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American consumers have the constitutional right to choose the speech platform of their choice, even if it is a choice that unnerves the national security apparatus and congressional China hawks.

If TikTok is indeed routinely providing access to American user data to Chinese authorities, it is worth sanctioning. But there are a host of intermediate regulatory steps that lie somewhere in between doing nothing and threatening an outright ban.

It's an entire, emergent "new news" media ecosystem that has a real chance of providing a sustainable and robust alternative to legacy news institutions.

The authors of the study made two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.

So the story‐​within‐​the‐​story is that a more sustainable, innovative, and often superior quality "new news" media is on the horizon.

Canada's link tax threatens catastrophe for local news outlets.

It doesn't take an economist to realize that raising the costs of linking to the news will ultimately mean fewer articles from fewer news outlets reaching fewer consumers.

My policy analysis of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is now online.

Paul Matzko









When Fox News settled for nearly $800 million with Dominion Voting Systems, it avoided having to admit that it promoted lies in its coverage of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. That settlement is now the basis of an attempt by the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) to block a Philadelphia television station, Fox 29, from having its license renewed by the FCC. MAD's petition recently received a letter of support from Bill Kristol, the Never Trump conservative and a current editor at The Bulwark.
The MAD petition hinges on an infrequently enforced FCC policy about "news distortion." It is a high bar to clear. To qualify, the reported news must not only be false but falsified. That's the "distortion" angle. Selective reporting, like focusing on an unrepresentative framing of an event, wouldn't count. For example, a journalist could choose to do their segment at a post‐​George Floyd protest in the summer of 2020 either with a fiery backdrop late at night or in front of peacefully marching protesters earlier in the day. Neither choice would count as distortion. It could, however, be distortion if a journalist were to pay actors to stage a fake demonstration.
While I found much of Fox News's coverage of the 2020 election to be a shocking dereliction of journalistic responsibility — and friends don't let friends rely on *any* cable news channel as their primary source of information — I have my doubts about whether it rises to the level of news distortion. Selective, biased, or even knowingly false reporting isn't enough. Fox News would have had to manufacture the stories themselves, not just report on lies and rumors promoted by others.
But let's set that uncertainty aside for a second and simply assume that Fox News will be found responsible of news distortion by the FCC. Is that a good system that operates in the public interest? And should conservatives like Bill Kristol support such a system?
A quick look at the history of the news distortion standard offers a cautionary tale for those with an understandable but misguided desire to use State power to punish falsity. The news distortion policy was not created in a vacuum and was not a product of disinterested civil servants seeking to serve the common good. It was concocted under pressure from politicians who wanted to punish disfavored speech and suppress political dissent.
The news distortion policy began in 1969 with a series of FCC investigations into complaints about journalistic staging. These were not just complaints from ordinary citizens; they came from members of Congress. While the complaints covered quite a range of topics — from allegations of staged marijuana parties on college campuses to selective editing of interviews with whistleblowers on Pentagon waste — the most widely referenced involved news coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago.
In particular, Democratic congresspeople were angry that journalists were, in their opinion, exaggerating police violence against protestors. One Senator accused a camera crew of dressing up a "girl hippie" with a bloody bandage and sending her up to the police line to shout, "Don't hit me," on cue. Supposedly wounded protestors would rise up like Lazarus as soon as the cameras turned off.
It's worth noting that none of the 1969 investigations found any merit to these complaints. And historians are in broad agreement that the '68 protests had plenty of certifiable police brutality and angry protestors without any need for journalistic fabrication. (I studied w/​David Farber; read his book!)
So what was the point of these news distortion claims? It was an attempt to abuse a government agency to delegitimize democratic opposition. (And Democratic opposition, for that matter.) If you were a pro‐​war Democratic congressman supporting the pro‐​war Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey as the DNC delegates defied the primary results that favored anti‐​war candidate Eugene McCarthy, you weren't appreciative of journalists drawing attention to your unpopular convention machinations. Nor would you appreciate exposes of the party's willingness to rely on sometimes brutal law enforcement tactics to suppress their critics.
So filing a complaint with the FCC for news distortion — which could then require the responsible news network to explain their conduct in a potentially embarrassing public spectacle — was a way of putting pressure on tv networks to shape future coverage in a way that was more favorable to the politicians filing the complaints.
In other words, complaints about news distortion were *themselves* an attempt at distorting the news!
We rightly condemn President Richard Nixon for sending Charles Colton to CBS in 1970 to threaten the network with targeted FCC regulatory enforcement if they didn't back off with their critical coverage of the Vietnam War effort. (It worked.) We should be just as condemnatory of how congress created a novel news distortion standard at the FCC in 1969 to suppress critical news coverage.
It's notable that the FCC's rules were capacious enough in '69 & '70 to enable both parties to simultaneously target their opponents. Nixon leaned on the fairness doctrine while congressional Democrats used news distortion. It's a reminder that when government agencies are granted the power to control speech — even accidentally — it creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to find ways to abuse those powers in order to extract maximum partisan advantage. That's an invitation for a constant, seesawing, no‐​holds‐​barred brawl for control of the levers of regulatory power; the temporary winner(s) get to punish their ideological enemies and reward their allies. Free speech gets caught in the crossfire.
With that history in mind, Bill Kristol's support for a newly invigorated news distortion policy comes across as naive. (To be fair, as you can see from the picture above, Kristol was merely a callow intern at the White House in 1970 when all this was happening.) The news distortion policy was censorship via the backdoor.
And conservatives have good reason to be leery of boosting the FCC's authority to police news content. As I have written about at length, while the FCC's various backdoor speech regulations have punished radicals from both Left and Right, conservatives have been a particular target. I used to ask liberal proponents of a revived Fairness Doctrine standard if they really wanted to gift these powers to the Trump administration. I suppose now I have to ask conservative proponents of an energized news distortion standard if they really want to gift these powers to the Biden (or Harris) administration.
Rather than calling for broader enforcement of the news distortion policy, small government conservatives should instead be calling for its repeal.
Crossposted from the author's Substack. Subscribe for weekly insights from the intersection of history, policy, and politics.

