[butlerweave]

Do they need a License or something similar to operate in the US ?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Do they need a License or something similar to operate in the US ?

Yes. It’s called the First Amendment.

</sarcasm>

The problem we face is that journalism is actually a monopoly. Major journalism is wire service journalism - chiefly but not exclusively the Associated Press and its membership. Wire services homogenize journalism by giving all outlets of the wire services the same inputs. As Adam Smith put it,

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

So what we have in the AP is a conspiracy against the public. A conspiracy to do what? To promote the interests of journalism at the expense of the interests of the public. Understand, the public wants to know what is going on, and it trusts journalism - if not a single newspaper but all newspapers in aggregate - to tell it. But journalism conflates the public interest with what interests the public - and the two things are not the same. Journalism interests the public - thus assures commercial success - at the expense of informing the public as to its true interests.

Journalism interests the public with bad news, and journalism claims to be objective. But that is a claim that negativity is objectivity - and that is a perfect picture of cynicism. Journalism is cynical - but only towards American society. Journalism confidently expects, via its PR influence, to control government - and therefore, journalism paints a positive picture of government.

Journalism is cynical towards society, but naive towards government. That is, journalism is inherently biased in favor of “liberalism.” The only possible solution I can see to that is anti-trust prosecution of the wire services. Considering that their mission - to economize on scarce, expensive bandwidth in the transmission of the news - is now obsolete due to the negligible cost of modern data transmission bandwidth, wire services should be sued into oblivion.