative voices on social media.”

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.