The backlash against tech companies has revived interest in antitrust.

Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple squirm under fresh scrutiny. Two weeks ago, the Senate probed whether Apple and Google use the iPhone and Android app stores to squash apps that could compete with their products. In late March, President Biden nominated Lina Kahn, a progressive antitrust scholar, for an open seat on the Federal Trade Commission. Weeks earlier, he tapped Tim Wu, a high-profile critic of Big Tech and a law professor at Columbia University, for the National Economic Council. (Trustbusters so inclined can buy a mug celebrating the nominations.) Bills to combat corporate consolidation are percolating in the House and the Senate. The Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and dozens of state attorney generals are bringing antitrust lawsuits against the largest tech companies.

Senator Amy Klobuchar was a proponent of antitrust long before the “techlash” made it cool. Now she’s the head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee. In her new book, Antitrust, she chronicles America’s history of combating monopolies. The former prosecutor explains how a lax approach to mergers from the late 1970s onwards has led to concentration in just about every market, from healthcare to caskets to online travel booking services. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the harm monopolies cause, what the Senate can do about it, whether the Biden administration understands the issue, and the significance of Mark Zuckerberg’s emails.

So: Antitrust. Why should people who don’t make policies, or don’t run big companies, care about this?

Monopolies hurt everyone. If you wonder why your cable rates have been high for years, look at monopolies. If you wonder why, in some midsize cities, it costs so much to get airfares, or how come farmers have to pay more for fertilizer or seeds, or why we don’t have good privacy protections with tech, all of that points to monopolies because they don’t have the incentive to make changes or bring down rates.

One of the arguments you make is that monopolies aren’t just bad for prices they’re bad for workers.

Well, that’s one of the most interesting things. You may have a special area of expertise, and if there’s only one place to go use that expertise, then you have problems with wage negotiation. Probably the best example ended up in a lawsuit, where the tech companies actually had to pay major money out because they had agreed not to hire the employees of the other company.

Right, and you also highlight an example of hospitals colluding to keep nurses wages down as well.

Yeah, exactly. And I think a really important point to make is this isn’t just about tech. With babies’ heart valve drugs—one company [Ovation] cornered the market, and suddenly the prices go from $80 to $1,600 per treatment—that’s just outrageous. And so, I think making the argument to consumers, that yes, the tech part of it is important but it’s not just tech, it’s really important to make the case for insulin and EpiPens. People know when they don’t have a choice of stores, or they don’t have a choice of different products to buy. The hardest part right now is people often don’t know, online travel being the best example. They think they can price compare when 90 percent of [travel booking sites are] owned by two companies.

Right, you see a bunch of different online tools and they’re actually all owned by the same few companies.

Right.

You point out that labor was at the center of the first antitrust push in the U.S., but that monopolies-are-bad-for-workers faded from the antitrust conversation for decades. You write that “antitrust officials have made a major mistake by almost totally ignoring labor markets.” Why do you think that happened?

The conservative court, and the fact that it was really hard to bring cases like that. Antitrust became the province of economists and courtrooms.

Gradually, it got away from our politics, so you no longer had farmers with pitchforks or people marching for union rights, taking on monopolies. It went into 200-page filings about an economic theory and market share.

I think we need to start making the political case, the populist case, for why this hurts. And to me the privacy and the data being mined—yes, we should have federal privacy law—but even more than that, if we had allowed capitalism to really do its job and there’d been more intervention in some of these proposed mergers, we wouldn’t be in a situation where they, in the case of Facebook, bought every potential competitor. WhatsApp. Instagram. Every time they [faced a] real competitor, they bought them up. The words are best expressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s own email  that was discovered by my friend [Democratic Congressman] David Cicilline where he said, these brands may be nascent but in the end they could be disruptive to us. That’s not an exact quote, but “disruptive to us,” is an exact quote.

Especially funny given how the tech industry prides itself on “disruption.”

Mmhmm.

To your point about building a political case, you note that the complexity of antitrust law makes that difficult. You quote Justice Breyer who wondered aloud, whether he could patent “a great, wonderful, really original method to teach antitrust law that kept 80 percent of students awake.” That does seem like a problem for trying to gather broad support for antitrust policies. How do you make that political case?

Well, I’m actually pleased that people like John Oliver devoted a whole half hour segment to this, and I tried to commend those that have taken this on. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, and why I have over 100 cartoons. Look back to the founding of our country; the colonists were just mad that they had to buy from the East India Company, right, that was part of the reason they threw the tea in the harbor. And so, we need to harness the anger out there about everything from income inequality and wages, and put it not just into antitrust, but understand it’s related.

One of the cases you address is the breakup of AT&T. What do we learn from that?

 AT&T gave us a whole bunch of good stuff; the telephone, being able to call people across the country and across the world. And then at some point, they just kept gobbling up everything in sight. So, they had a vertical monopoly over all of the equipment, and they had a horizontal monopoly over all of phone service. And pretty soon competitors just got shut out. And that’s when the government started to say, “Wait a minute, I bet we could get lower long-distance rates.” So, a major lawsuit ensued. We ended up winning—the government did—and that led to the breakup of AT&T, which even Bob Allen, the former chairman of AT&T, has said made the company stronger. And what happens? Long-distance rates go down, and the cellphone industry goes from being a big old cumbersome phone that was the size of a briefcase, to where we are now. That’s competition. That’s relevant because one of the remedies with companies like Facebook and Google is to divest some of their assets.

You lead the Senate antitrust subcommittee. What’s the most important thing the Senate could do in the near term to address the problems of consolidation that you outline in the book?

Well, that would be beefing up the agencies [the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s antitrust division]. They’re a shadow of their former selves, from where they were under Ronald Reagan even, and he was not a fan of doing a lot within antitrust. And passing [Republican] Senator Chuck Grassley’s and my bill to change the fee structure for mega-mergers would put $130 million into agencies that they could use to hire lawyers and the like. You just can’t take on the biggest company in the world has ever known with duct tape and Band-Aids.There’s been big movement to try to get this done, it’s actually on the agenda of the Senate judiciary committee right now.

Got it.

And there’s all the bills we should enact to help news organizations so they can negotiate better, that’s kind of the issue we saw in Australia, that’s the bill [the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act] I have with [Republican] Senator [John] Kennedy. And there’s my major bill [the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act] to look at exclusionary conduct and update the laws. And that’s what we should do next. Even if we break it into pieces—you know I don’t have a monopoly on good ideas—[laughs] that was a monopoly joke. And so, we can divide and conquer basically.

Do you have the Republican votes for those measures?

I believe I have the Republican votes for the Klobuchar/Grassley bill, yes. And I believe that—if push comes to shove and there was a vote—we would have the votes for newspaper negotiations. As per my bill, you know, I’m still pushing people but I think for pieces of it I definitely would.

Antitrust was not a big part of President Biden’s campaign, but he has tapped critics of Big Tech for important antitrust roles. Have you talked to the Biden administration about this issue? Does it seem like they get it?

Yes, yeah, I would say that they do. And I think that was exemplified by the fact that they put in someone as out-of-the-box thinker as Tim Wu in the White House and Lina Khan nominated for the FTC. I think they get we have a major monopoly problem and I especially think they understand the issues with tech.

The post Klobuchar: “Monopolies Hurt Everyone” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On January 6, Jason Moore was working from his home in Portland, Oregon and flipping between CNN and MSNBC as Donald Trump supporters gathered outside the U.S. Capitol. “Watching what was unfolding in D.C. on cable news, I found it initially fascinating, and then, later, terrifying,” he told me.

Moore, a digital strategist, is one of the top 55 contributors to the English-language version of Wikipedia. The free online encyclopedia has more than six million articles in English and is maintained by more than 100,000 regular volunteer editors like Moore. Around 1:30 p.m. eastern time, Moore started a new Wikipedia page to document what was then just a protest. He titled it: “January 2021 Donald Trump rally.”

“I have a personal interest just in documenting political movements,” said Moore, who goes by the username Another Believer. He logs onto his Wikipedia watchlist—a feed of the changes that have been made to the pages he wants to track—several times a day, like someone else might log on to Twitter or Facebook. “I’m a bit of a political junkie.”

As the Capitol protest escalated into a violent assault, Moore was tabbing between Google News, the Wikipedia article he had created, and the article’s “talk” page, where volunteer editors could discuss changes with one another. Hundreds more volunteer editors were chiming in. As chronicled by Alex Pasternack in Fast Company, Wikipedians debated the reliability of different sources and the accuracy of terms, and documented the democratic cataclysm in real time. It became, said Moore, “this hurricane of people sifting through a lot of information at once.”

Moore estimates he spent about ten hours editing the page now titled “2021 storming of the United States Capitol” and closely related pages. The entry runs nearly 13,000 words long and has hundreds of external source citations. It has sections on intelligence, or the lack thereof, leading up to the attack; on police preparations; on the participation of state lawmakers; on the House and Senate evacuations; on the completion of the electoral vote count; and more. More than 1,000 volunteer editors worked together on the entry, which is still being updated regularly.

The page is the result of a remarkably collaborative online community of volunteers who edit, verify, and generally obsess over the vast, always-in-motion encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not without faults; it doesn’t take much poking around to find a page with a major error. (Last year, a Reddit user unearthed that an American teenager who did not speak Scots, a Scottish dialect, had written almost half of the articles on Scots Wikipedia. The pages were riddled with grammar mistakes). Wikipedia is also not representative of the public; the vast majority of its volunteer editors are male, and fewer than 20 percent of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women.

But Wikipedia—one of the most visited websites in the U.S.—has avoided many pitfalls that have hobbled other online platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are facing a backlash for their role in propagating misinformation. After Trump’s repeated false claims about election fraud propelled his followers to break into the Capitol, all three companies suspended his accounts. It might have been the right call in the moment, but it also raised uncomfortable questions about the outsize power over discourse wielded by a tiny number of executives at private companies. Wikipedia’s bottom-up model, shaped by thousands of volunteer editors, proves that there’s another way to build online communities. 

Other special volunteer roles help keep the site running. An arbitration committee, also made up of vetted, experienced editors, settles the most contentious disputes; “checkusers,” an elite group of Wikipedia editors, are granted access to technical data to figure out if several Wikipedia accounts are being operated by one person. These privileged editors help deal with difficult situations, but much of the day-to-day work of editing Wikipedia is handled by regular volunteers making changes, discussing issues, following the suggested dispute resolution process, and ideally, landing on a consensus. The site even has principles for how editors can best collaborate, dubbed “Wikiquette.”

As protestors at the Capitol turned violent, one major debate among Wikipedia editors was how to describe the event in the page’s title. Was it a protest? A riot? An insurrection? A coup attempt? “There is a clear consensus that protest is inadequate to describe these events,” wrote a Wiki editor with the username Matthias Winkelmann. “Riot is a more appropriate label for the events that took place,” responded a user called Bravetheif. “I oppose ‘protests’ and oppose ‘storming,’ but support ‘2021 United States Capitol Siege’ or ‘2021 United States Capitol Breach,’” wrote another editor calling themselves RobLa. On the morning of January 7, an editor with the username CaptainEek set the page title to “2021 storming of the United States Capitol.”

But the debate roared on, with editors making a case for their preferred term. Volunteers catalogued which terms different reputable publications had used. Their list of “generally reliable sources” that had used “coup” included the Atlantic, Buzzfeed News, and the Los Angeles Times. The list for “insurrection” included the Associated Press, Axios, and NPR.

This appeal to reputable sources springs from the ethos of Wikipedia content. According to English Wikipedia’s “Verifiability” policy, an editor can be sure something is true, but if it’s not verifiable with a reputable source, it shouldn’t be added to a page. The site has a chart of publications categorized by the current consensus view of their reliability. The consensus can and does change. In 2018, for example, Breitbart was “deprecated” by a consensus of editors, meaning it could no longer be cited as a reference for factual matters. A year prior, editors had made a similar decision about the Daily Mail, a British tabloid.

The imperative to provide reliable sources is one way Wikipedia editors keep misinformation off of contentious pages. When one user proposed an edit suggesting that the Capitol rioters were not really Trump supporters, but rather antifa, an editor with the username Anachronist responded, interrogating the sources provided for the proposed edit:

“Let’s examine those sources. A student newspaper (byu.edu) isn’t a reliable source. The Washington Times contradicts your proposal . . . explicitly saying that no Antifa supporters were identified. I could stop right there, but let’s go on: Fox News is not considered a reliable source for political reporting, and the Geller Report is basically a blog, self-published, and therefore not usable.”

The proposed edit never made it through, since administrators had placed the page under protection, meaning less experienced editors could not make changes directly to the page. That’s a common step for entries on contentious topics. By the evening of January 6, the “Storming” page was placed under “extended-confirmed protection,” meaning that for the next two days, only editors who had made over 500 edits and had had their account for 30 days or more could make changes. (After two days, the page was set to a slightly lower level of protection). “This helped enormously with the level of disruption,” said Molly White, a long-time Wiki editor and administrator, in an email.

