HT Pajamas Media

Here’s something to ponder this morning. Here’s another excellent article by Steve Boriss.

RBT

Is the AP Good for America?

[…]

This AP-supported journalism culture deprives Americans of their birthright as codified by the Founding Fathers. The purpose of the First Amendment was to establish a country with maximum free expression and debate — a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas. Jefferson himself created a partisan paper to challenge Alexander Hamilton’s partisan Federalist newspaper. The concept of a single set of news stories and angles is the antithesis of the Founders’ vision.

But lately, the AP hasn’t been working so well for its members either. Before there was an Internet, AP member papers could freely share their stories amongst themselves without worrying that their readers could access them from other sources. Now that the Internet allows readers to find AP stories from many different sites, local papers are left with little content that appears to be exclusive, and thus little reason for their readers to subscribe.