The National Writers Union joins our Media Guild of the West colleagues in rejecting the California legislature’s recent backroom deal with Big Tech, which lawmakers have accepted in place of legislation that would properly tax these mega-corporations and sustainably fund California’s struggling news ecosystem. NWU especially condemns the deal’s bizarre provision for Google to fund generative “artificial intelligence,” encouraging the proliferation of highly fallible plagiarism engines that regurgitate news content, sometimes word for word, without recompense or consent, in place of paying actually intelligent human journalists for their labor.
To our knowledge, this deal has not even included minimum demands of our Media Guild of the West colleagues, including the crucial demand that large newsrooms — like those run by hedge fund Alden Global Capital and Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain — have valid collective bargaining agreements in place to receive state funding. By ignoring this basic demand as well as a demand to fund journalist-run news cooperatives, lawmakers have demonstrated that this deal is more about appeasing the tech industry than supporting the struggling news ecosystem.
Google has been found to run an illegal search engine monopoly by US courts, and unequivocally runs an advertising monopoly as well: the company takes 35 cents on the dollar from every digital ad sale. In recent decades, Google and other tech giants’ pursuit of profit has made it impossible for news outlets, historically dependent on advertising revenue, to thrive. As a result, these companies have gutted local reporting in California and beyond, thereby reducing trust in journalism and accelerating a crisis in democracy.
California lawmakers had one job: to make a clear example to the country that thorough, reliable reporting that informs California residents is more important than mega-corporations with $2-trillion-dollar market capitalizations. They failed. But the bills scuttled by California lawmakers still can ignite real transformation. NWU urges journalism advocates across the country to adopt and pass local versions of SB1327, a digital ad tax, in order to disrupt Google’s stranglehold on our information ecosystem and provide communities with the news they need to hold power to account. We also urge reporters and civic media advocates to join us to organize media workers in support of such legislation.
As these recent events in California reveal, we cannot wait for states, corporations, or even publishers to deliver the robust, useful, well-funded media system we need and deserve. It will be organized workers who build journalism back better. To all creative workers we say: Join the National Writers Union so that together we can organize and fight for quality journalism and a just media industry.