White, a software developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts who goes by the username GorillaWarfare, made multiple edits to the “Capitol Storming” page. “I was horrified and anxious to watch this all unfold,” she explained, but editing on Wikipedia felt better than doomscrolling. “This is something I do often—if I’m trying to understand what’s happening or learn more about something, I will go edit the Wikipedia article about it as I do.” White primarily edits pages related to right-wing online extremism. She wrote much of the Wikipedia pages for Parler and Gab—alternative social media apps popular among Trump supporters and right-wing provocateurs—and contributed significantly to the entry on the Boogaloo movement.

Wikipedia can count on having humans in the loop on content decisions, rather than relying on artificial intelligence, because it’s much smaller than YouTube or Facebook in terms of active monthly users, said Brian Keegan, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. That’s helpful because content decisions often require understanding context, which algorithms don’t always get right. Humans can also offer more nuanced feedback on why an edit is being reversed, or why a page is being taken down.

Of course, Wikipedia doesn’t always get it right either. Less trafficked pages receive attention from fewer editors, which can easily result in significant factual errors. But pages that attract more attention from editors are often of high quality, thanks to a fairly functional system of collaboration and cross-checking. In fact, other social media companies have come to rely on Wikipedia as a source of reliable information. In 2018, YouTube announced it would link to Wikipedia pages alongside its videos about conspiracy theories in an effort to provide users with accurate information. In 2020, Facebook began testing Wikipedia-powered information boxes in its search results.

What Wikipedia illustrates is that the problems with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms aren’t that they are social or that they’re populated by user-generated content. It’s their business models. All three are for-profit companies that make their money through micro-targeted advertising, which means they have strong incentives to show users content that will keep them on their platform for as long as possible and keep them coming back. Content that confirms users’ beliefs or stokes their preexisting resentments can be good for business. That only overlaps with the truth some of the time.

As a nonprofit, Wikipedia operates within a fundamentally different set of incentives. It doesn’t rely on advertising revenue and it doesn’t need to drive up user engagement. The Wikipedia community has instead been able to develop norms and policies that prioritize the integrity of the content. “A platform like Wikipedia has no compunction about shutting down access to editing their articles, or stopping people from creating accounts—all these things that would really hurt topline numbers at shareholder-driven organizations,” said Keegan.

The irony of the “Capitol Storming” page is that so many volunteers worked so hard to accurately document an event fueled by lies. For every claim that the election had been stolen or Mike Pence had the power to stop the count, there was a volunteer clicking through news reports, trying to get it right. Nearly a month later, the page still isn’t complete. When I asked Molly White how she would know when to stop working on it, she wrote that Wikipedia is never finished, and pointed me to a corresponding Wiki entry titled “Wikipedia is a work in progress.”

Update: A reference to Fast Company’s article on the same Wikipedia page was added on Feb 8.

The post When the Capitol Was Attacked, Wikipedia Went to Work appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Tuesday, Spotify, the audio streaming behemoth, announced another acquisition. It struck a deal to buy Megaphone, a podcast ad tech company that works with thousands of content publishers, including Disney and Spotify itself. The $235 million purchase positions the Swedish company to become a dominant player in the podcast advertising business.

The deal with Megaphone is just the most recent example of Spotify’s aggressive expansion into podcasting through a rapid string of acquisitions. In 2019, it purchased the premiere podcast production network, Gimlet Media, and later snapped up Parcast, which specializes in true crime shows, and bought The Ringer, a media company focused on sports and pop culture. It acquired Anchor, which makes podcast creation tools. And it has cut a series of exclusive deals with top talent, including Joe Rogan and Michele Obama. The company, in other words, is building a podcasting empire, operating as a podcast player, a one-stop-shop for making your own podcast, a top producer of original shows, and now, as a podcast advertising and hosting company.

Spotify’s acquisitions are part of a larger wave of corporate consolidation in the podcast industry, which has long maintained a low barrier to entry, welcomed experimentation, and run on an indie ethos. As tech companies like Amazon and Spotify jockey to become leading podcast platforms, and other media companies, like SiriusXM and iHeartMedia, buy up downstream companies, a looming question is whether podcasting will remain a sustainable business for independent creators and journalists.

That’s why Spotify’s purchase of Megaphone—though less glam than, say, its podcast deal with Kim Kardashian West this June—is consequential. Advertising is the primary source of revenue for many podcasts, so consolidation in that space has ramifications for how the whole industry makes money and who gets how much.

Podcast ad technology has traditionally been less sophisticated than advertising on the internet, where companies can target you with ads based on your sexual orientation, interest in K-pop, whether you’ve been visiting car rental websites, or any number of interests revealed by your devices. Without the tracking infrastructure companies like Google and Facebook, podcasts ads have traditionally been one-size-fits-all-listeners, often read by the hosts themselves, and slotted in before someone starts listening to a show. That method doesn’t provide companies with the fine-grained data they’d like, such as how many people fast-forward through their ads, but market research suggests that podcast ads can be more effective than other forms of advertising. This arrangement has also worked well for creators, who can charge high rates for their direct, intimate pitches to listeners. (On a per-listener basis, ads on top podcasts can cost more than Super Bowl ads on TV in recent years. The Super Bowl, of course, has far more viewers than even wildly successful podcasts).

Megaphone offers a more advanced form of podcast advertising, which can aim ads at specific audiences. It will be even more formidable when it’s combined with Spotify’s massive listener database, which includes details such as when exactly a listener tunes in, their music and podcast listening preferences, their precise location, and even whether someone’s phone is in their hand or in their pocket. Megaphone’s technology will be combined with Spotify’s Streaming Ad Insertion technology, a novel tool that enables the company to insert ads into shows as a listener is streaming (as opposed to inserting them when someone downloads a podcast, which could be days before they intend to hit play). Spotify did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The combination of the two companies’ services will make podcast ads more like internet ads: personalized to the listener, placed in real-time. The deal will also make Spotify’s Streaming Ad Insertion technology available to the thousands of podcast publishers on Megaphone. Megaphone hosts more than 5,500 shows, and Spotify is home to 320 million monthly listeners, according to The Verge. If that combination of scale, as well as Spotify’s ability to offer more detailed data, draws advertisers to spend their money via Spotify, it could make the platform unavoidable for content creators.

 But there’s another reason this deal is important: It echoes a trend in digital advertising that hurt newspapers and magazines. Media outlets were once, of course, the way to reach large, captive audiences, so that’s where companies bought ads, underwriting quality journalism in the process. Then Google branched out from the search engine business and got into digital advertising. It bought up companies such as DoubleClick and AdMob and leveraged the personal data it was vacuuming up across its properties, like Gmail, YouTube, and others, to offer brands the ability to microtarget their ads. Google, and now Facebook, have, notoriously, become the dominant forces in digital advertising, capturing 88 percent of the market’s growth from 2018 to 2019. That growth has come at the cost of advertising revenue for journalistic outlets, which have shed jobs at an alarming rate in recent years.

 With its purchase of Megaphone, Spotify is “really reading the Google playbook,” says Daniel Hanley, a policy analyst for Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on antitrust. “It’s almost word for word. It’s kind of crazy.”

Much as consolidation in digital advertising hurt journalistic outlets, there’s concern that targeted advertising in podcasting, concentrated in the hands of a few companies, could have a similar effect on podcast creators. Spotify, for its part, claims the deal will help, not hurt, podcasters. “With this acquisition,” the company said in a statement, “we’re helping podcast publishers earn more from their work—while also helping advertisers connect with engaged podcast audiences.”

That may be true. Spotify’s technology could be a boon to your microbrewing podcast or your crafting talk show, for now. But as a streaming platform and mobile app, Spotify has far more personal data on users than its ad tech competitors could ever have—that is until Google and Amazon get into the business. The next podcast-obsessed Texas Tech grad who launches a podcast ad tech company might be crushed by Spotify’s data advantage. And if the platform is able to crush its competitors—or even just shrink the market to a few big players—podcasters could see a decreasing share of the spoils of each ad sale. That concern may seem several steps ahead of the ball, but then again, few predicted that Google would morph from a search engine company into a digital ad giant when it bought its first ad tech company.

Before the Megaphone deal is complete, Spotify will likely have to get the Federal Trade Commission’s approval. That probably won’t be a high hurdle. In rare cases where the FTC has concerns about a deal being anticompetitive, the commission might ask the two companies for more documents to get a better sense of the industry, holding up the sale’s approval. If further examination convinces the FTC that the acquisition is anticompetitive—an incredibly unlikely outcome—the panel could tell Spotify it must sell off part of its business in order for this deal to go through, or it could take the company to court to prevent the purchase altogether.

Antitrust enforcement isn’t as vigorous as it used to be. Forty years ago, before the Reagan era began, the thinking was that agencies shouldn’t wait to take action until an industry becomes highly consolidated, they should actively try and maintain markets with vigorous competition. In the 1960s, for example, the Supreme Court blocked a merger between two grocery store chains in Southern California because combined, they’d have had a market share of about eight percent in the Los Angeles area. That precedent has largely been ignored since the early 1980s but never overruled.

During his first term, Joe Biden will have a chance to change the balance of power at the FTC by appointing another commissioner. (Currently, the agency has three Republican-appointed commissioners and two appointed by Democrats. Biden will be able to flip that ratio, with three Democratic appointees). The Democrat-appointed commissioners currently seated have been calling for more active antitrust enforcement.

 Spotify is not the only company to look for gold in podcast advertising and publisher-side analytics. SiriusXM bought SimpleCast, a podcast management and analytics company; snapped up AdsWizz, a podcast ad tech company, via its purchase of Pandora; and acquired Midroll, a podcast ad tech company, via its purchase of Stitcher. iHeartMedia bought VoxNest, a company that offers podcast analytics and programmatic ad tools.

Acquisitions by these players happen against a backdrop of moves by even larger titans. Amazon, for example, is fashioning its audiobook company, Audible, into a podcasting network. It’s also turning its Spotify-like streaming service, Amazon Music, into a purveyor of podcasts linked up to its popular line of smart speakers. Apple, whose product begat the term “podcast”—a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast—in the first place, is also a major player. It not only has its Podcasts app pre-downloaded on millions of iPhones, but it also purchased a podcast recommendation software company, Scout FM, in September. Since it’s already making feature films and series through AppleTV, the world’s most highly valued company is bound to end up producing its own podcasts, as well as owning the platform and hardware on which they play.

“We’re witnessing the foreclosure of this really dynamic industry that’s open and accessible,” says Hanley. We’re “really seeing it consolidated into the hands of just a few players.”

The post Spotify, Podcasts, and The War for Your Ears appeared first on Washington Monthly.

House Republican women have broken a record. In 2021, the largest ever freshman class of GOP women will take seats in the chamber. In fact, the cohort of Republican women in the  House may double in size when new members arrive in January.

At least 23 Republican women were elected to the House this week, 13 of whom will be new to Congress, according to data from the Center for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Several won swing districts that had flipped blue in 2018. Eight Republican women have been elected to the next Senate, and if Georgia’s Kelley Loeffler holds on to her seat, they will match their current record of nine sitting women Senators.

“There is no doubt about it. Last night was truly the night of Republican women,” tweeted Elise Stefanik, a representative from New York who helped lead the effort to recruit and support Republican women candidates in this election cycle.

Does that make this the “Year of the Republican Woman” that several outlets predicted? If the yardstick is GOP women’s performance in the 2018 midterms: Yes. After that blue wave election, the female Republican cohort in the House dwindled from 23 to 13—less than three percent of all representatives.

But if House Republican women’s success is measured against that of Democrats, then this week’s wins are modest at best. Democratic women will hold at least 83 seats in the next House as of this writing, and all 17 sitting female Democratic senators have been re-elected. (Compare that to 23 Republican women elected to the House and eight elected to the Senate). Some House races are yet to be called, and it’s unclear whether Democrats will ultimately match their previous record, set in the 2018 election, of 89 women heading for the House.

This week’s election is “a good news story for Republican women,” says Deborah Walsh, director of the Rutgers University center. “But I really can’t stress enough the distance that the party still needs to go achieve gender parity.”

How did Republicans begin to turn it around? The credit, in part, goes to new Republican groups like Stefanik’s E-PAC (the “E” stands for “Engage, Empower, Elevate, and Elect”), as well as Winning for Women, VIEW PAC, and Maggie’s List (a riff on Democrats’ Emily’s List, but named for Republican legislator Margaret Chase Smith). They recruited a record number of Republican women to run for congress in 2020, focusing on candidates with experience as state legislators, said Michele Swers, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies women in Congress. And critically, PACs like Stefanik’s gave to Republican women in primary contests, something the Republican Party rarely does.

