New Legislation Could Dismantle Independent Media

Independent media outlets are getting destroyed by YouTube, and a pending piece of legislation could explain why. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Independent media outlets are getting destroyed by YouTube and a pending piece of legislation could be why that's happening. You and I did this story a while back and it, it, the, the reason it's such an important story is where you have this corporate media cartel run by three owners, the big three that own all of corporate media. And the, what they're trying to do is put independent news, programs just like this out of business. And they're, they're doing a pretty darn good job of it right now by spreading around billions of dollars to Google and YouTube and saying, hey, we want to pay our way in and we want you to minimize the impact of independent media.

Right. This is a very weird piece of legislation because it's being sold to the public under a completely false pretense.

Mm-hmm.

It's the journalism competition and preservation act, JCPA. And what the JCPA says it wants to do is we just wanna level the playing field. We wanna make sure if, if Facebook or Google, if they're sharing the story from your outlet that you get compensated accordingly.

Mm-hmm.

And so who's gonna determine what appropriate compensation is. Oh, well, let's put together a panel of these big multimedia companies. You know, you got your New York Times, your Fox news, your NBCs, they're gonna be the ones who create what they're describing as the media cartel that gets to set these rates and of course, directly negotiate with these big tech giants. And we know how that will end if this becomes law.

Well, okay, look, I'm, I'm gonna date myself. Air America, you were working with me all the way back to the Air America days. You were a producer for Air America. It was Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Bobby Kennedy, Chuck D, just this really, Cenk Uygur, just incredible lineup of, of people that were trying to introduce progressive radio into the vast market. All right. When we saw, saw this happening back then, the people who got nervous was corporate media, because we weren't telling the corporate media stories. We weren't worried about advertisers that are telling us, no, you can't, you can't do this story about this product that's killing people. We, we didn't worry about it. And so corporate media has been dumbed down to where not only do they not tell those stories, but now the American public is seeing that they're not getting really good news from places like CNN or MSNBC or Fox, because it's so jaded and it's so, it's so arranged. So there's cable cutting taking place all over the, all over the country right now.

Yeah. And those networks do, you know, to a degree, they walk on eggshells. We can't say anything hyper offensive or else we're gonna turn off the advertisers. And more importantly, we've gotta make sure it's YouTube ready. That's the point of these segments. Short, quick, make it to where YouTube cannot object to any of it, make it broad enough to where it's gonna show up in your suggested feed, no matter what you're watching. And that really is what is killing the independent media here.

Because we talk about details.

Right.

We talk about stories behind the story.

And it is all connected too, with this JCPA, because these outlets understand these corporate media groups are now going to be the ones who are gonna be negotiating. We gotta keep 'em happy so they don't demand a high price.

Right.

What better way to do that than to push their content and push out independent media. Now.

It's already happening.

Well, it is.

If you go, if I go to.

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