His panicked manifesto contains a strong case against CRT activism, but he ultimately falls into the same trap as his enemies.

Paul Matzko









This global public opinion poll asking respondents whether they have a favorable view of the USA has been bouncing around the interwebs. The topline finding — the US is pretty popular! — surprised many American cultural critics who remember the bad old days of the Iraq War when global criticism of US imperialism surged.
I find the handful of countries where the opinion of the US remains more negative just as interesting. Hungary's worst‐​in‐​Europe result is amusing given how the far Right in the US fetishizes Viktor Orban's reactionary politics. American Hungary stans suffer from sublimated self‐​hatred, wishing they could be as xenophobic and culturally chauvinist as team "Make Hungary Magyar Again."
But the other outlier country on this list with a marked dislike of the US might be more of a surprise to Americans: Australia. We're almost underwater Down Under. This is in sharp contrast with how highly Americans think of Australia; if you combine all positive responses from this survey, Americans consider Australia their warmest ally. Which means the gulf between how Americans and Australians view each other would be one of the widest in the world!
As it so happens, I spent eight summers as a teenager living in Australia. That certainly doesn't make me a country expert — and it's been two decades since I was last there — but it does mean that Australian antipathy towards the US doesn't take me by surprise.
That dislike was very much on the surface when I was a 10 or 11 year old trying to make Aussie friends. The most popular country singer in Australia at the time was the man, the legend, John Williamson. I've written about Australian country music elsewhere, but I can still sing many of Williamson's top hits from memory, including his rip‐​roaring nationalist anthem "A Flag of Our Own" (1991). Williamson was a republican, which meant that he believed Australia should leave the British Commonwealth, reject the monarchy, and take the British stripes off the Australian flag. Here's the song's chorus:
'Cause this is Australia and that's where we're from We're not Yankee side‐​kicks or second class P.O.M.s And tell the Frogs what they can do with their bomb Oh we must have a flag of our own