In several districts, Republican women competed against Democratic women who had won office in 2018. Ashley Hinson, a TV reporter, turned Republican state legislator, beat Abbey Finkenauer, a freshman Democrat, in the race for Iowa’s first district. In Oklahoma’s traditionally red fifth district, Stephanie Bice, a state senator, edged out Kendra Horn, who had flipped the fifth in 2018. As of this writing, at least six Republican women have flipped House seats. Some of those wins didn’t come as a surprise; many of the seats Democratic women won in 2018 were purple at best. Before Horn won, for example, Oklahoma’s fifth district had been led by a Republican for 40 years. Donald Trump won the district by nearly 14 points in 2016.

Republican women’s wins in swing districts could increase the party’s investment in women’s campaigns in the next cycle. But in the longer term, these victories are less helpful for growing the number of Republican women in Congress. Historically, women have been perceived as more moderate than their male counterparts in the GOP and have tended to serve in moderate districts where turnover is higher. To build their ranks sustainably, Republican women need to win safe seats and stay in them for years, building seniority and a path for others to follow. The women winning swing districts in 2020 could be swept away in 2022 or 2024.

The incoming Republican women will reshape the House in other ways. Amongst the wave of Democratic women elected in 2018 were several mothers of young children, like Katie Porter, a single mother of three, Mikie Sherrill, who has four kids, and several others. Unpredictable work hours on the Hill and the distance members travel from home to get there can make it difficult for primary caregivers—disproportionately mothers—to serve. Now, more Republican women will be joining that cohort, including Hinson, who has two sons; Nancy Mace, a single mom of two, newly elected to represent South Carolina’s first district; Victoria Spartz, who has two daughters and who just won the election for Indiana’s fifth district; and potentially Beth Van Duyne, a single mother who is leading in the vote count for Texas’s twenty-fourth district.

A couple of Republican women headed to Congress share a more unusual distinction: support, or at least sympathy, for QAnon. The conspiracy theory is sprawling but centers on the (baseless) belief that the president is secretly combatting a shadowy group of Democratic politicians and celebrities who abuse children and worship Satan. Lauren Boebert, a restauranter and hard-right gun activist who won Colorado’s third district, has expressed enthusiasm for the fringe movement but walked back her support under pressure. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won Georgia’s fourteenth district, has supported the theory since 2017, writing pro-QAnon articles as a “correspondent” for a conspiracy website, and posting videos in which she praises Q (the anonymous leader of the movement). “I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out,” she said in one now-private YouTube video, according to the Washington Post.

Despite its wins, the Republican women’s congressional caucus is still a shadow of the Democrats’—a partisan gap that has widened over the past couple of decades. About two-thirds of female Senators are Democrats, and that’s unlikely to change significantly. Democratic women outnumber Republican women in the House more than six to one in the current Congress, and while that partisan gap will narrow somewhat with the newly elected members, it won’t be close. As of Thursday evening, 83 Democratic women, including incumbents and newcomers, had won House seats.

Republican women’s gains, though, could provide momentum for GOP women candidates in future elections. Outside groups should have an easier time getting the ear of party leadership, says Swers. It may also help convince more first-time female candidates to run.

“One cycle doesn’t make a trend,” says Walsh, who runs the Rutgers Center. “Will this continue? Will the party put resources in? That’s what we’re going to need to watch for in 2022.” She added, with a laugh, “I can’t believe I’ve uttered ‘the election year 2022.’”

The post Republican Women Made Big Gains in the House. Here’s Why. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

The Daily is perhaps the most successful news product at the country’s most successful newspaper. Each weekday morning, a new episode of the New York Times podcast appears on millions of phones. Host Michael Barbaro, a former Times politics reporter, might talk one day to the White House correspondent Maggie Haberman about the latest Trump palace intrigue, and the next to a reporter in the Moscow bureau about unrest in Belarus. The show is a wildly successful experiment that attracts a much larger audience than the front page of the print newspaper each day and brings in major ad revenue from the likes of BMW, Chanel, and Fidelity Insurance. At a time when the financial viability of the news industry is very much in doubt, The Daily is an encouraging counterexample. 

The Times is at the forefront of a broader podcasting boom. Ad revenue for podcasts increased by nearly 50 percent last year, according to an estimate from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and is projected to top $800 million this year. Regional newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Texas Tribune, and the Des Moines Register have gotten into podcasting, as have many online magazines and public radio stations. Slate now makes about half of its revenue from its podcasts. Vox Media expanded from a handful of shows in 2017 to more than 200 shows in 2020. Revenue from podcasting is expected to double this year. “We went from it being a hobby, to a strategy, to a big pillar of the company,” says Marty Moe, president of Vox Media Studios.

Podcasting is also a sector where it’s relatively easy for new and independent voices to break in. The former radio reporter Amy Westervelt founded her own network, Critical Frequency, in 2017. Just two years later, it won AdWeek’s annual award for best podcast network of the year. Podcasting also provides space for in-depth reporting, something that has become increasingly difficult to fund in other media. Long investigative reports on technical subjects can be turned into explanatory miniseries, as BuzzFeed did in September with an exposé on big banks’ role in financing terror and drug operations. Challenging topics, like school segregation, can be excavated through compelling storytelling, as with Nice White Parents, a New York Times podcast tracing the history of one Brooklyn school. “The space for high-quality content, and quality journalism, has been contracting for economic reasons for many years now,” says Jacob Weisberg, CEO of Pushkin Industries, a podcast production company he started after years as the editor in chief of the Slate Group. “I see podcasts very much as a place to enlarge that space.” 

But podcasting’s bright future is under increasing threat. The medium stands in danger of being rolled up by monopolistic tech platforms that could come to own and control the marketplace itself. With that power, they could suck away much of the value created by talented podcasters, just as Amazon stole away the income of even many best-selling authors after it came to own and control most of the digital infrastructure on which e-books are sold. 

The most immediate incursion from Big Tech is Spotify, the music-streaming giant, which has already made aggressive moves to install itself as the new podcast gatekeeper. It has acquired several production companies and cut exclusive deals with top podcasters, like Joe Rogan, requiring that they remove their shows from all other platforms. But behind Spotify loom even more powerful actors. Its forays appear to have piqued the attention of Amazon and Google, and possibly even Apple, which has long functioned as a passive, benevolent monopolist over podcast distribution.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with market platforms. The trouble arises when marketplaces come under the control of monopolists who are accustomed to running platforms to their own advantage, at the expense of everyone else who relies on them. The recent House antitrust subcommittee report on tech monopolies illustrates what this can look like. The investigation found evidence that Amazon exploits the data it gathers on third-party sellers who use its online market to undercut those very merchants; that Google put a thumb on the scale to feature its own products, like Chrome and Google Shopping, over competitors even when its engineers knew those offerings wouldn’t naturally rise to the top of a Google search; and that Apple uses its control over the iPhone app market to unfairly tax, bully, and play favorites with third-party app developers.

These monopolistic tendencies have already wreaked havoc on other creative industries, forcing onerous terms on musicians, app developers, and book authors, as well as stealing revenue from newspapers and magazines. The same fate could befall podcasting, to the detriment of journalists and, by extension, democracy. But it isn’t too late. As the House report makes clear, the government waited until the damage was already done to start investigating the anticompetitive practices of tech monopolies. Podcasting offers policy makers a chance to atone for their sins—by using public policy to keep podcasting from being devoured before it’s too late.

Steve Jobs introduced the wider world to podcasts at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2005. (The term is a mashup of iPod and broadcast.) Slate was one of the earliest media companies to experiment with it. They started by simply reading articles into a microphone. They tried something they called “voicemail blogs.” “It was very much about figuring out a new medium,” Weisberg, the former Slate executive, told me. “There wasn’t a clear revenue model, but the people who were making them at Slate loved making them, and the audience loved them, so they kept expanding.”

Thankfully, it was relatively easy for Slate, and other podcasters, to get their product out. Podcasts relied on “Really Simple Syndication,” or RSS feeds, a standardized, open web format for pushing out updates to any website. The format made it easy for listeners to subscribe to podcasts and automatically get new episodes, using any number of apps set up to receive RSS feeds. For the most part, however, people didn’t listen on any number of apps. They listened on iTunes, and, later, Apple’s podcasting app, which was preinstalled on iPhones. Apple let podcast hosts put their shows on the app for free. By default, Apple became something like a benevolent old-fashioned bookstore owner, not charging anyone for product placement, demanding onerous terms of services, or competing against independent authors with its own products. Weisberg describes the company’s hands-off approach as “a real gift” to the podcasting world. 

It took time, but thanks to its widespread accessibility—and a few blockbuster shows, most notably the 2014 sensation Serial—podcasting took off. In 2015, less than half of Americans were familiar with podcasts, and only 17 percent listened monthly, according to a survey from Edison Research. By early 2020, three-quarters of Americans were familiar with podcasts, 37 percent listened monthly, and 25 percent had listened to one in the last week. Most impressive is the amount of time listeners spent. Out of those who listened in the last week, the average time spent listening to podcasts is more than six and a half hours per week.

All that ear time has opened up enormous opportunities for ads. Businesses have capitalized. Podcast listeners hear their favorite hosts shill for products for a few minutes each episode: a subscription toothbrush service, stamps you can print out at home, software for getting an email newsletter started. Ads delivered by hosts are the primary way many successful podcasts bring in money. Done well, they don’t feel all that intrusive—it’s just more stuff from the person you chose to listen to. “Hosts are able to leverage the personal connection that they have with the audience,” says Dan Check, CEO of Slate, which makes the listener more receptive and the ad more effective. 

So effective, in fact, that companies are willing to pay more per 1,000 listeners (the “cost per mille,” or CPM in industry argot) for an ad on a top podcast than the going rate for a Super Bowl ad in recent years. While the advertising industry has been rocked by tighter budgets during COVID-19, brands are projected to increase their spending on podcast ads in this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s data. 

For the most part, that money has been going to podcasters themselves. Advertisers make deals with podcasters directly or go through one of several podcast ad firms that match brands to shows. Lots of podcasts bring in additional revenue by putting out extended episodes on Patreon, or letting subscribers pay for an ad-free feed. This has all grown without giant tech companies consolidating the market and taking huge cuts of the revenue. 

But that’s starting to change.

To understand what could happen to the podcasting industry, it helps to understand what happened to early Hollywood. 

In the 1940s, a handful of studios controlled nearly every part of the moviemaking process, from the theaters in which the films were shown to the actors, who had to sign exclusive deals with one studio. Under studio contracts, actors’ lives were minutely controlled. Actresses were prevented from getting married or having children, for example, if it conflicted with their image as a sex symbol. 

The Supreme Court put this setup to an end. In a landmark 1948 decision, United States v. Paramount Pictures, the Court ruled that Hollywood movie studios could no longer also own movie theaters, because that put them in the position of favoring their own films over those of independent moviemakers. The decision ultimately meant that actors, screenwriters, directors, and other creative talent could sell their services across a much broader open market and were no longer effectively indentured to one of the era’s studios. It also meant the viewing public had a much broader choice of films showing at their local theater. 

But now, Spotify looks like it’s trying to become today’s version of pre-1948 Paramount.

The first clue came in 2018, when Spotify struck a deal with the actress and comedian Amy Schumer to create an original podcast for the platform, and then netted an exclusive deal with the rapper and podcaster Joe Budden. The exclusive deal was a major change in the terms of the game. Traditionally, all podcasts had been free to listen to, with some ads, on all podcast platforms. But for the duration of his contract, Budden, who had established his popular hip-hop culture podcast across several platforms, would be forbidden from airing his show on any other podcasting platform.

A spate of exclusive deals followed. Spotify made agreements with Vice News, Kim Kardashian West, and Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. Perhaps most notably, the company netted Joe Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the country. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is paying him more than $100 million to bring his show to Spotify, and to remove it from all other platforms by the end of 2020. 

The second sign of vertical integration came in February 2019, when Spotify acquired two podcast companies: Gimlet Media, a premier company behind the popular shows Reply All and Homecoming, and Anchor, a software company with tools for people to make their own podcasts. “Gimlet and Anchor will position us to become the leading platform for podcast creators around the world and the leading producer of podcasts,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote after the deals closed. “These acquisitions will meaningfully accelerate our path to becoming the world’s leading audio platform.” The company then went on to acquire Parcast, a podcast production company focused on making true crime podcasts, and the Ringer, a popular sports website and podcast network, home to Bill Simmons’s titular podcast. 

This means that Spotify is no longer just a platform for listeners to find podcasts and for podcasters to find an audience. It’s also a podcast production company that competes for listeners against the other podcasts on its own platform—like the old movie studios that owned the theaters that rival movie producers depended on. This seriously disadvantages independent podcast production companies, like Amy Westervelt’s Critical Frequency, which must compete with Spotify-backed productions that can command far greater resources and potentially get insider perks, like additional promotion on the platform or more detailed audience data than is available to other content creators. Similarly, Anchor’s tools could be integrated directly into Spotify’s app—a massive advantage other podcast tool companies can’t match. (The platform has already tested an in-app “create podcast” button that took users to Anchor’s tools.) 

