Taxing big tech won’t save local journalism. But it’s a step in the right direction | Opinion
From addiction to smartphones to the rising prevalence of disinformation on platforms like Facebook, the 21st Century is the era of social media. And yet, within a matter of less than two decades, centuries-old institutions are facing existential crises due to our over-reliance on social media.
Perhaps the first — and most tragic — victim of social media is the newspaper industry.
Even though many papers have transitioned to digital mediums, social media platforms have continued to undermine the industry. Newspapers often use social media as a means of sharing their coverage, yet they often receive little to no support from social media platforms, and users often reproduce content that undercuts the revenue of newspapers.
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While large newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have survived, regional newspapers have disappeared at alarming rates. Unlike the average social media user, journalists are professionals regulated by standards who provide readers with trusted reporting.
This is why we need bills like Oakland Asm. Buffy Wicks’s Assembly Bill 886 and Contra Costa County Sen. Steve Glazer’s Senate Bill 1327. Both bills would levy a tax on large tech corporations — namely Google and Meta — for their acquisition of user data for advertising, and would require the Franchise Tax Board to divert funds from these taxes to local news organizations.
Advertising has become increasingly based on user data collected by websites like Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, newspapers have lost valuable income from advertising agencies. These bills are touted by their authors as a stopgap for saving dozens of newspapers across the state in danger of shutting down.
Since the advent of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, newspapers across the country are hemorrhaging. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism reported last November that more than half of all U.S. counties have either no access or limited access to local news coverage and more than 200 counties throughout the U.S. have no newspaper at all.
In 2014, the Brookings Institute reported that between 1989 and 2012, the number of journalists in the U.S. declined from 59,000 to 36,000. Now, more than half of all the country’s 3,100 counties either do not have a local news outlet or have only a single surviving outlet (what experts call “news deserts,” where residents have little access to local news beyond one outlet).
In California, Alpine, Sierra, Sutter and Glenn counties have zero local news outlets, while 11 other counties have only one. There is also a need to save ethnic community newspapers, like the Black American Los Angeles Sentinel and the Japanese American Nichi Bei News — the only source of information for their ethnic communities.
In the Assembly, Wick’s bill has received bipartisan support.
“I don’t believe in corporate welfare, I don’t believe in transferring wealth, but I also don’t believe in unjust enrichment,” Republican Asm. Bill Essayli told The Red Bluff Daily News. “I do think Big Tech is being unjustly enriched off the backs of journalists.”
Unsurprisingly, critics of the bill include tech companies. Several industry advocacy groups have attempted to frame the bill as creating a “link tax” that would undo the existing state of the “connected economy.” Some criticism, such as the kind voiced in journalist Steven Waldman’s article in CalMatters, offers constructive suggestions to ensure that the funding only goes toward California news outlets instead of national media companies like People Magazine or Breitbart.
Community journalism not only offers a means of keeping citizens informed, but democratizes access to news.
These bills ensure accountable funding for news outlets across our state. When news outlets are shuttered, it deprives residents of a reliable source of information and a means of holding local leaders accountable for their actions.
When newspapers disappear, so does reporting on local issues and investigative journalism, allowing corruption to fester and suffering to go unnoticed.
Jonathan van Harmelen is a U.S. historian at UC Santa Cruz. He is an independent journalist, and his work has previously appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, TIME and The Mercury News.
