(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell caved to his friends, outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., regarding the inclusion of a media cartel provision in the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act.
Such bills coming from the House often include numerous political favors handed out to each party, but this time the Left scored a major victory.
The media provision, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, will effectively transfer wealth from Silicon Valley to the corporate media by allowing large media companies to construct “joint negotiating entities,” Breitbart reported. It has absolutely nothing to do with national defense, which was shamelessly used by proponents as convenient cover.
The joint negotiating entities will oversee Big Tech companies in order to determine the type of content that they allow, and the type that they will ban. In short, the new addition will allow dying mainstream media companies to censor the American people and what they post and see on social media platforms.
The bill contains what will function as a bailout to prop up the legacy media, which many desperately need to stay relevant. The Washington Post, NPR and CNN announced this week that they were cutting staff and budgets in the face of falling audience shares and plunging revenues.
The heavily taxpayer-funded NPR, which is effectively the Left’s state-funded propaganda wing, reported that it needs to cut at least $10 million from its budget, with tanking ad revenue from sponsors.
NPR staffers were told in a memo from CEO John Lansing that he hoped to avoid layoffs, but would be implementing what he described as “close to a total hiring freeze.”
Chris Licht, who took over the helm at CNN in May in the face of multiple scandals and wretched ratings, described the cuts as a “gut punch,” which marked the deepest cuts to the network in years.
“It is incredibly hard to say goodbye to any one member of the CNN team, much less many,” Licht wrote in a company-wide memo.