As a platform, Spotify also has at least two major advantages when cutting deals with advertisers, which could threaten the setup that has so far worked pretty well for podcast hosts. First, it could, in the future, offer brands a larger audience for their ads than any other podcasting firm alone could deliver, with the option to, say, advertise across their thousands of sports shows. This might draw advertisers away from other podcasting firms. Spotify is already netting far bigger customers than individual podcasters typically could. Omnicom, a large digital marketing agency, has signed up to buy $20 million worth of podcasting ads on Spotify. 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it has changed up podcast delivery technology in a way that will give its ads an edge. Traditionally, the RSS format made podcasting more resistant to surveillance-based micro-targeted ads—you can’t do much spying on someone when they’re listening to a downloaded file, and that was the information podcasters had to work with. But as a mobile app Spotify has a lot more granular information to offer advertisers—like precise location, the time when users are listening, and even whether someone’s phone is in their hand or in their pocket. Streaming also allows the company to dynamically insert ads into podcasts as they are playing, something that most podcast firms, which have to pre-bake ads into podcasts to comport with RSS-based platforms, cannot do. Finally, as a platform, Spotify can also bring to bear user data, like the demographic information people input to set up an account, or the preferences and habits revealed by their music listening, that podcast firms generally don’t have access to. 

These enhanced advertising capabilities are a major part of Spotify’s sales pitch. In January 2020, the company announced its new “Streaming Ad Insertion” technology, which will take information about listeners, like their age, gender, location, and type of device, and use it to target ads at them, inserted in real time as they stream their podcast. In June, the Verge reported that Spotify has made this technology available for 100 Spotify shows. It’s still early days; the company has hinted that it will expand the technology’s use further.

Spotify’s more sophisticated ad targeting abilities, and its power to program ad placement within podcasts, mirror the trend that eroded the business model for print journalism. Print publications used to be important gateways to specific audiences—Runner’s World, for example, was a place Nike knew it could reach potential buyers. That remained true in the early days of the internet, when advertisers bought banner space directly from publishers. But the rise of micro-targeting over the past decade allowed brands to aim their ads to a certain audience no matter what website or app they’re looking at. Runner’s World, in other words, is no longer the most important gateway to Nike’s audience. 

Instead, the gateway became the two companies that provide the most detailed data on individuals. The first is Google, which tracks users across its sprawling empire of map, email, search, video (YouTube), and other properties. The second is Facebook, whose monopoly over social networking gives it an unrivaled trove of granular and intimate data about its users. The two companies’ data advantage, built up largely through acquisitions of competitors, has allowed them to dominate the business of digital advertising and to redirect to themselves the ad money that once funded media outlets. Google now controls 90 percent of the market for publisher-side ad servers, and takes an estimated 40 percent cut of ad sales that use its services, according to an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Market Authority. The two companies combined took in 88 percent of the growth in digital advertising dollars between 2018 and 2019. (See Phillip Longman’s “Starving the News“) 

Targeted advertising could do the same to podcasts. Some in the podcasting business are already worried that it will. “Let’s look at the web, the best and most recent example of a mass-market, highly diverse, mature, fully analytics-capable medium,” Marco Arment, creator of the popular podcasting app Overcast, remarked in a Columbia Journalism Review article after hearing about new podcasting ad tracking software. “How did that turn out for all sides involved? Is web publishing a healthy business while minimizing consumer/privacy abuse?” It was, of course, a rhetorical question.

Spotify may have gotten an early start on taking over the podcast market, but it’s facing competition from some fearsome rivals.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon Music was branching into podcast distribution, letting podcasters add their feeds to the platform, and has plans to put out exclusive podcasts of its own, including one with DJ Khaled. It is also fashioning Audible, its audiobook platform, into a podcast network, with dozens of original, exclusive shows that exist behind a $7.95 monthly paywall. 

Amazon has advantages Spotify doesn’t. Its Echo speaker leads the smart-speaker market. Anytime someone asks Alexa to play a podcast, it automatically plays from Amazon Music (if it’s available there). The company could parlay its dominance of smart speakers into gatekeeping power in podcasting. The opportunities for synergy—or, perhaps, for self-dealing—are immense. Someone listening to a podcast via Amazon Music on their Echo device could hear an ad for a product made by Amazon and sold on Amazon. With a few words to Alexa, they could buy it. In that interaction, Amazon would have created the podcast, the platform the podcast is played on, the software that summons the podcast, the hardware the podcast is played on, the product advertised, and the market on which the product is sold. 

Google has also begun expanding into the podcast market. When you search for a podcast on Google, several small panels embedded high up in the search results direct you to episodes on Google Podcasts. That product has less than 2  percent of the market, according to figures from the podcast hosting platform Libsyn. (Solid market share figures are hard to come by, but Libsyn publishes the share of downloads each platform gets, across all listeners to the thousands of podcasts it hosts.) And yet Google’s search engine often features it above more popular apps, like Spotify and Stitcher. Google has several other levers it could pull to expand its app’s reach. Google’s Android operating system runs on roughly 45 percent of phones in the United States. Google runs the app store those phones use, Google Play, and has its own line of smart speakers, Google Home. The company is adept at using these platforms to create what the House antitrust report called “interlocking monopolies,” using dominance in sector A to give its own products an advantage in sector B. Ultimately, Google’s biggest advantage lies in its data. As podcast advertising shifts to a real-time micro-targeting model, personal data will be the coin of the realm, and no company in the world knows as much about as many individuals as Google. 

Don’t forget Apple, which commands more than 60 percent of U.S. podcast listeners, according to Libsyn’s figures. Apple’s success has less to do with beating its competition in design and user experience and more to do with the fact that it comes pre-installed on all iPhones, a level of convenience that Spotify and other podcast apps can’t compete with. The open question is whether the company will do much with its power. Apple has built its brand in part around privacy, so it may not get into the invasive business of advertising. But between hiring Jake Shapiro, the founder of a premier podcast distribution nonprofit, to lead creative partnerships at Apple Podcasts, and its recent acquisition of Scout FM, a company that algorithmically curates custom podcast playlists, there are signals that Apple may finally be stepping up its efforts. Like Google, it could turn any number of dials to promote its own podcast platform through superior integration with Siri, or better compatibility with Apple’s own iPhones or iOS operating system. Its competitors rely on Apple’s app store for distribution, and Apple could make any number of decisions on that platform that hurt its competition. Through its own software—from Safari to the Health app—Apple can gather substantial personal information for advertisers. If Apple vertically integrates and gets into podcast production and advertising, as Spotify has, it would be extremely well positioned to monopolize the podcasting industry. 

So what happens next?

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Spotify becomes a dominant podcast creator, advertiser, and distributor. Once people are used to finding their favorite podcasts in one place, they’re unlikely to wander. If Spotify can provide the largest audience for advertisers, and a system for granular micro-targeting based on the data it collects on those listeners, it could win a critical and self-reinforcing chunk of the podcasting pie. 

Or perhaps Amazon, Google, or Apple will surge from behind, buying or crushing Spotify en route to dominating the industry. 

Finally, we could also end up in a world where Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Apple all make aggressive efforts to own the podcasting space, and we end up with a few ginormous podcast creator-advertiser-distributor companies. That might be better than a single monopolist taking everything over—but probably not much. Right now the industry is mostly vertically separated. Some companies make podcasts, others do advertising, and still others run platforms—and there’s competition within each level. A four-way Big Tech podcasting oligopoly, however, would be more like the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s. In that world, “if you want to produce a podcast, you’re going to get to pick between one of four bosses, as opposed to being able to be your own boss and sell into an open market,” says Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert at the American Economic Liberties Project. (Stoller was one of the first to write about market consolidation in podcasting, and how it could harm the industry.) This could drive down revenue for content creators—and the publications that depend on them. Having four companies control the pipeline of audio content could also make it harder for new and independent creators to find an audience.

It’s possible that these fears will prove to be overblown. Many observers are optimistic that there will always be a route for independent podcasts, or podcasts made by small companies, to succeed. Jacob Weisberg of Pushkin and Dan Check of Slate, for example, think the fact that listeners don’t seem to mind ads read by hosts means that advertisers will continue to pay high prices to content creators, even if it means their products aren’t micro-targeted. Others hope that indie podcasters will be able bring in enough money through subscriptions, or extra paid content on Patreon, to sustain themselves if platform companies take over ad sales. At least some podcasters seemed to have learned the right lesson from the decline of digital publishing: Make your money from several different sources. 

But as the history of digital advertising shows, the worst can happen. That means policy makers must be proactive to help keep the podcast market healthy. 

Fortunately, there are clear ways for the government to step in. The FTC, and other regulators, could take the stance that platforms, once they provide an essential infrastructure, must stick to being platforms—they can’t branch out into advertising or podcast creation, where they might have an unfair advantage. Regulators could also create rules to ensure that podcast creators don’t have to take bad deals in order to gain access to distribution platforms. In the past, the federal government created such rules for media. In the 1970s, for example, the Federal Communications Commission issued rules preventing the big three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, from sucking profits away from independent TV producers.  

Those rules were eventually relaxed, as antitrust enforcement generally fell apart. The past couple of years, however, have seen the beginnings of an antitrust renaissance. As Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have crept into every corner of our lives, advocates and policy makers have rediscovered competition policy as an important bulwark against corporate monopolies. The Department of Justice, the FTC, dozens of state attorneys general, and European Union regulators each have had investigations into one or more of these companies in 2020. On October 6, the House subcommittee released a report finding that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook used their platforms to gain an upper hand in new markets. The Democrats on the committee, who authored the report, gave Congress concrete recommendations, including a ban on letting certain dominant platforms compete in adjacent lines of business. 

But the point of antitrust law is not only to reel in monopolies once they’ve crushed their competitors and taken over industries. It’s also to prevent harmful consolidation from happening in the first place. Policy makers should apply the thinking from their report to the podcasting industry before the situation becomes worse. They should enforce structural separation within the industry, so the platforms that provide essential infrastructure can’t branch out into content creation or advertising within podcasts. 

They must do this now. Podcasts are one of the few promising ways for media outlets to reach new audiences, develop new journalistic formats, and bring in new revenue for valuable reporting that is otherwise underfunded and underappreciated. But the drumbeat of platform monopolization is getting louder. Regulators need to listen up.

The post Big Tech Comes for Podcasts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the long and mostly disappointing history of women in American politics, 1992 is widely considered a pivotal year. Fueled in part by outrage over Anita Hill’s treatment by an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings the previous fall, voters elected a record number of women to the House and Senate.

Headline writers would soon dub 1992 “The Year of the Woman.” In the popular imagination, that phrase has come to evoke the beginning of a decisive upward trajectory for women in elective office. But it was always a bit of a misnomer. Of the 24 women elected to the House in 1992, 20 were Democrats—as were all four of the newly elected senators. A more accurate description would have been “The Year of the Democratic Woman.”

That label would also have foreshadowed the path of progress for women in the years since.

The next 30 years of data tell a consistent story of two lines diverging. In 2004, 52 Democratic women were elected to Congress, compared to 30 on the Republican side. But by 2008, the Republican women’s caucus was reduced to 21, while Democrats had climbed up to 69. Today, partly on the strength of another “year of the woman” in 2018, Democrats are up to 105 women. And Republicans? Twenty-two. In fact, while there are currently more Democratic women serving in the House than at any point in history, the number of Republican women in the House is the lowest it’s been since 1992. 

In light of the attrition, some Republicans are making a push to get more women elected in 2020. As of this writing, a record 220 (and counting) Republican women have filed to run in congressional primaries. Susan Brooks, a Republican congresswoman who has been vocal about getting more women to run, was put in charge of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) candidate recruitment efforts. Elise Stefanik, another House Republican, launched E-PAC, a political action committee, to support and raise money for GOP women candidates, with a focus on supporting their primary bids. (The “E” stands for “Engage, Empower, Elevate, and Elect.”) And more than half of the NRCC’s 22 “young guns”—House candidates that the party identifies as especially promising—are women. 

If Republicans are going to reverse the trend of the past nearly 30 years, it’s going to be thanks to candidates like Tiffany Shedd, who is running to represent Arizona’s First District. Her CV boasts a wide range of talents: natural resource lawyer, farmer, bilingual kindergarten teacher, homeschool mom, and 4-H certified shotgun coach. She grew up in Arizona and stuck around for law school. She realizes that she checks certain boxes for the party. “I don’t really have to guess or figure out, like, so-called ‘messaging,’ because I am the demographic we’re trying to win,” she told me in April. Her campaign ad tells the story of facing off drug smugglers trying to cross her land, interspliced with video of people climbing over border walls, clips of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking angrily, and Shedd shooting a rifle. On her campaign site, she pledges to work with Donald Trump to secure the border. 

