Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s calls for Republicans to boycott the National Defense Authorization Act until “extraneous measures” like the Competition and Preservation Act of Journalism (JCPA) are deleted have apparently worked. What some called the “media cartel bill” was left out of the bicameral agreement Congress made last week to finalize the NDAA.
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell had earlier acquiesced to demands from Majority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to include the JCPA in the NDAA for one of the last actions of the lame duck Congress.
Cotton called the JCPA “a reward for liberal media companies to form a cartel to work with big tech that will hurt center-right media.” He called on Democrats to “back down and pass a defense bill that is actually focused on our national security and troop support.”
Facebook had also threatened to “consider removing news from our platform” if the JCPA was passed. The proposal would have created a temporary carve-out in antitrust law allowing news publishers and broadcasters to collectively push for more favorable distribution terms for their content online.
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
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