Americans old enough to remember when a viewer actually had to get off the couch to manually change the TV channel have experienced firsthand the vast expansion of the information and media landscape over the past 50 years. No longer are our news and entertainment sources limited to a handful of AM radio stations, three network TV channels, a morning or afternoon newspaper and a few weekly periodicals available at the newsstand or through the mail.

Yet the Federal Communications Commission continues to regulate traditional broadcasters based on the dubious theory that the airwaves are a limited or scarce public resource and therefore must be managed by Beltway bureaucrats. Never mind that technology has overtaken this rationale and demolished it.

In that same vein, Congress in 1970 passed the Newspaper Preservation Act in an effort to ensure competing voices in two-newspaper towns, but the justification for this legal framework has not survived the test of time.

Since 1970, there have been a little over a dozen so-called "joint operating" arrangements (JOAs) involving newspapers, including some in GateHouse Media, the parent company of The News Herald.

A 2018 University of North Carolina study found one in five local papers — nearly 1,800 — has ceased publication since 2004. Many of these closures have been in rural areas — almost 200 counties in the United States now have no local newspaper — but large urban dailies have in no way been immune to the trend and have experimented with a number of reforms in an effort to survive, some converting to weeklies or employing layoffs and cutting back on print editions to save expenses.

If Congress wants to continue the slide toward publicly corporations dictating the opinions of every city and state in America, then by all means; do nothing.

Otherwise, Congress may be wise to work with the media industry to find a common ground that stops short of layoffs and restrictive covenants but allows for the reality of operating a media company in a time of such fragmented audiences.

Joint operating arrangements have been one way companies have been able to work around the FCC, which often falls victim to the whims of whatever administration occupies the White House. Congress members who value being able to call their local newspaper or TV station and give their view may want to know that privilege is in jeopardy thanks to the static nature of media laws, which only tend to change after some sort of scandal. We would prefer to fix the problem before the symptoms go viral. (One could argue they already have, judging by the dysfunction in Washington and elsewhere.)

Whether it is a symptom of the problem or part of the cause (we would argue both), media laws need to allow for freedom of the press but also freedom in operating the press. While we certainly don't want to limit voices, we believe it is time the federal government acknowledge the realities of JOAs and put in writing things they have tacitly allowed for years.

A version of this editorial first appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a News Herald sister paper with GateHouse Media.

REPRINTED FROM THE PANAMA CITY NEWS HERALD

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