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Sec. 7. Any person who shall be injured in his business or property by any other person or corporation by reason of anything forbidden or declared to be unlawful by this act, may sue therefor in any circuit court of the United States in the district in which the defendant resides or is found, without. respect to the amount in controversy, and shall recover three fold the damages by him sustained, and the costs of suit, including a reasonable attorney's fee.
I have argued that the wire services in general, and the AP in particular, are a standing violation of antitrust law. Now that I see the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the above section in particular, I am struck by what an inviting target the AP is.
The AP started life as the New York Associated Press in 1848 - four decades before passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The AP was aggressively monopolistic during that time - putting the screws to telegraph lines to give the AP exclusive rights to transmit news reports over them, for example. Not only was the AP monopolistic against any competing wire service, it systematically homogenized, and continues to homogenize, news reporting. This is obvious in the AP Stylebook, which rules certain usages, such as “illegal alien” and others, in or out. Even without the Stylebook, the effect is obvious when an NBC News broadcasts a George Zimmerman tape, editing out an answer and then a question, putting words into his mouth in answer to the preceding question. Were there actual ideological competition among journalists, the reputation of NBC would have been savaged by other journalists after that. Instead, the other members of the AP were busily piling on Zimmerman in other ways.
It is perfectly understandable that journalists tend to be “liberal,” because journalists are reporters of bad news, and bad news is criticism. Since journalists are critics, their position is the exact opposite of that of Theodore Roosevelt in his “man in the arena” speech the operative portion of which begins, “it is not the critic who counts.” Naturally the journalist prefers to think the opposite of “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” The opposite of that is exquisitely expressed by “liberal” Elizabeth Warren: “You didn’t build that.” Nevertheless, Adam Smith perfectly characterizes the AP when he asserts that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The AP newswire is a continuous virtual “meeting” of all of major journalism. There is no need for a RICO suit to go after treble damages and ruin the AP; the Sherman act includes provision for that very thing. The real objection to the AP is its fraudulent “journalistic objectivity.” And the homogenization of all of major journalism, so that people who deviate from that consensus are “not objective, not journalists.” The AP was found to be in violation of the SAA in 1945, but it was not broken up. It was too big to fail because its mission - the conservation of expensive transmission bandwidth in the dissemination of news - was seen as too vital. in the 21st Century, information transmission bandwidth is dirt cheap. I venture that Free Republic alone uses as much bandwidth now as the whole Associated Press did in 1945. The mission of wire services to economize on bandwidth which is no longer a significant expense is therefore an anachronism.
The AP and its membership constitutes a conspiracy against the public. The AP should be transformed into something quite different - and it should be stripped of its membership. There should be lawyers lining up to pick the bones of the AP.