The Republican establishment has lined up behind her. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has endorsed her, and the NRCC named her a “contender,” one tier below a young gun. She’s got support from more than a dozen members of Congress, the Arizona Farm Bureau, a handful of woman-focused conservative PACs, and more. She ran in 2018 and didn’t make it out of the primary, but this year she has outraised her only remaining primary opponent by more than five to one. Her district is currently represented by a Democrat, but it voted for Trump in 2016. With all that backing, Shedd and candidates like her are a test case. The GOP has been remade in Trump’s image. Is there any room left for Republican women? 

There’s a Godwin’s law of conversations about women running for office: As a discussion runs longer, the probability of someone bringing up EMILY’s List approaches 100 percent. Founded in 1985 to back Democratic women who support abortion rights, it’s the bar against which other efforts to support women candidates are measured. The name is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast”—as in, it makes dough rise. Financial support at the start of a campaign signals a candidate’s legitimacy and helps bring in other donors. 

Many of the women it has backed have not only gone on to win office but have stayed in power for decades. Barbara Mikulski, one of the first two women the group supported in the 1986 midterms, went on to become the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress. (She retired in 2016.) In 1992, the organization was profiled on 60 Minutes, drawing national attention, and it grew its network of donors by more than sixfold. Some of the women elected in 1992, like Patty Murray and Dianne Feinstein, are still serving and have ascended to leadership roles in the Democratic Party. In 2000, EMILY’s List started to help women who were running for state and local office as well, in effect building out the front end of the congressional candidate pipeline. For the 2018 midterms, the organization raised more than $100 million for the candidates they had endorsed. (Between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2018 midterm elections, the group says, an unprecedented 42,000 women reached out to them to talk about running for office, compared to just 900 in the previous cycle.)

In addition to fund-raising, EMILY’s List recruits women to run for office. Staff spread across the country often spend months identifying women with potential. “Take a look at somebody like Kyrsten Sinema,” said Emily Cain, the organization’s coincidentally named executive director. EMILY’s List worked with Sinema when she was a state legislator running for the U.S. House, and then backed her again when she ran for Senate. It was the same with Maggie Hassan, who springboarded from the New Hampshire state senate to the governor’s mansion to the U.S. Senate. EMILY’s List backed all six of the current Democratic women governors, who outnumber Republican women governors two to one. Some, like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, have gained national exposure during the coronavirus pandemic. Whitmer has become the subject of Trump’s harshest attacks on governors, and is widely considered to be on Joe Biden’s list of potential running mates.

EMILY’s List is so effective that it plays an important complementary role to the formal Democratic Party. “The party in any given state is quite happy if they can nominate a woman who is going to get EMILY’s List support,” Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told me. “It takes the pressure of fund-raising off the local party, and they can use those resources elsewhere.” 

Other factors have driven Democratic women’s steady gains. First, many of the Democratic women elected in the 1990s—like Nancy Pelosi—are now in powerful positions, setting off a positive feedback loop. Democrats have five women in leadership roles in the Senate and 11 in the House, compared to one and one on the Republican side. More women in the caucus means more advocates for promoting women within the party, and more role models for those considering a run for office. 

Policy commitments are also important. The party has consistently focused on issues that disproportionately affect women, like abortion, sexual assault, paid leave, and, more broadly, safety net programs, which women are more likely to access. Democrats have also almost exclusively benefited from the gains in Congress made by women of color, who helped drive the Democratic wave in 2018. Currently, there are 47 women of color serving in Congress, and 46 of them are Democrats. 

On the Republican side, there’s a long history of failed attempts to copy the success of EMILY’s List. WISH List, founded in 1992, was a PAC aimed at backing Republican women who were in favor of abortion rights. But by the early 2000s, its fund-raising was in decline, and in 2010 it folded in with another group. Then that group, Republican Majority for Choice, shut down in 2018. The Susan B. Anthony List PAC was created in 1992 to support women, on either side of the aisle, who oppose abortion access. (The name is an apocryphal reference to the legendary suffragist’s supposed pro-life worldview. The editor of Anthony’s papers has called that notion an “invented memory.”) The SBA List still exists, but it has shrugged off its rule of only supporting female candidates. VIEW PAC was founded in 1997 to elect more Republican women to Congress, but according to the organization, it has raised a total of less than $10 million since its founding. She-PAC, a group formed in 2012 to back Republican women running for state and federal office, barely got started before it shut down in 2016. 

Other groups have formed in the past decade—Maggie’s List in 2010, Winning for Women in 2017, and Representative Stefanik’s E-PAC in 2019 are a few. They point to the record number of women running this year as evidence that the tide may be turning. The Republican Party typically avoids supporting one candidate over another during the primaries, so when Stefanik pledged to throw her weight behind women in primaries, she got pushback. Tom Emmer, then the incoming NRCC chairman, said it was a “mistake.” Stefanik fired back, tweeting, “NEWSFLASH: I wasn’t asking for permission.” It seems now, though, that party leaders back the effort. “Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise have stepped up in tremendous ways,” Stefanik told me, referring to GOP leaders in the House, “and I think our model is working.” Both McCarthy and Scalise wrote checks to E-PAC soon after its launch. 

Still, history suggests tempering optimism. Women voters have shifted sharply away from the GOP under Trump. But even before Trump, Republican pro-women groups were making an identity politics pitch at odds with conservative ideology. Republican donors “reject affirmative action–type activities,” Laurel Elder, a political scientist and sociologist at Hartwick College in New York, told me. The candidates with the most merit, the thinking goes, will rise to the top. “They’re essentially opposed to making specific efforts to recruit women—or to recruit any group based on demographics—so it makes it challenging for these groups that are explicitly designed to try to recruit women to have a comfortable home in the party.”

This aversion to identity politics gets in the way of the groups’ ability to make a full-throated case for their cause. When I asked Olivia Perez-Cubas, spokesperson for Winning for Women, why her organization thought it was important to get more women into Congress, her first answer was that Congress should reflect the country. But that quickly came with a caveat. They’re backing their chosen candidates, she said, “not because they’re women, but because they’d be great members of Congress, and they’re great fits for their districts.” Winning for Women, though, doesn’t support male candidates—even if they’d be great members of Congress and great fits for their district. 

Above all, the effort to elect more Republican women has sputtered because there simply isn’t much demand for change among Republicans. A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2016 found that just under 40 percent of Republicans agreed that the country would be better off with more women in public office. According to another study from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Republicans think we’ve already done enough on gender equality as a society, and almost 20 percent say we’ve gone too far. That puts groups like E-PAC in a pickle. Republican voters don’t think the problem they’re trying to solve is really a problem at all. 

Meanwhile, the trends that drove Democratic gains were mirrored on the Republican side, cutting in the opposite direction. The party, which had once had room for Nelson Rockefeller–style liberals, grew uniformly conservative, its base of power shifted to the South, and it became increasingly dependent on the votes of white evangelicals. The result of this ideological sorting, Elder said, is that that conservatism, “which used to hold back women across the board, is only holding back Republican women.” Her research demonstrates that the more conservative a district is, the less likely it is to elect a woman. “When the Republican Party started moving in a more conservative direction, that tracks almost perfectly with the emergence of the partisan gap and deteriorating performance of Republican women,” she told me. Michele Swers, a political scientist at Georgetown University, makes a similar point. If you look at the type of congressional districts over time that tend to elect women, these districts are usually more urban, more racially and ethnically diverse, and higher income, she says. “These days, that kind of district is electing Democrats.” 

As a result, not enough Republican women have risen through the ranks to create the kind of virtuous cycle that Democrats benefit from. Typically, leadership positions are filled by members who have been in Congress for years, often decades. There simply aren’t many Republican women who fit that description; many of the women elected decades ago have since lost their seats or resigned. Research shows that elected Republican women have historically been more moderate than their male colleagues, which has driven their attrition as the party has drifted ever rightward. “One of the lessons is that you have to have Republican women in all sorts of seats, not just swing seats,” Stefanik said. When women win office in deep red districts, they’re more likely to stick around in Congress and build seniority. “To some extent,” she continued, “that’s still a challenge we need to work through.” 

A week after the 2018 midterm elections, newly elected members of Congress descended on the Capitol for orientation. Ethical guidelines were reviewed; services of the Capitol police explained; catered meals eaten. Newcomers to the House gathered to take a group photo. Included in the snapshot were a record 38 women: 36 Democrats and two Republicans.

Then, that caucus of two faltered. As California’s Young Kim had headed to D.C. for orientation, votes in her Orange County district were still being counted. When the tabulation was complete, it turned out that her (male) Democratic opponent had narrowly won. Out of the more than 120 Republican women who had run for the House, only one new member, Carol Miller of West Virginia, would be taking a seat in the Capitol. 

Democrats had beaten their own records. Including incumbents, 89 women had been elected to the House on the Democratic side, a cohort that included the first two Muslim women, the first two Native American women, and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. But in a year of record wins for women in Congress overall, Republican women had actually posted losses. A combination of retirements and unsuccessful campaigns meant that their ranks in the House had shrunk by almost half. In the Senate, the news was better, as the GOP increased from six to eight women—but still lagged behind the Democrats’ 17. (Since then, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia was appointed to fill an open seat, bumping their total up to nine.) “A record number of [Republican] women ran, but that certainly wasn’t reflected in the Election Day results,” said Perez-Cubas, the Winning for Women spokeswoman. “It was disappointing.”

Two thousand eighteen seemed like a low point, and yet 2020 could be worse. Two out of the 13 Republican women currently in the House have announced that they won’t be running for reelection—including Susan Brooks, who chairs the candidate recruitment efforts for the NRCC. Nearly half of the nine Republican women serving in the Senate are at risk of losing their seats in November: Martha McSally in Arizona, Susan Collins in Maine, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Kelly Loeffler in Georgia. 

Loeffler, in fact, may turn out to be a good case study in how Republican efforts to promote women lose steam. She was appointed to the Senate by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to fill a vacancy created by a resignation. Kemp’s logic appeared to go like this: Democrat Stacy Abrams had come within striking distance of the governor’s mansion on the strength of a young, diverse, urban coalition. The reliably red state was at risk of shifting to purple. If the Republican Party was going to maintain its power, it needed to expand its support among white suburban women. But most Republican elected leaders in the state were white men. Enter Loeffler, a longtime conservative donor, CEO of a financial services company, and co-owner of Atlanta’s WNBA team—and, of course, a woman. Trump, however, preferred Doug Collins, a loyal defender of his in the House and on many a cable news show. Kemp stuck with Loeffler, who took office in January and is up for election in November. 

During her first few months in the Senate, though, Loeffler has already gotten into hot water. In late January, before the public was alerted to the severity of the coronavirus crisis, she began selling stocks that would be adversely affected by it. In fact, she commenced the sell-off the same day the Senate Health Committee, on which she sits, held a members-only hearing about the pandemic. (Loeffler says that a third party makes trades on her and her husband’s behalf, without their knowledge.) Her odds of winning in November look shaky for other reasons, too; Collins has declared that he’ll be challenging her in Georgia’s primary. Since her appointment, The Cook Political Report has downgraded the Georgia Senate race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican.” If Loeffler loses her seat—either to Collins or a Democrat—Trump will be emboldened to say “I told you so” and other Republicans may be less likely to promote women with the goal of expanding the party’s voting base in the future.

If GOP women are to expand their footprint, it will likely be thanks to people like Tiffany Shedd: candidates with ample backing and funding who are running in swing districts or districts where the incumbent isn’t running for reelection. There are other women who fit that description, like Young Kim, the Orange County Republican, who is running again in 2020. Or Beth Van Duyane, who is competing for an open seat in a Texas district rated “Republican toss up.” Or Ashley Hinson, campaigning for a toss-up district in Iowa currently represented by freshman Democrat Abby Finkenauer. If these Republicans do well in 2020, it could give the effort to elect more women some momentum.

But a spate of congressional wins would almost surely mean that Trump, at the top of the ticket, had won as well. A man who has driven women voters away from the party in striking numbers would continue to define its goals and values. “Frankly, at this point, the Republicans are still able to win elections, even though they’re fielding such a paltry share of female candidates,” Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, told me. “Unless there are electoral consequences, it doesn’t really seem likely that there’s going to be a fundamental shift.”

But say 2020 is a bad year for the GOP—an increasingly likely outcome given rising unemployment claims and coronavirus deaths. Republican political elites might draw the opposite conclusion: that their efforts to elect women like Shedd were a waste, and that trying to get more women elected isn’t worth the investment. It’s possible, Rutgers’s Debbie Walsh said, that Democrats could elect equal numbers of men and women to Congress in 2020. “But,” she said, “we are never going to get to parity overall if only one party is working on recruiting and supporting women.”  

