Not so. The Obama Administration is on record opposing new antitrust relief proposed by Congress to help newspapers survive.
From The Associated Press:
The Obama administration on Tuesday rejected new immunity from antitrust laws for teetering newspapers struggling to compete with Internet providers of news, entertainment and advertising.
"We do not believe any new exemptions for newspapers are necessary," the Justice Department's Carl Shapiro told a House panel.
Shapiro, an assistant attorney general for economics, said Tuesday that any new antitrust exemptions for newspapers were "not the way to go."
The Justice Department, he said, will weigh each merger proposal individually to determine if it would substantially harm competition and consumers.
Newspaper industry representatives told the House Judiciary Committee's competition policy subcommittee they need more legal flexibility than current antitrust law allows. Current laws limiting mergers are enforced as if newspapers still compete for advertising and readers only with each other, they said.
In reality, they said, newspapers now compete with countless bloggers and online news sources. Industry representatives call that a losing business model, pointing to the rising numbers of newspapers slashing staff and filing for bankruptcy amid a reader exodus for online sources of news and commentary.
At issue is whether to loosen laws governing joint operating agreements designed to save dying publications in two-newspaper cities. The agreements, permitted by the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, assumed that the costs of putting out a newspaper were so high that two newspapers wouldn't be able to survive in the same town. Under a JOA, two newspapers share business operations and costs with their in-town rivals while keeping separate, competing newsrooms.
Read the full story here.
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