Rodney Benson

I think it's more common.

It's less dominated by these stock market traded companies that are –

that have this kind of relentless drive for profits and acquisitions less dominated by conglomerates.

So for instance,

In France, the newspaper Le Monde is owned by an endowment, a nonprofit endowment.

And so that insulates it from some of these pressures.

In Sweden, you've got the Tinnius Trust that owns some of the largest newspapers.

And you've got very strong public broadcasting that is well-funded by the state but has a

what they call these arms-length protections from direct government control.

So they have various kinds of laws and regulations that ensure that the government can't instrumentalize the public media for political control.

The other thing that I think you see in Europe, besides different kinds of ownership structures, is ways of helping journalists fight back inside news organizations.

So, for example, I mentioned Le Monde, another feature of Le Monde and some other newspapers in France, is that journalists have contractually obtained the right to kind of elect their editor-in-chief or to have a veto over that.

So you wouldn't have – if CBS had that provision, Barry Weiss would probably not be the editor-in-chief at CBS, right?

So we – in the U.S., when there's a problem, journalists –

that object to these changes, they may resign, they may make a statement and they may say, I can't, you know, I'm going to stand up to this, but then they really have no power to really stop it.

They can sort of make a public statement.

But so these kind of collective rights for journalists, that's not just the kind of union rights, but it's professional associations that can kind of stand up for their professional obligations.

That's something that you see more often in Europe.

A lot of media are struggling financially.

And so if you see some media that are really fighting to be independent, subscribe or send a donation.