Please find a Myths and Facts document that rebuts many of the invalid claims here.
There have been claims made that the JCPA will lead to job losses based on the notion that newspapers will “cut them to under 1,500 employees” to be eligible. Except The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, no newspaper in America comes close to 1,500 employees. In fact, the opposite will happen, as it did in Australia where newsrooms in some cases doubled because of the infusion of cash. Moreover, the JCPA on page 22 requires payments be tied to how many journalists you have. The more journalists you hire, the more compensation you will receive.
The bill at page 17 also requires public disclosure and transparency. Each publication and broadcaster must publicly disclose how much is received and how it is used.
The bill does not impose a “link tax” and the internet is not going to break. Payments in Australia and Europe have resulted in no changes to the internet or links. The bill on page 24 only allows payment for the dominant platforms to access the news content by crawling publishers’ websites; linking is and will remain voluntary and free to platforms and consumers. News content creators already have separate, existing rights to prohibit unauthorized access to their content today. They do not do that because the platforms can live without access to any one given publisher, but publishers cannot independently live without access to Big Tech’s billions of users.
Lastly, the JCPA does not dictate what is news; the bill defines eligibility broadly at page 5 for publishers and page 3 for broadcasters, and is subject to challenge by the platforms, who currently decide what is news in the platforms today.
###
Media contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org
Members of the News/Media Alliance staff have contributed to this post.
