The news media and President-elect Donald Trump have had a contentious relationship, to say the least, since he launched his bid for the presidency — with Trump often making a sport of bashing the media, many times for good reason.

But that has not stopped the News Media Alliance, a nonprofit organization representing nearly 2,000 news organizations in the U.S. and abroad, from offering the Trump transition team some media industry policy guidance.

Chief among the industry's concerns are outdated and burdensome regulations. "While news organizations are innovating and adapting to a vastly different media landscape, antiquated government regulations and imbalanced policies are unnecessarily hindering investment and growth at news media companies," News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern said in a statement. "We encourage the new administration to revisit these regulations and policies as it charts a new course for our nation's economic growth."

One example the organization cited is the 1975 ban on media cross-ownership, which would be repealed under a new bipartisan bill. "Even if these rules made sense 40 years ago, when each market had one newspaper and three TV stations — and cable and the internet did not exist — they do not make sense today," the white paper noted. "(The) rules banning cross-media ownership no longer reflect the reality of today's media landscape and they unnecessarily restrain investment."

Similarly, in yet another example of laws and regulations lagging far behind markets and technological advances, the media organization criticized the government's overly narrow definition of media markets in antitrust actions, which has long been a shortcoming of antitrust law for a variety of industries. "(The Justice Department) believes that print newspapers constitute their own market, and denies that newspapers compete with the internet, television, radio and other mass media," it wrote. "The DOJ's outdated 'market definition' locks newspapers into a 1970s-era advertising model and does not consider the numerous sources the public has at its fingertips."

The NMA additionally called for greater copyright protections and the extension of a printing tax deduction to income from digital distributions, though, as the Carrier Corp. example and several previous editorials attest, we would much prefer broad-based tax reductions to carve-outs for specific industries — even our own. Finally, the group issues a plea for much-needed transparency and media independence.

"A free, diverse and independent press is essential in our democracy to inform the public of the actions being taken by elected officials," it asserted. "We urge the new administration to follow longstanding traditions of pool coverage and press access so that Americans from across the country can better understand the actions being taken by those in whom Americans have placed their trust."

Despite Trump's distaste for the media — as evidenced by his February call to "open up" libel laws to make it easier to sue the media for unflattering stories about him — and its many failings to present unbiased news, the "fourth estate" continues to serve an important role as government watchdog and facilitator of political discourse.

Trump has talked a great deal about reducing regulations once he takes the reins of power. By taking many of the NMA's recommendations to heart and not excluding the media industry from these reforms, he could not only make good policy but also begin to bury the hatchet with the industry and disprove critics' accusations about his allegedly vindictive nature.

REPRINTED FROM THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER