SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) – The government of California and internet giants such as Google have reached a $242.5 million agreement to fund local news operations, halting the push for legislation to force social media companies to pay newsrooms while continuing concerns about what the new financial connections will mean for journalistic independence and objectivity.
Democrat state Sen. Steve Glazer’s California Journalism Preservation Act would have required social media and search engine companies to pay a portion of their advertising revenue to news outlets whose content appeared in their feeds or search results. It drew stiff opposition from Google, which operates the world’s top search engine and video platform.
However, KCRA reported that the bill will not move forward now that state officials reached a deal with Google and other Big Tech companies, including Amazon and Facebook’s Meta, to support newsrooms voluntarily. Among the details are that Google has pledged $172.5 million and the state $70 million over the next five years as well as a yet-to-be-finalized commitment to invest in artificial intelligence (AI).
“In the latest draft of the framework, there is also a provision that 12% would go to ‘underserved’ and ‘local’ news outlets,” Rebuild Local News added, as noted by The Center Square. “It’s a bit hard to know what that means, but based on what we’re hearing, it’s likely that means members of California’s ethnic press and outlets with fewer than five employees.”
California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed the agreement as a “major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California,” but Media Guild West president Matt Pearce assailed it as “ratification of Google’s monopoly over our newsrooms.”
For years, conservatives and other dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy have criticized the world’s largest online information and communications platforms, including Google, Facebook, and (until ownership changed hands in late 2022) Twitter, for using their vast influence to slant the news, sources, ideas, and arguments their users see and share through their services. One of their chief rationales for doing so was to prevent “misinformation” from influencing elections that critics denounce as merely a pretext to sway elections in their favor.
The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.
Critics say that for the government and Big Tech to directly finance mainstream media outlets, which have long had their own problems with left-wing bias, only magnifies such problems by giving news organizations a financial tie to two major entities they are supposed to cover impartially and scrutinize thoroughly.