Most excellent article, Bookmarked.IS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A MONOPOLY?Yes. And even if it weren’t, it still would be . . . in the sense that it doesn’t actually matter if the AP has competitors in the propagation of wire service news. Even if there were, it would still be true thatPeople 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 NationsAny wire service is a virtual “meeting” of "people of the same trade” known as journalism, and its inherent tendency is to produce a conspiracy against the public. A conspiracy, that is, to promote the interests of journalists just as surely as a meeting of plumbers will tend to promote the interests of plumbers at the expense of the public.The interest of the journalist is to interest the public and not “the public interest.” The interest of the journalist is to promote the attitude that journalists can be trusted implicitly.
But reporting bad news - the journalist’s stock in trade - implies criticism of those who, it can be suggested, could have prevented or ameliorated the bad thing reported. So the journalist is inherently a critic, which puts him on the wrong side of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech, the operative paragraph of which starts out, “It is not the critic who counts.” If you invert that meaning you get, “performance counts for nothing, it is only about who gets the credit,” or, “Nothing actually matters except PR,” or - Obama’s famous formulation - “You didn’t build that.”
When you see that in black and white, it should be obvious that the interest of the public is in performance - of getting needful things done - but the journalist is interested only in who gets the credit. And thus, the journalist and the socialist politician are natural allies, joined at the hip by their lust to separate credit from accomplishment.
This article is dated 1909, and it already was able to reference an antitrust defeat suffered by the AP. Another occurred in 1945. But the AP was “too big to fail” because wire services had an important function in the immediate transmission of news over wide distances. Today the cost of the bandwidth required for that mission is laughably small, probably less than what FR uses. The AP isn’t “too big to fail,” it is merely too big. Period.