How The Cowardice Of The LA Times And Washington Post Highlights The Danger Of The Link Taxes They Demand, And Their Hypocrisy

As Mike and others have pointed out, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have utterly failed the public. While it is of course their right to endorse, or not endorse, anyone they choose, the refusal to provide any such endorsement in an election with such high stakes abandons the important role the press plays in helping ensure that the electorate is as informed as it needs to be to make its self-governance choices. They join the outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others who have also pulled their punches in headlines and articles about the racist threats being made in the course of the presidential campaign, or inaccurately paint a false coherence between the candidates in their headlines and articles, and in doing so kept the public from understanding what is at stake.  The First Amendment protects the press so that it can be free to perform that critical role of informing the public of what it needs to know. A press that instead chooses to be silent is of no more use than a press that can’t speak.

The issue here is not that the LA Times and Washington Post could not muster opinions (in fact, one could argue that its silence is actually expressing one). The issue is more how they’ve mischaracterized endorsements as some sort of superfluous expression of preference and not a meaningful synthesis of the crucial reporting it has done. In other words, despite their protests, the endorsement is supposed to be reporting, a handy packaging of its coverage for readers to conveniently review before voting.

If it turns out that the publication can draw a conclusion no better than a low-information voter, when it, as press, should have the most information of all, then it can no longer be trusted as a useful source of it. While both the LA Times and Washington Post have still produced some helpful political reporting, their editorial reluctance to embrace their own coverage makes one wonder what else they have held back that the public really needed to know about before heading to the ballot box. Especially when it seems the Times in particular also nixed the week-long series of Trump-focused articles it had been planning, which would have culminated in the editorial against him – the absence of that reporting too raises the strong suspicion that other relevant reporting has also been suppressed.

This crucial educative role that the press plays to inform public discourse so necessary for democracy to successfully function is now going unserved by the publications who have now abdicated that important job. Which is, of course, their choice: it is their choice in whether and how to exercise the editorial discretion of what to cover and what to conclude. The press freedom the First Amendment protects includes the freedom to be absolutely awful in one’s reporting decisions. No law could constitutionally demand anything otherwise and still leave that essential press freedom intact.

But if these incumbent outlets are not going to do it, then someone else will need to. The problem we are faced with is that not only are these publications refusing to play this critical democracy-defending role, but they are also actively trying to prevent anyone else from doing it. Because that’s the upshot to all the “link taxes” they and organizations they support keep lobbying for.

As we’ve discussed many times, link taxes destroy journalism by making that journalism much more difficult to find. The link sharing people are now able to freely do on social media and such would now require permission, which would necessarily deter it. The idea behind link taxes it would raise revenue if people had to pay for the permission needed to link to their articles. But all such a law would be sure to do is cut media outlets off from their audiences by deliberately cutting off a main way they get linked to them.

While the goal of the policy, to support journalism, may be noble, the intention cannot redeem such a counterproductive policy when its inevitable effect will be the exact opposite.  It is, in short, a dumb idea. But if link taxes are imposed it will be a dumb idea everyone has to live with, no matter how much it hurts them. And it will hurt plenty. Because even if it manages to generate some money, the only outlets likely to ever see any of it would be the big incumbents – the same ones currently failing us. Smaller outlets, by being smaller, would be unlikely to benefit – compulsory licensing schemes such as this one rarely return much to the longtail of supposed “beneficiaries.” Yet for those smaller outlets keen to build audiences and then monetize that attention in ways most appropriate for it, these link tax schemes will be crippling obstacles, preventing their work from even getting seen and leaving them now without either revenue or audience. Which will make it impossible for them to survive and carry the reporting baton that the larger outlets have now dropped. Which therefore means that the public will still have to go without the reporting it needs, because the bigger outlets aren’t doing it and the smaller ones now can’t.

Laws that impose regulatory schemes like these are of dubious constitutionality, especially in how they directly interfere with the operation of the press by suppressing these smaller outlets. But what is perhaps most alarming here is the utter hypocrisy of these incumbent outlets to claim link taxes are needed to “save” journalism while not actually doing the journalism that needs saving, yet demanding a regulatory scheme that would effectively silence anyone interested in doing better.

If they wonder why journalism is struggling, then the thing they need to do is look in the mirror. The way to save journalism is to actually practice journalism. No link tax is going to make the LA Times or Washington Post play the role they have chosen not to play anymore. But they will make it so that no one else can play it either. And that’s no way to save journalism; that’s how you kill it for good.

And with it the democracy that depends on it.