Let me decipher that for you. P.O.M.s stands for "Prisoners of Her Majesty," or Brits, which is often amended with an adjective such as "whingeing POMs" to describe those who yearn for ye olde country and constantly complain about Australia's supposedly backward ways. This was a particularly popular complaint in Australia in the aftermath of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis. The Australian Governor‐​General — a crown appointee in a mostly symbolic role — had invoked a long neglected royal power and replaced the elected left‐​wing prime minister with a conservative. (For comparison, imagine the hoopla if King Charles III were to kick British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak out of office and install a Labour prime minister!)
"Frogs," of course, are the French, who were on the radar of Aussie nationalists in the 90s for conducting nuclear testing in their Polynesian colonies — which Australia considered its own backyard — and doing so without regard for the effects of nuclear fallout on surrounding islands and Australia itself.
That leaves us with Yankees, commonly shorted to "Yanks," which quickly becomes, via Australia's penchant for rhyming puns, "Septic Tanks," or then shortened further to "seppos." (Aussies are world leaders in slang. It's like if Cockney wasn't just the lingo of one neighborhood in London but had been exported en masse via prison ships, transported to the other side of the globe, and then had taken over an entire continent. Oh wait…)
Maybe you're wondering why America made that opprobrious list alongside the POMs and Frogs. We weren't testing any nukes in the Pacific (at least, we hadn't for a while) and we weren't meddling in their domestic politics (though blaming the CIA for the 1975 constitutional crisis remains popular among Aussie conspiracists).
But when this song was released in 1991, the Australian military had just participated in the US‐​led Gulf War. Although suffering no combat casualties, Australian nationalists saw this as yet another example of Australia blindly serving the interests of foreign superpowers, from dying at the command of callous British generals in the trenches at Gallipoli — the subject of a 1981 blockbuster starring a young Mel Gibson — to the failed fight alongside the Yanks in the jungles of Vietnam.
Bear in mind that Australia's anti‐​Vietnam War protests in 1970 were the *largest* protests in their history; by contrast, the much feted anti‐​Vietnam war protests in the US don't even crack our top 27! Australia's involvement in the Iraq War did little to assuage critics who believed Australia should stop playing second fiddle to the US, especially after leaked documents showed that the Aussie government's primary purpose for sending troops was to cozy up to the US. All the talk about eradicating weapons of mass destruction and promoting democracy was merely "mandatory rhetoric."
However, when I was a teenager in Australia in the late‐​90s, especially while visiting rural communities in Northern Queensland, the complaint I heard the most often revolved around US trade policy, specifically US tariffs on the import of Australian lamb meat. I remember riding around the bush in a ute (flatbed pickup truck) with a local farmer who was spitting mad about US tariffs and who said that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was Bill Clinton getting his just desserts for harming Aussie sheep farmers. What a thought! Australian headlines from the time were simply scathing in their critique of Clinton's hypocrisy in signing a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico while slapping new tariffs on Australia.
Yet other than the mad cow panic, meat import policies — let alone veal tariffs, lol — have never been a major political issue in recent US national politics. But they sure mattered a great deal to Australia, which is the second largest sheep exporting country in the world (Australia and New Zealand combine for an incredible 93% of the global market). In any case, US trade policy in the 1990s fit with Australian nationalists' broader critique of the US as a bully who simply expected Australia to meekly comply with its broader geopolitical agenda regardless of whether it was in Australia's own national interest.
So Australians' mixed opinions regarding the US are grounded in real, pragmatic considerations. It's yet another situation in which our imperial entanglements and trade protectionism have provoked blowback.
It's possible that in the future those feelings might revert towards the more US‐​positive, Australasian mean given Chinese economic and military expansionism in the region. Up until now, Australia has been insulated from the downside risks of Chinese expansion — funnily enough, the intervening Indonesians have been a more significant target for Australian jingoism — while benefitting greatly as a supplier of raw materials for the post‐​Mao Chinese economic miracle. Until the pandemic, Australia hadn't experienced a recession in nearly thirty years (!).
On a more speculative note, if Noah Smith and other India boosters are correct, Australia's role as a potential trading partner with India could matter as much for that country's success as its trade with China has for the past three decades. Last year, Australia signed a new free trade deal with India and expects its exports to triple by 2035. And given the ongoing decoupling of global investment from the Chinese market, Australia could benefit from a major boost of foreign investment given its proximity and ties with India, Vietnam, and other high growth South and Southeast Asian markets (nicknamed "Altasia"). There's little in the way of Australia enjoying another thirty years of torrid economic growth.
The US should forge a new, peer relationship with Australia, signaling that it takes Australia seriously as a vital regional ally rather than treating it as a junior partner in our foreign misadventures. We have a golden opportunity to do so right now. As Doug Bandow has noted, China has foolishly kicked off a trade war with Australia, and while Trump considered following suit with new tariffs on Australian exports, he was finally persuaded not to. We should take advantage of China's mistake by expanding our 2005 free trade agreement with Australia and lower rates on agricultural products that are feeling the pinch from Chinese tariffs.
This is a crosspost from the author's Substack. Click through and subscribe for more content on the intersection of history and policy.

Intro: "Every Hate-Monger, Radio Preacher and Backwoods Evangelist" -- Conservative Radio, the Polish Ham Boycott, and the Creation of a Right-Wing Social Movement -- Seven Days in May or: How the Kennedys Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Radio Right -- Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They Aren't After You: Putting the Reuther Memorandum to Work -- "The Red Lion Roars Again": The Fairness Doctrine, the Democratic National Committee, and the Election of 1964 -- Outsourcing Censorship: How the National Council of Churches Silenced Fundamentalist Broadcasters -- The Radio Right in Decline -- Conclusion: From Radio Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump's Tweets.

President John F. Kennedy launched the most successful censorship campaign of the past half century. Its target was the Radio Right, an informal network of conservative broadcasters who reached millions of listeners across the country by the early 1960s. With Kennedy's encouragement, the Internal Revenue Service audited conservative broadcasters to impair their ability to raise money while the Federal Communications Commission discouraged radio stations from airing their programs. The success of the counter–Radio Right campaign contradicts postrevisionist interpretations of Kennedy as a president who grew toward greatness while in office.