Encouraging the Marketplace of Ideas
Maurice E. Stucke, University of Tennessee School of Law, has published Concentrated Media is Something We Can’t Ignore: A Response to Speaker Pelosi. Here is the abstract.
This essay briefly responds to a request that the U.S. Department of Justice should give San Francisco Bay Area newspapers more leeway under the federal antitrust laws to merge or consolidate their business operations. The essay agrees with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s concerns that a strong, free, and independent press is vital to our democracy and in informing our citizens, especially news organizations that devote resources to gathering news. As the essay explains, the antidote is not to weaken the antitrust laws to enable large media conglomerates to become even bigger. Instead, the health of the marketplace of ideas depends on the antitrust laws to preserve divergent and competing voices.
Download the essay from SSRN here.