Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is one of the Senators preventing the Democrats from ramming the widely condemned Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) through the legislative process without a debate on the floor.
The JCPA is a financial handout for the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful media conglomerates. The bill will allow the creation of a joint negotiating entity, a.k.a. a cartel, to force arbitration agreements on Big Tech companies, forcing them to give the media industry financial and other favors.
Large media conglomerates and their hedge fund owners set to be the biggest winners of the JCPA, with provisions in the bill that allow companies that own multiple news outlets to sign up all their publications to join any new cartel, allowing the biggest conglomerates to dominate proceedings.
The bill also allows the cartel to write its own rules to exclude potential new members, a recipe for sidelining conservative and alternative media. Protections in the bill against “viewpoint” discrimination fall flat, as the exclusion and censorship of conservatives in recent years has always been justified using viewpoint-neutral pretexts, like “disinformation” and “extremism.”
As if all that wasn’t repulsive enough to conservatives, there are also national security concerns: China is using the same media companies that would benefit from the JCPA to push its propaganda. The national security threat is particularly egregious given that Democrats have attempted to attach the JCPA to a “must-pass” defense spending package, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Steve Daines has, according to sources on the hill, voiced an objection. He is one of several Republican senators making life miserable for the Democrats, placing a “hold” on the bill and preventing it from being passed through the hotline procedure.
In doing so, Sen. Daines is doing what his voters back home in Montana want. Gallup’s regular survey of Americans’ trust in the media industry has found it to be at record lows, with Republicans’ trust in the institution at a particularly dire 11 percent as of 2021.
To put that in perspective, the number of Republicans who thought abortion should be legal under any circumstances in 2021 was 15 percent — four points higher!
With the media so utterly discredited, the logical conclusion would be that fair competition is exactly what the industry needs. Instead, some lawmakers want to artificially prop up the industry by allowing its wealthiest and most powerful elements to strike backroom deals with Silicon Valley.
Democrats are desperate to secure a corporate welfare package for their cronies in the leftist media — but it only takes a few bold Senators like Daines to block their efforts.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
