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Why the Marketplace for News Is Broken

Jun 14, 2019  •  Post A Comment

The general counsel of News Corp., appeared earlier this week before a House subcommittee, slamming “the technology industry’s stranglehold on traditional media companies,” reports the New York Post.

The Post is owned by News Corp.

The story continues, “‘The marketplace for news is broken,’ David Pitofsky said in his testimony to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, according to Bloomberg. ‘Dominant online platforms control the infrastructure, data and tools for news publishers to sell and serve online ads, while simultaneously competing against those publishers for the very same ad dollars,’ Pitofsky said. ‘This presents a significant conflict of interest.’

“House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said Facebook and Google have an enormous amount of control over the news consumption of Americans,” the story adds.

3 Comments

  1. ““House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said Facebook and Google have an enormous amount of control over the news consumption of Americans…”


    That’s only because that’s where many Americans choose to get their news.

    That’s the marketplace… the place where people choose.

  2. What is Nadler’s solution? Break up companies that employ thousands of people? Government write the news for these websites? Or maybe Nadler wants to have the government sell ads for the sites he is concerned about? Maybe the American people are smarter than Nadler thinks, and can make their own opinion on where to get their news, and how to search to confirm stories. I haven’t seen any problems with ads interrupting my reading on MSNBC, CNN, FOX or Daily Caller.

  3. Spot on Cleric. The lazy way to reason thru the current conundrum is to simply bleat “break them all up!!” (ala Liz Warren). But breaking them up could cause far greater problems than Lizzy and others have considered. I don’t claim to have “the” answer. I just know that the current crop of democratic presidential hopefuls haven’ put an awful lot of thought into this yet.

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