Legal Insurrection readers can vividly recall the mainstream media’s smearing of everything that went against the preferred narrative on the COVID pandemic as “misinformation.”
I will simply point out that the facts deemed “misinformation” by the elite media and its “experts” turned out to be true and accurate.
And the above is just a small sample of the societal-level damage caused by the COVID polices, especially as prolonged by Dr. Deborah Birx and the Biden administration.
To ensure the media was unable to conduct another campaign to silence valid criticisms of science policy again, back in early 2023, The Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit organization established by now Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed an antitrust lawsuit against The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters.
Now the Justice Department has issued a statement supporting CHD, urging the federal court to acknowledge that restricting competition among viewpoints can be a valid basis for antitrust action.
The government doesn’t take a stance on the merits of the facts in this particular case, but says it’s important for the court to recognize that the “the Sherman Act protects all forms of competition, including competition in information quality.”…The issue was a collaboration between news outlets and tech platforms called the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which works to flag “high risk disinformation” and share best practices about how to address it. CHD and several online publishers allege they “lost millions of dollars in revenue” by being demonetized, downranked, or otherwise restricted on “platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.”While web platforms have a First Amendment right to not publish speech they wish to avoid, CHD claims the TNI amounts to a coordinated effort to violate antitrust laws in “the US online market for COVID news and the U.S. online market for political news” by disadvantaging the organization and its co-plaintiffs. The antitrust lawsuit is filed solely against the initiative’s news publishers, which CHD complains flagged covid-related posts …
The argument in this case is that poorly-named Trusted News Initiative suppressed competition in the marketplace of ideas.
CHD alleges that TNI’s restrictions are unreasonable not only because they “collusively reduce output” and “lower product quality”—conventional indicators of illegal collusive behavior—but because “they suppress competition in the marketplace of ideas.” Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division is running with CHD’s argument.Slater said that the “Antitrust Division will always defend the principle that the antitrust laws protect free markets, including the marketplace of ideas,” in a press release. In the department’s statement of interest, Slater references the majority opinion from U.S. v. Associated Press (1945) to argue that “right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.”
The DOJ filing was a reminder to the court of the very nature of Sherman Act protections, as clearly some of our judges apparently need remedial lessons on such things.
Although concerted activity can have procompetitive benefits, it “inherently is fraught with anticompetitive risk” because it “deprives the marketplace of the independent centers of decisionmaking that competition assumes and demands.” Copperweld Corp. v. Indep. Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752, 768-69 (1984). When concerted action is among competitors, it presents heightened risks. See Arizona v. Maricopa Cnty. Med. Soc’y, 457 U.S. 332, 348 n.18 (1982) (“horizontal restraints are generally less defensible than vertical restraints”).Courts, therefore, should exercise care when analyzing claims of concerted action among competitors to ensure that the Sherman Act’s goal of protecting competition throughout the U.S. economy is advanced.Accordingly, when rival news publishers come together and conduct aspects of their news businesses jointly, that is concerted action subject to Section 1 scrutiny.
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