After visiting daughter Ruth in New York City, Ginny, Lawrence and I took the train from Manhattan’s Penn Station to D.C.’s Union Station.
Given airport shuttle times, airport security, boarding time, airplane taxiing, etc., it was just as fast and a lot less expensive. Plus, trains are a bit of a novelty for Southerners.
Both the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station and Union Station were gorgeous buildings to visit. They are tourist attractions in and of themselves. The trip itself wasn’t particularly scenic. Trees and bushes along the tracks blocked our view of the landscape for much of the trip. Being cloudy and rainy that day didn’t help much. The seats were big and comfy. The train was modern and clean. We had cell service the whole way.
Arriving in D.C., we saw sunshine after several days of a rainy nor’easter in NYC. In many ways, D.C. is nicer than Manhattan. The boulevards are wider. There’s more space and greenery. The buildings are more beautiful and height restricted. Yet there’s still vibrant pedestrian traffic through the city at all times, mainly because so many people live in the city. As I have written many times, the key to Jackson’s downtown revival is tax credits for high-rise residential buildings downtown.
Ginny and I both love D.C.’s traditional French restaurants, one of the few types of cuisine you can’t find in Jackson. Even in New Orleans, traditional French restaurants are surprisingly hard to find. The chefs just can’t resist turning traditional French food into Creole French.
All in all, D.C. is just one of the most beautiful cities in the world, right up there with London and Paris.
We stayed at the Georgetown Marriott, where I was attending a “Fly-In” hosted by the News/Media Alliance to lobby Congress to pass legislation helpful to journalism.
Tuesday was the main day. Meetings were set up all day long with senators and congressmen. We had professional lobbyist “sherpas” guiding us through this process, both in setting up and conducting the meetings.
It’s quite a spectacle to behold and interesting to participate in. You go from one congressional office building to the next, surrounded by the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and many other monumental structures. Apparently, all industry lobbying is done this way. It’s a machine.
I was not planning to go this year, having done this routine several times in the past with no results. The News/Media Alliance is the biggest news industry organization. Most of our legislative efforts are opposed by Big Tech, and it seems Big Tech always wins because it has all the money.
But Danielle Coffey, the CEO of the News/Media Alliance, made a special plea for my participation because they needed Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker to be the lead Senate sponsor of our new legislative initiative, the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act.
The News/Media Alliance wanted Wicker because he is considered to be a popular, respected mainstream Republican. The bill already had bipartisan leadership in the House, with Republican Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida as the lead sponsor and Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee of North Carolina as a co-lead. Wicker as a lead Senate sponsor would further underscore the bipartisan nature of the bill.
In addition, Wicker is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Stealth bots are not just a threat to American journalism. They threaten American security.
Most Americans have never heard of stealth bots. Yet these invisible computer programs are quietly changing the economics of the internet, threatening the survival of newspapers and other businesses that create original content.
Here's how it works.
Newspapers spend millions of dollars employing reporters, editors and photographers to gather news. That information is published on our websites, where advertising and subscriptions help pay the bills.
Along come sophisticated computer programs called bots. These programs can automatically visit thousands of websites, extracting articles, photographs and other valuable information.
Some even disguise themselves as ordinary human readers to circumvent security measures designed to prevent unauthorized access.
The result? Technology companies can exploit the work of journalists without paying the people who created it.
Imagine operating a grocery store where someone could walk through the aisles, take whatever merchandise they wanted, and then open a competing store selling your products. You wouldn't stay in business long.
That's increasingly the predicament facing American journalism.
The problem has become particularly acute with artificial intelligence. AI companies need enormous quantities of information to train their systems and answer users' questions. Newspapers provide some of the most valuable information available: professionally researched, edited and verified reporting.
Yet the financial benefits can flow to the technology companies rather than the news organizations bearing the costs.
The News/Media Alliance, representing more than 2,000 newspaper and magazine outlets, is supporting the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act.
The proposed legislation would prohibit certain deceptive automated programs from disguising their identities or impersonating ordinary human visitors when their activities burden websites. It would also provide enforcement mechanisms against these practices.
This isn't about stopping artificial intelligence. AI offers tremendous opportunities for improving productivity and distributing information.
Nor is it about preventing ordinary Americans from accessing publicly available information.
It's about transparency and accountability.
Critics reasonably worry that overly broad regulations could interfere with legitimate research, search engines and useful automated services. Congress should carefully distinguish those activities from deliberate deception.
The larger issue is straightforward. If society expects professional journalists to investigate corruption, cover local government and hold powerful institutions accountable, somebody must pay for that work.
Without a sustainable economic foundation, independent journalism will steadily disappear.
And when local newspapers disappear, communities lose something that technology alone cannot replace: people whose job is to find out what's happening and tell the truth.
That was the message we carried into the congressional offices. And nowhere was our reception more encouraging than in the office of Mississippi's senior senator.
The highlight of the Fly-In involved 30 of the nation’s top editors and publishers, sitting and standing around a big conference table in Wicker’s office. The room was packed. Wicker kindly insisted that the three Mississippians — me, Layne Bruce, director of the Mississippi Press Association, and Peter Imes, publisher of The Commercial Dispatch — sit with him at the front of the room.
We all worked together to make our pitch. Wicker could not have been more supportive. The Mississippi delegation was the hero of the Fly-In.
It felt like I was in the middle of an important moment in our nation’s history. The press is the only industry whose freedom is expressly protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet it is being destroyed by AI, scraping bots and outright theft. As one Microsoft executive described it, “The largest theft of labor in human history.”
Local professional journalism is not dying because of technological obsolescence. It is dying because Congress and the courts have failed to protect the intellectual property of journalists and content producers, a protection that is in the Constitution itself. Those of us left won’t go down without a fight.
