Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask Congress for Help With Their Newspapers

[SirLinksALot]

SOURCE: NEW YORK SUN

URL: http://www.nysun.com/national/bezos-slim-and-buffett-billionaires-pleading/90026/

By IRA STOLL



It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals.

Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin ($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion).

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives of Bezos-Slim- and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.”

Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test.

In respect of the Times, it’s particularly comical, because, as an editorial matter, the paper generally favors stricter antitrust enforcement. The newspaper that less than two years ago was editorializing that Congress “should also study whether there are ways to strengthen the antitrust laws,” now is backing the move for what its own columnist describes as “an anticompetitive safe haven,” “a limited antitrust exemption.”

One of Robert Bork’s scholarly insights was that if there’s any logic to enforcing antitrust laws or enacting them in the first place, it is with a eye toward protecting consumers. The publishers contend that news is a kind of special case because consumers are harmed by a decline in news quality. Or, as the Times quoted Mr. Chavern, “If you want a free news model, you will get news...But it will be garbage news.”

I’m a paying, seven-day-a-week print newspaper subscriber who earns a living as a journalist primarily on the basis of people’s willingness to pay for news. So I sympathize on some level with what Mr. Chavern is saying. But even I can see that his argument is, to use his own term, “garbage.”

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[Joe Wooten]

Not just no, but HELL NO!!!!!

[Wingnut]

Not just no, but HELL NO!!!!!

I second that emotion!