Kristina Karisch contributed reporting.

The post Why Can’t Republicans Elect Women? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On a Brooklyn neighborhood forum, funeral director Amy Cunningham put out the call. Could anyone contribute items, like flowers, to an upcoming funeral? An elderly woman had died of coronavirus in a nursing home and had no family in the area. Florists in New York are closed, so one resident contributed lilacs from her backyard, the Associated Press reported. Another embroidered “Mom” on some fabric that would be placed on the casket, with the deceased woman’s family watching via livestream.

More than 16,000 people have died of Covid-19 in New York City, the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S. Just as hospitals have struggled to keep up with the influx of sick people, the city has also struggled to accommodate all of the dead. The state has relaxed environmental regulations to allow crematoriums to operate around the clock, and the city has dispatched a fleet of mobile morgues. Burials on Hart Island, New York’s mass grave for bodies that aren’t claimed, or whose family cannot afford a funeral, have increased five-fold.

Funeral directors like Cunningham have been forced to adapt ceremonies and services around the contagious disease. Cunningham, the founder of Fitting Tribute Funeral Services, specializes in environmentally friendly burials. She and I talked about how funerals have changed in New York.

This conversation has been shortened and edited for clarity.

How is your work different since the coronavirus outbreak started in New York?

Well, my firm specialized in earth friendly burials, home funerals, and witnessed cremation services, and none of those services are currently possible in exactly the same way I was delivering them. Because of the novel coronavirus, families are saying goodbye—on a good day—with nursing assistants holding the cell phone to the ear of the dying person in a hospital that the family hasn’t even been able to enter.

The funerals I’m managing now involve the transporting of the deceased person in a white plastic body pouch to protect the funeral home personnel from any risk of the virus passing to them in the hours after death. That bag isn’t coming off at the funeral home. While it’s believed that the coronavirus expires within the body at the time of a death, there is said to be some risk to individuals in the hours immediately afterwards, perhaps because the lungs of the dead person still hold a bit of air, and as we move them they actually can exhale a little bit after death. Plastic body bags are a fact of life for now, but they are upsetting to me. They’re hardly eco-friendly, not remotely green. I’ve got folks looking into how we could develop something just as sturdy and kinder to the planet.

Another thing that’s different is that previously, if a death occurred on a Tuesday I could arrange for a burial or cremation two days, three days later, sometimes even the next day if the paperwork went smoothly. Because of the sheer number of dead that we’re managing, cremations are now being scheduled at the end of May.

Are there any basic things you need in order to provide your services that are either hard to get ahold of or that you’re running out of?

It seems likely that there will be a casket shortage eventually. I’ve personally solved that issue by bringing caskets into my living room at home. I live in a two-story limestone row house and I’ve got four caskets in my living room right now. I went ahead and had the casket company deliver them, and had my son and husband carry them in so that at least I’d have some caskets that were clean and ready to move when I needed them. That’s a little unusual.

Have there been an influx of families that are in need of death care services but can’t afford them? If so, what are their options?

Yes, I’m hearing from people who need a funeral, and are disappointed that the wait time for an affordable cremation is so long. Some have lost their jobs, have no money, and need to plan a funeral with a burial now that might cost $1500 to $6000. It’s pretty devastating. There was a time when the deaths were occurring so quickly that some funeral homes weren’t able to manage the sheer volume of the work and were referring people out to other firms. Those firms were helping us New York City funeral directors cremate the dead by taking them to other states. There’s so many deceased people, our crematories are overwhelmed. So, there are people driving deceased folk up to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, other areas where the crematories are a little less overwhelmed.

In the coming month, that’s going to ease up. Today in New York as you’re interviewing me, I’m not hearing the same sirens out in the streets that I was two weeks ago. So it could be correct that, as Governor Cuomo says, we’re leveling this off. But people out of work are still struggling and starting GoFundMe pages to help them with the cost of the funeral.

I will say this, however: I’m really impressed with the local funeral directors that are reducing their prices for families in that situation. How can you charge them the full rate? It just can’t happen. So, we’re offering people our services at a reduction.

What does your typical day look like right now?

The heavy lifting and placing in the casket is done by amazing folks I employ to help me at the funeral home. My day is mostly on the telephone with grieving families, trying to schedule and arrange these burials and cremations in a timely way. I’m spending a fair amount of my time explaining to families why only 10 family members can come to the cemetery. We’re trying to educate folks about the possibilities and Zoom memorials and new ways to grieve remotely so that we can have some sort of commemoration of the life as we manage the very very basic down-to-earth matter of a simple disposition right now.

What has been your advice to people who have lost family or friends to coronavirus? Either practical advice, or different advice you’re giving on how to grieve?

I had already been thinking that we place too much emphasis on the hour-long funeral service. Saying farewell to someone is really the task of a lifetime, and something that you do most intensely over the period of the first full year. So I’ve been coaching families to see that, yes, we’ve lost the gathering we’re most familiar with, but you will be able to find a way to mourn, and find community, and relate to your other family members in a way that will be new but restorative in surprising ways.

When I do have a casket in my car headed for a burial, we’ve been replacing traditional chapel gatherings with doing these outdoor block parades. I drive the car with the casket in it onto the actual block where the deceased person lived, and people can acknowledge the death as a neighborhood. I had one death caused by a heart attack. We have to remember that other sorts of deaths still occur in the age of the novel coronavirus. I drove to the man’s block, opened the car, and allowed people to approach the car while maintaining a safe distance from each other. They placed flowers in the car, and then the immediate family drove to the cemetery and stood at the lovely graveside service 6 to 10 feet apart. Good funeral, lots of love expressed.

I know you specialize in sustainable, or greener burials. Are you still able to do those kind services?

Yes. My real contribution as a funeral director in this moment is personally driving people upstate to eco-friendly cemeteries that will just bury simple caskets in the earth. The only problem is that there is this plastic body bag inside there that I never used to have to use. Most of the eco-friendly cemeteries are saying, “well, God, what can we do, we know it’s a crisis in our country, and a time of considerable suffering.” So, they may take that plastic bag for the short term as we work it out. In other words, the green burials I’m managing are just a bit less green than they used to be but we’re doing the best we can.

Do you think the pandemic will lead to any lasting changes in the funeral industry?

I hesitate before mentioning this because it doesn’t feel like a great time to criticize the conventional funeral industry. The men who have been in the business 40 years and were nearing retirement have flung themselves into this crisis and been so courageous.

However, maybe when we catch our breath, we’ll evaluate where we’re headed as an industry and how we might provide better services to more people, and take the drive to profit from the funeral out altogether by looking at cooperative funeral home structure, which is operating very successfully in the state of Washington.

In the old days prior to the Civil War, before the American funeral industry was formed, communities took care of their own. And it feels to me like we could attend to that kind of care again and find ways to make deaths less of a medical event, and more of a community-based experience. So, as I work hard and admire the conventional guys I know and work around, I’m at the same time thinking, “Gee, there must be a better way to give funeral services to people at an affordable rate, and in a loving way.”

The post Thousands of New Yorkers Are Dying. What Happens to Their Bodies? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

David Firestone, an associate special ed teacher in New York City, is in his final semester of a master’s program at the Hunter College School of Education. Yet he still feels like he hasn’t learned one of the core skills of teaching. 

“No one has ever bothered to teach us how to write a real lesson plan,” he told me in November. “They just care that we know how to write edTPA lesson plans.” He was referring to the test you’re required to pass in New York State to become certified as a teacher. A real-world lesson plan is usually half a page, maybe a little more. What the program has instead drilled into him is how to write the kind of document he will submit to get his teaching license: a super-detailed, eight-page plan, essentially a script of everything he’d say in a class. 

As a full-time associate special ed teacher and a graduate student on the side, Firestone has a finely calibrated sense of time—how to divvy it up, maximize it, save it. He leaves his house in central Brooklyn at seven to get to school in south Brooklyn by eight, teaches a full day of classes, and finishes just before three. Then he spends an hour and 20 minutes trekking to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to take grad school classes, which can run until 9:40 p.m. He often doesn’t get home until after 11. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for eight-page lesson plans. Frequently he writes his on the subway. It’s a schedule that he described alternately as “brutal” and “God awful.” 

So why do it? Because he has to. Right now, one of the most common ways that school districts attempt to increase teacher quality is through master’s degrees. Some states, like New York, Maryland, and Connecticut, require that teachers get master’s degrees in order to keep teaching. Far more states encourage teachers to get them by tying them to pay raises.

It makes sense for states and school districts to look for ways to improve teacher quality. There are many factors schools can’t control, such as family income, parents’ level of education, and so on. But out of the factors they can influence, like class size or access to technology, one has a far greater impact on student achievement than all the rest: teacher quality. Research shows that having a great teacher rather than an average one makes as much as a half year’s difference in learning growth. 

The problem is that education master’s programs generally don’t produce better teachers. While programs vary greatly, and some stand above the rest, the teachers I interviewed told me that they had spent too much time on theory and not enough on practical teaching skills; professors were too far removed from the classroom and using out-of-date pedagogy; and many programs simply weren’t rigorous. Decades of research back up their critiques. 

“When you talk to someone who is not in the weeds of ed research, they would be shocked that more education wouldn’t make a teacher more productive,” said Dan Goldhaber, who directs the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington. But that’s what the data shows. Students whose teachers have a master’s degree don’t perform better on standardized tests—an incomplete but meaningful metric—than students whose teachers have just a bachelor’s degree. 

Some teachers get a master’s because they want to. But many do it because their district requires them to, or because they aren’t being paid much and it’s a way to get a raise. Some teachers bluntly told me their degrees were a waste of time—a surprising admission given the strong human impulse to attribute value to whatever you’ve already spent a lot of money on. 

In districts across the country, teachers aren’t paid enough. To attract talented, devoted people to the profession—and so that teachers don’t need second and third jobs—we need to pay them more. What doesn’t make sense is tying increased teacher pay to cumbersome, expensive degree programs that don’t actually improve teacher quality. And it’s clear that there’s a better way.

American teachers weren’t paid salaries at all well into the 19th century. Schools were largely community organized, and teachers’ compensation mostly consisted of free room and board. By the early 20th century, with the cash economy in full swing and K–8 education growing rapidly, teaching had become more professionalized—but teacher pay reflected the intense racial and gender inequities of the time. In part to confront that unfairness, districts began setting pay schedules based on objective criteria like training and years of experience. Scholars disagree on when exactly the master’s pay bump started, but by the 1960s it had become widespread.

This arrangement has proven durable. It makes budgeting more predictable for school districts. It suits the needs of teachers’ unions, who want to increase benefits that are equally accessible to all their members and tend to prefer linking pay to seniority rather than performance. And, not incidentally, it ensures a steady stream of tuition revenue to the universities offering the degrees. 

What the system does not do, however, is improve teacher quality. 

That’s not exactly what Arthur Levine expected to find when he set out to study the field of teacher education in the early 2000s. At the time, he was the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, one of the most prestigious programs of its kind in the country. Education schools were coming under criticism, but Levine assumed that his research project would prove their value. He and his research team conducted four massive surveys and 28 case studies of education programs, resulting in a more than 100-page report. 

“When I started the study, what I suspected was that the criticism was overstated,” he told me recently. He was wrong. “Things were so much worse than I had imagined,” he said. “It was shocking.” While there were some standout programs, on the whole he found a system rife with low selectivity, low rigor, and low graduation standards. Students criticized faculty for having limited classroom experience, which led to dated material and a lack of practical tips. Worst of all were school- administration programs, which many teachers enroll in with an eye toward career advancement, and of which Levine concluded, “The majority of programs range from inadequate to appalling.” 

Subsequent studies have backed up Levine’s research, showing that teachers with master’s degrees aren’t any better, on average, at educating students. (A notable exception, according to recent research, is that students had higher math scores when their teachers had master’s degrees in math or science.) The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, which represents hundreds of colleges and universities that have education programs, cautions that much of this research relies narrowly on student performance on tests, and doesn’t capture other skills we expect teachers to impart. But the consensus among people who have studied the question is overwhelming.

“Most of the research is that there’s either no statistically significant difference, or small significant differences, in teachers with master’s degrees,” said Thomas Kane, an economist and professor of education at Harvard. Matthew Chingos, an education-policy expert at the Urban Institute, has described it as “one of the most consistent findings in education research.” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, put it more bluntly: “It’s as conclusive as research that finds smoking causes lung cancer. It’s as conclusive as the research on climate change.”

It cuts against logic. How could several years, hundreds of hours, and tens of thousands of dollars spent on making teachers better not make better teachers? 

One explanation I heard again and again was that programs spend too much time on theory and not enough on practice. “Education programs in general are abstract, and they don’t really give teachers opportunities with real-world practical strategies which you can utilize in classrooms,” said Jessica Chirico, a social-studies teacher at a New York City charter school, who, like David Firestone, did her master’s at Hunter College. “Vygotsky is a great guy, Piaget is a great guy,” she said, referencing two famous pedagogical theorists. “But at the end of the day, the kid is throwing paper balls at his friend in the classroom, Johnny is not listening—how is that going to help you?” 

Firestone found that many of his professors were professional academics who hadn’t worked in a school classroom for decades, or at all. “There’s nothing wrong with leaving the classroom to be an academic,” he said. “But I just find that people who are in the classroom every single day think more practically than the academics.” Other teachers noted that their professors weren’t using up-to-date pedagogical practices themselves. Martin Goldman-Kirst, a math teacher at Cleveland High School in Washington State, recalled the irony of being lectured on not lecturing his students. “I found that really funny,” he said. “It would have been funnier had I not been so bored.” 

When programs do try to deliver hands-on classroom experiences, it can be the most valuable part of the degree—but it can also fall flat. Firestone was required to spend a summer observing and learning from full-time teachers leading summer school classes. But the teachers, he said, were hardly models to emulate. They were mostly close to retirement or brand new, and were teaching summer classes because they needed the money or didn’t yet have a full-time job. Sometimes Firestone found himself offering to take over a lesson. 

To the extent that programs are challenging, most teachers I spoke with pointed to the burden on their schedule, rather than the rigor of the content. This leads to perverse incentives. The salary bump for getting a master’s degree is given in exchange for the signed and stamped diploma, whether or not teaching improves. Teachers, most of whom already have tightly packed schedules, often seek the least time-consuming programs. Schools of education, in turn, compete for customers by making their programs less demanding. In many districts, there are few restrictions on the types of degrees that qualify, so often teachers choose subjects, like school administration, unrelated to what they teach. It might qualify them for a more lucrative leadership position down the line, but it won’t make them a better math, Spanish, or history teacher now. “You could get a master’s degree from a topflight master’s of education program, or you could go to a fly-by-night program, and typically those two would be treated the same [by the school district],” said Dan Goldhaber, the researcher at the University of Washington.

Laura Lozito, a social-studies teacher who works with Chirico, would have liked to get an advanced degree in history. But when she compared syllabi, she quickly realized that a master’s in education would entail less reading and writing, and would cover material she was already familiar with from her undergrad courses. Her schedule couldn’t bear the workload of the history degree, so she chose a master’s in adolescent education offered online through Mercy College. The homework mostly entailed posting in an online forum for her class. It was a lot of “ ‘Yeah, I agree with so-and-so’s point,’ ” she said, and it got tedious. “I will be 100 percent honest, I did not notice any added value with this degree,” she told me. “With the exception of a couple of things I gleaned from the texts, I feel like if I had never gotten it, I’d be teaching the same way.”

Nixing the automatic master’s pay bump, which many experts advocate, would likely face intense resistance from teachers’ unions. It would also draw quiet resistance from a less obvious source: the universities awarding degrees. Data from the Department of Education shows that education master’s degrees are the second most commonly awarded master’s degrees in the country, after MBAs. That makes them an important and reliable source of tuition revenue—as long as teachers feel the need to get them.

Marguerite Roza, an education-finance expert, got an inkling of that fact when she published a paper arguing that states should end the “master’s bump.” The money going toward degree-based pay raises—nearly $15 billion nationwide in the 2007–08 school year—was a waste, she argued. She authored that paper from her perch at the time at the University of Washington’s College of Education—the very sort of institution that was benefitting from the arrangement.

The paper had been out for less than a week, Roza said, when she heard from the dean of the college, Patricia Wasley. Wasley told Roza she had been inundated by calls from deans of other education programs across the country, according to Roza. They were asking that she censure Roza or even make her retract the paper. Wasley declined. 

“The college of ed, for sure, earned a lot of their money through this whole handshake relationship with the school districts,” Roza told me. “It makes colleges of education extremely resistant to any real change.” 

That doesn’t make real change impossible, however—in fact, some states have already done it. In 2013, North Carolina stopped paying teachers extra for master’s degrees in part because of the research finding their limited impact on student achievement, and in part because of budget squeezes from the Great Recession.

But wait: Does this mean paying teachers less? As teacher strikes have swept across the country, the public has been reminded that in many places, teachers make so little that some end up taking second jobs, or even, in extreme cases, selling their plasma. In most places, we should be paying teachers more, not less. 

Roza agrees. This money should still go to teachers—it just shouldn’t be tied to an expensive, time-consuming degree with no tangible benefit. Simply giving all teachers higher salaries, says Roza, would be better than having teachers go into debt to get degrees.

Some districts are proving that it’s possible to do one better. Over the past decade, DC Public Schools (DCPS), long seen as one of the worst school systems in the nation, has clawed its way up the ranks of urban school districts across the country. In 2019, only D.C. and one state (Mississippi) saw improvement across most measures on an important national test of fourth and eight graders. Some of those gains are due to demographic changes, but research shows that demographic change isn’t the whole story. The district also undertook a series of major but controversial reforms aimed at improving the quality of the teacher workforce. As part of the teacher effort, it abandoned the traditional practice of paying teachers strictly on the basis of years of service and graduate credits. It implemented a new evaluation system, combining principal evaluations throughout the year with student test scores and other measures. High marks meant that a teacher would get a substantial bonus and, in some cases, permanent bumps up the pay scale. The small percentage of teachers rated “ineffective” were dismissed. In addition to shifting to a performance-based pay system, the district also beefed up mentoring and career development, including by implementing a weekly coaching program. 

Vast racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps among students remain, and when the Washington Teachers’ Union surveyed their members, a majority said they felt that the evaluations were unfairly subjective. But academic researchers found that, on average, low-performing teachers who leave the system are replaced by more effective ones. And a recent Washington Post poll found that the share of Washingtonians who approve of the city’s schools (including charters) is at a record high, and up sharply from 2008. 

Not all school districts could easily replicate what DCPS has done. Smaller districts, especially in rural areas, can’t replace low-performing teachers so easily, and they may not have resources for a robust coaching system. In other words, those districts will still have to rely on university programs to provide continuing education for their teachers. The question is how to make those programs better.

When I put that question to experts, several suggested looking into Relay, an independent nonprofit grad school that focuses exclusively on teacher and school-leader education. Initially incubated within Hunter College and accredited in 2011, Relay was created to be a hyper-practical program for training new teachers. In their first year, students work in classrooms full-time with mentor teachers, earning assistant-teacher salaries. At the same time, they’re taking classes and being coached by professors—all of whom have been classroom teachers for years. In their second year, Relay students lead classrooms, earn full salaries, and continue to take courses and receive feedback. Student teachers submit video of themselves leading classes, which professors  review and give them feedback on, like a football coach going over a game tape with players. 

Relay has grown quickly, and now has campuses in 19 cities. It says it educates more than 4,000 student teachers. The school’s impact on students hasn’t yet been evaluated by third-party researchers, but some early indicators are promising. Relay had 18 first-year teachers working in DCPS in the 2018–19 school year who were assessed under the district’s evaluation system. While it’s hard to draw conclusions from such a small sample, Relay says the share of its first-year teachers scoring in the top two brackets was nearly 20 percentage points higher than other novice teachers in the district.

Researchers will watch as Relay and other programs test out new strategies. But there’s a larger, structural fix: decoupling master’s degrees from automatic raises. Enrollment in education master’s programs would almost surely dip, at least initially, but those still choosing to enroll would become more demanding customers. As Marguerite Roza and Patricia Wasley put it in a piece for Education Week responding to the backlash against Roza’s research, replacing the master’s bump with performance-based pay would “tip the scales to those programs that have redefined their offerings with a focus on achieving better results in the classroom.” 

Figuring out how to actually make teachers more effective should be a national priority, Arthur Levine said. “The research makes clear that teacher quality is one of the best investments we could possibly make,” he told me. “Our future depends upon the quality of our teaching force.”

This piece was produced in partnership with FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Brooke LePage provided research assistance.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described David Firestone as a special ed teacher. He is an associate special ed teacher. We regret the error.

The post Master’s of None appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lila Scher has been working since she was fourteen. Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, she worked as a line cook at the state fair making tacos and nachos. In high school, she was a busser and runner at a brunch spot near her house. And when she got into college at George Washington University, in D.C., she knew she’d have to keep working. During her first semester she was constantly on the hunt for jobs. 

By the spring, she had landed one, handling IT requests from professors. Was it her dream job? No. Did she get yelled at by professors who were angry that their projector wasn’t working? Yes. Was she interested in IT? Not really. 

But there were upsides. She could fit shifts in between her classes, and she didn’t have a commute. She liked her supervisor, who let her work more hours when she was tight on money, and who served as a reference when she applied to other jobs. Having the job helped her learn to manage her time, and she could sometimes get homework done during shifts between calls. Plus, she was getting her first professional office experience. The job required learning to speak with authority, even to professors. “I grew in that way quite a bit,” she said. 

That’s financial aid money at work. Scher’s on-campus job was a federal work study position. Her experience is fairly typical: more than half a million students across the country reshelve books in campus libraries, swipe IDs at the front desks of gyms, and answer phones in administrative offices as part of their financial aid package. The federal government kicks in a large portion of their wages. In one controversial instance, work study students at Harvard were employed to clean dorms. 

It’s one of the oldest federal aid programs, created in the mid-1960s with the goal of helping low-income students work their way through college. But it hasn’t kept pace with the changing economics of higher education. Today, most college students need to work during school whether they get work study or not. Meanwhile, unlike in the 1960s and ’70s, work study wages in 2019 do not even come close to covering tuition. But, like a baggy old sweater that’s now ironically hip, work study still suits the current higher ed landscape—just for different reasons. 

First, while work study will probably never go back to covering the cost of tuition on its own, students will always need reliable ways to earn money for living expenses, even if some form of tuition-free college is in our future. Second, there’s the ongoing quest to improve graduation rates; research shows that the convenience of work study helps students stay in school and graduate. Third, with some tweaks, the program is positioned to connect more students with high-quality work experiences that could lead to jobs after graduation. Plus, work study is a rare species in contemporary politics: it has the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. 

But to capitalize on any of those strengths, lawmakers need to correct a glaring injustice baked into the core of the program: rich, expensive, elite private schools get a huge share of the money, but educate few of the low-income students who most need it. The community colleges and public four-year universities that do serve the less wealthy don’t get nearly as much funding per student. If Congress wants to help more low-income students complete college and land a good job when they finish, fixing work study is an obvious place to start.

Work study was created as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, enacted by Congress along with a raft of other antipoverty work programs. The stated goal was to “stimulate and promote the part-time employment of students” pursuing higher education “who are from low-income families” and need to earn money to go to school. Jobs were supposed to either relate to a student’s academic interests or serve the public. (Congress later required that a small portion of the money given to each school go to students doing community service.)

Today, the program seems even more necessary. The college student population looks much more like the country as a whole than it did in the early days of work study; there are far more low-income people who attend college and need a job to afford it. One in ten full-time students works more than thirty-five hours per week, and students today work about twice as much outside of school as students did in the ’70s. Yet even as tuition rates have blown through the roof in recent decades, the work study budget has sagged. In the ’70s, the average allotment per student could cover 90 percent of tuition. Now, the average award is about $1,550 per year, so small that out of all the students I talked to, none of them even thought of it as money for tuition. They used it for gas, pasta, laundry, subway cards, shampoo—stuff they needed for life.

But while work study no longer covers tuition, research shows that it helps with a different problem: graduation rates. More than 40 percent of students who started college in 2012 hadn’t earned a degree six years later. For students receiving Pell Grants from the government—a decent proxy for low-income students—the numbers are even worse. People who leave school without a degree are often trapped, with high-interest loans rising like water in a sealed chamber, locked out of the higher-earning, degree-requiring jobs that could offer an escape.

Work study can help. Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University, has found that, for students who were planning to work during college no matter what, participation in work study is linked to higher graduation rates. That’s likely because work study students mostly get jobs on campus, so they are less likely to have a commute and more likely to have work that can be tailored to their class schedule. And Scott-Clayton suspects that simply being on campus for more hours per week may make students more likely to take advantage of institutional resources—from academic advising to the financial aid office—and get to know staff and other students. 

The effect is strongest for students attending public institutions, including community colleges: they are seven percentage points more likely to graduate if they do work study. That may sound modest, but it’s a substantial boost compared to other forms of aid. Grants, for example, improve a student’s odds by just two to three percentage points. “For a lot of students at public institutions,” Scott-Clayton said, “just getting access to a job that responds to their academic schedule, and where the employer has the student’s interests in mind, is a big benefit.” 

For many undergrads, work study provides a low-stakes way to take a first crack at a professional office environment, learn soft skills, and come away with a reference. For Scher, the IT help desk job was her first time working outside of the food service industry. “It was a very good first step of being like, ‘Oh, okay, this is how you behave in an office setting, this is how you sit at your desk,’ ” she said. Getting some administrative experience under her belt helped her get an internship the next year, and she says that even now that she’s graduated, her work study job is still on her resume. “Learning those things for the first time,” she said, with a supervisor “who understood I was a student first, and that this was maybe my first experience—that was great.”

An unfortunate thing happened when work study was created. In order to decide which schools got what share of the money, universities made their case to regional panels, and the results were not equitable. “The decisions we made were largely subjective,” wrote Robert Huff, who served on one of the panels and was Stanford’s first aid administrator. Schools had to submit data to prove how much money they needed, but it was hard to independently verify the information. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that aid officers were often airbrushing their numbers to support inflated requests. 

Ultimately, aid officers from expensive, private schools proved most adept at the game, and their institutions ended up with much of the pot at the expense of public universities and community colleges, which serve far more low-income students. In the 1980s, Congress sought to correct the imbalance by creating a “fair share” formula. But the formula would only apply to new funding for the program. Congress promised the existing winners that their allocations wouldn’t change greatly. 

Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t invested much new money in the program since then. In fact, the total inflation-adjusted budget for work study in 2016 was lower than it was in 1980. More than half of it still goes to schools that were grandfathered in. As a result, a high-income student at a private four-year college is more likely to get work study than a low-income student at a public four-year school. The way money is doled out is “divorced from any sort of useful metric you could think of,” said Reid Setzer, who analyzed the program while working at Young Invincibles, an organization that advances young people’s policy interests. 

Policy researchers have been calling on lawmakers to fix the distribution breakdown for decades. But attempts have always failed, thanks in part to successful lobbying efforts from university associations and prestigious schools. According to Greg Winter’s reporting for the New York Times, 

Such disparities have been a sore point among universities for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable basis. Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the nation’s financial aid officers are calling for the imbalances to be wiped away, replaced by a system that steers financial aid toward the universities that poor students actually attend, rather than those with the biggest reputations.

That was written in 2003. In the sixteen intervening years, little has changed. 

Today, community colleges get just over a third of the work study money that private, four-year institutions receive, despite educating far more low- and middle-income students. Scott-Clayton found that, in 2017, New York University received more work study money from the government than all twenty-four of the City University of New York’s public schools combined. Harvard, which has a nearly $40 billion endowment, got more than $3.5 million in work study funding in 2016. 

Mechanically, it’s a simple problem to fix. Congress would just need to rewrite the rules about how schools get money. The stumbling block has always been politics. But were Congress to attempt to rejigger the formula again, they’d be doing so in a different political climate. In the wake of public outrage over rich families bribing their way into prestigious schools by paying to inflate test scores or cutting deals with athletic coaches, elected officials may be more willing to take on the likes of Stanford and Yale. 

Even better than simply expanding the work study budget would be to retrofit it to address one of the biggest challenges in higher education today: placing students in well-paying jobs after they graduate.

Employers aren’t investing as much time and money into training new workers as they used to. That’s in part because expectations have changed, and fewer people start a job out of college planning to stay for twenty years and work their way up—a timeline that drove employers to invest in entry-level workers. Instead, employers now expect new hires to have gained professional skills while still in college. A survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education recently found that the first thing employers look for in recent graduates is internship experience. 

That’s one reason why students of means, who can afford to take unpaid internships during college, have a leg up when it comes to getting hired after graduation. Meanwhile, as it exists right now, work study isn’t focused on helping students get experience in their field of interest. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Some colleges already facilitate internships for students as a way to bridge the gap between school and career. At Northeastern University, for example, students can participate in a “cooperative education program,” or co-op: six-month periods spent away from classes working full-time in jobs related to their career goals. In most cases, the employer pays the student’s wages. According to the school, half of Northeastern students who participate receive a job offer from one of their co-op employers, and more than 90 percent of students have a job or are enrolled in graduate school less than a year after graduating.

Northeastern has for years been pushing Congress and the Department of Education to change some of the rules around work study so that it can be applied to co-op jobs. (Currently it can only be used for part-time employment.) And in the past year, both the Trump administration and members of Congress have gotten behind the idea. In March, Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand cosponsored a bill with Republican Senator Pat Toomey that would allow students to use work study to take full-time jobs for short periods. 

The Department of Education appears receptive, too. Earlier this year it announced an experiment, slated to start in the fall, that will provide extra money to select schools to facilitate off-campus work experiences for work study students. Those students can take full-time internships, and the government will pay the same share of student wages whether they work at for-profit companies, nonprofits, or on-campus employers. If the department finds that participation boosts students’ chances of getting a job after graduating, those changes could be implemented on a national scale. 

But to do that, and to make sure work study reaches the students who could benefit most from it, Congress will have to give the program more money. Alarmingly, the Trump administration has recommended cutting work study’s budget by more than half, despite its own Education Department’s declared interest in using the program to connect students with high-quality work experiences. Recent proposals from congressional Democrats and Republicans have called for increasing the work study budget. But even Democratic proposals, which would more than double program spending by 2023, come up short. Reaching every Pell Grant student, to use a rough benchmark, would require increasing the current budget more than ninefold—and that’s before adding in extra money for schools to set up programs with off-campus employers, or raising the amount that students are paid. But work study is so small now—last year’s budget was just over $1 billion—that even with an increase of that order, it would still be trivial relative to overall higher education spending.

The fact that, Trump budget requests aside, there is broad consensus that work study needs more funding gives reason for hope. Unlike so many questions in contemporary politics, what to do about work study is not deeply polarizing. But what work study is may be even worse: part of a larger, complex bill that Congress has failed to act on for years. Its best chance for improvement comes through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the sprawling higher ed omnibus bill that governs everything from school accreditation to student loans. It’s typically updated every four to six years, but has languished since 2008, yet another victim of congressional dysfunction. 

Lamar Alexander, leading the charge to reauthorize the HEA as the chair of the Senate’s education committee, promised in a February New York Times op-ed to fix student aid within the next six months. But even if he and his colleagues make good on that pledge, the resulting law is likely to just nibble around the edges. At a time when students are graduating with enormous debt burdens—if they’re graduating at all—and struggling to make the leap to a good career, Congress has confined its thinking to incrementalism. It should recognize work study for the secret weapon that it is: a politically popular program that could make a major dent in the triple crisis of affordability, graduation rates, and the job pipeline. All it needs is some more ambition.

The post Putting Work Study to Work appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This was a bad week for journalism, in a depressingly familiar way.

On Monday, the investment firm that controls the newspaper publisher GateHouse Media bought Gannett, another publishing giant, which runs the USA Today network. Both companies own hundreds of newspapers around the country, and had already instituted layoffs this year. Meanwhile, public filings indicate that cost cutting will continue to be a priority, according to the Washington Post.

Then, on Wednesday, Pacific Standard, an online magazine focusing on social and environmental justice, announced abruptly that it would be shutting down. The same day, Governing, which covers state and local policy, said in a statement that it would be closing because it had proven “unsustainable as a business in today’s media environment.”

It’s part of a much larger trend: with Facebook and Google sucking up ever-increasing shares of ad revenue, publications are finding it harder and harder to stay financially viable.

One member of Congress thinks he has a solution. This spring, Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline proposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that would allow news publishers to collectively bargain with giant tech companies and negotiate the terms under which their content is republished.

It’s part of Cicilline’s broader effort to counter the negative effects of market consolidation. As chair of the House’s antitrust subcommittee, he has emerged as one of the most prominent critics in Washington of tech giants and monopoly power. This year, he’s leading a congressional investigation into Big Tech, summoning executives to Capitol Hill and grilling them on whether they squash competitors. I spoke with him this week about local journalism, the increasing popularity of reviving antitrust, and whether he thinks President Trump will be an ally—or an obstacle—in the effort.

This conversation has been shortened and edited for clarity

GG: I’d like to start by talking about the topic of your first hearing in the antitrust investigations, which was the impact on local journalism. Why did you choose to start with that subject?

DC: I think this is one of the areas where the market dominance of these large technology platforms is having a really serious and negative impact on our democracy. This is not just about their market dominance resulting in some impact on the sale of widgets, but this is really about the ability of citizens of this country to access trustworthy, reliable, local news, and a free and diverse press—particularly a local press—is really essential to the proper functioning of our democracy.

GG: You proposed a bill in the spring that would allow news publications to collectively bargain with online platforms like Facebook and Google that republish their content. What motivated you to write that bill?

DC: When you look at what’s happening in the marketplace, you see that the vast majority of American people access their news through two large platforms, Facebook and Google. And Facebook and Google have amassed enormous revenue from online advertising—$60 billion last year, the majority of all online revenue. At the very same time, despite [publications’] record levels of online readership, there’s been a steep decline in revenues as a result of the rise of these two large technology giants. And you’re seeing all across the country the impact on newsrooms where people are being laid off, newspapers are closing, and in a lot of ways, local journalism is on life support. So, the legislation I’ve proposed, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, provides an interim step to stabilize the marketplace by allowing producers of content online and small newspapers to collectively negotiate with the two large technology platforms.

GG: So, were this bill to pass, what are some specific measures that you could see news organizations pushing for in their negotiations?

DC: Well, I’ll leave it up to them to negotiate, but I think there’s no doubt they will attempt to negotiate terms that ensure that the branding and attribution—that is, when a newspaper has invested significantly in their brand because of high-quality and accurate journalism, then I think they want to be sure that that brand is protected. So, my guess is they would negotiate about attribution and branding, that they would negotiate about making certain that these platforms are not engaged in discriminatory conduct which favors their own publications.

GG: Antitrust seems to be having a resurgence of popularity in the past year or couple of years. It’s now a much more frequent topic of debate in national politics, but we obviously had huge companies before these past couple of years. Why do you think this subject is gaining traction now?

DC: I think we’re beginning to see the consequences of this enormous market concentration: in significant data breaches, in the widespread use of false information on the internet, the consequences of the interference in the American presidential election, the work by Cambridge Analytica. At least in the Democratic Party, we’ve very much focused on developing an economic agenda that really speaks to the anxieties of the American people, the economic anxieties, and focuses on getting the economy to work for everyone, raising family incomes, and being sure that we’re reducing the cost of people’s lives. The kind of mega-mergers and market concentration that we’re seeing is part of the reason that the economy isn’t working for everyone. I think people have just really begun to understand that our failure to be aggressive in antitrust enforcement has contributed to very substantial market concentration and some of the worst income inequality in our country’s history.

GG: For about the past 40 years, much of the discussion about why monopolies are bad—including antitrust legal decisions—has focused on consumer prices, the logic being that monopoly power is bad because it results in higher prices for consumers. But during the antitrust committee hearing that you had a couple of weeks ago, with lawyers from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, I noticed that very few of your questions had to do with impact on consumer prices. Is that a deliberate pivot?

DC: In the age in which attention is a commodity, and where your attention is monetized for ad revenue, the idea that focusing on, “Well, Facebook and Google are free”—but they’re not actually free. You’re giving them your attention, which is really the coin of the realm. Even in the context where it feels like the service is free, antitrust principles are important. In some ways even more important, because it may feel like “Oh, what’s the big deal, this is all free,” but if in fact they are crushing competitors by excluding them or acquiring them so that there’s no real competition, that has a very adverse impact on innovation. We want to make sure that the next Facebook, or the next Amazon, or the next Google has the ability to be successful.

So, this idea of really seriously impacting innovation is significant. If they are favoring their own products and services while giving you the impression that the search is done in some kind of neutral way, that’s also harmful to the consumer. I think the reason that you probably didn’t hear a lot about consumer prices is that there’s a recognition that that factor alone is insufficient to appreciate the dangers of monopolies and a lack of competition in the 21st century.

GG: Do you think your Republican colleagues agree that we have a monopoly problem?

DC: Yes. I don’t know if they’ll agree with every solution, but I think this is a bipartisan investigation, and I think my Republican colleagues have at least expressed a willingness to be part of the investigation, and help identify some solutions.

GG: So, two weeks or so ago, President Trump said that the government “should be suing Google and Facebook” and then said, “perhaps we will.” The Justice Department also recently opened an antitrust review of tech companies. Do you think President Trump will be an ally in the committee’s work?

DC: Unclear. You know, I don’t take the President at his word, to be very honest. I think this administration has not been effective at all in taking on the question of the technology giants and the deep concentration of market power in the technology platforms, or in monopolies generally. It’s an administration that seems to favor the very wealthy and big corporate interests, so I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the president is going to be on the side of consumers and workers in the antitrust work and the work for our committee, but we’ll see.

GG: Have you at all been in touch with the president about the committee’s work?

DC: No.

The post Can Journalism Be Saved From the Tech Giants? appeared first on Washington Monthly.