Special Episode: Covering California, Keynote – Senator Steve Glazer

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly’s conference COVERING CALIFORNIA: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State, which was held in Sacramento on Thursday, May 30, 2024

This is The Keynote Address from Senator Steve Glazer.

The Senator is introduced by Rich Ehisen of Capitol Weekly.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

RICH EHISEN: Thanks again to everybody for coming to the conference today, and those of you who are on Zoom, we really appreciate it. This is obviously a topic that is very important to us at Capitol Weekly and pretty thrilled to see that it’s equally important to so many of you in our audience today. So thank you very much.

And I’m very, very appreciative today to have our keynote speaker, Senator Glazer, Senator Steve Glazer.He’s in his 10th and final year in the Senate, and he’s gonna be leaving us, but he’s got a pretty good legacy of connective tissue, I would say, to journalism, and that’s one of the reasons we’re so thrilled to have him here.

We’ve had a lot of discussion today about a bill of his this year, Senate Bill 1327. I’m sure we’re gonna hear a little bit more about that along with other bills like AB 886 from Buffy Wicks, which we’ve heard a lot about as well.

Just a few things I wanna make sure we mention before I bring him up here. During his tenure in the Senate, he served as the Chair of seven Senate committees, including the one he is currently chairing, which is the Revenue and Taxation Committee, which has an awful lot to do with what we’ve been talking about today. He has previously served on the CSU Board of Trustees. Both my degrees are from CSU, so I’m excited about that. He chairs the Select Committee on Student Success. That’s obviously a great thing, and he served 10 years as an Orinda City Council member, including three terms as mayor, which if anything about local politics these days, that’s a tough job. A former senior advisor to California’s Governor Jerry Brown. He worked with Governor Brown to help return California to solid financial footing in the midst of the Great Recession. Some of you are too young probably to remember that. I’m not, I’m too old, sad to say. But anyway, Senator Steve Glazer. And just a reminder, we will have a Q&A here when he is done.

SEN. STEVE GLAZER: Thank you, Rich. It’s great to be here. I subscribe to four actual newspapers in my offices. Plus digital subscriptions to about six more. So Capitol Weekly figured I was probably… I had the most subscriptions in the building that I was qualified to talk to you about the future of journalism. So that, there’s my qualifications right up front.

In all seriousness, I’ve been involved in politics in one form of another my entire adult life. And throughout those years, I’ve had a terrific interaction with journalists. Of course, I started out reading the newspaper at a very young age here in Sacramento. In college, one of my fraternity brothers was the editor of the campus newspaper. Still a close friend of mine.

As many of you know… I started some of my work in the early years, this is 30 plus years ago, I worked as a Press Secretary, as a Communications Director in the Capitol before I started my own company. And as a senator, and I see some of my staff here… I’ve always asked that they read the newspaper every day. Preferably in print form.

I’ve always enjoyed, for myself turning the page and seeing an article that surprises me, learning something new on a topic that you hadn’t even been thinking about.

Now, when I started here in the Capitol in the late 1970s, the Los Angeles Times had about a dozen reporters in their bureau. And I think the Associated Press had about as many. The Times had one full-time reporter just to cover the Assembly. One, just to cover the Senate, another one on the budget. They had full-time investigative reporters. They had a reporter just to cover the delegations from San Diego and Orange County. And they had a reporter covering legislators from the San Fernando Valley.

They had the resources to hold government accountable, and they were not alone.

Senator Steve Glazer delivers the Keynote at Covering California: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

Many of the smaller cities had papers with reporters here too. Riverside, Fresno, Santa Rosa, and many others. And what they lacked in size, they made up with talent and energy. I always enjoy the growth of talent, small, scrappy reporters eager to make a name for themselves. I ran into one, not so scrappy and young, just the other day, it was Jim Richardson, who first started out up here for the Riverside Press Enterprise, and he was one of those very ambitious scribes.

He thought it would be fun to take a recently enacted seatbelt law and see if senators and assembly members were following it. So one day, one day he parked his car near the north entrance of the Capitol, where all the legislators would come in, so he could look inside to see whether they had their seatbelt on.

Well, it wasn’t just the subsequent expose that was noteworthy. As Jim related to me the other day, it was the confrontation with law enforcement that made it especially memorable. You see, the entrance to the Capitol was right across the street from a bank. And the bank called in a report of a suspicious guy stalking their entrance, sitting in a car. Well the cops came over, they had a chat. He didn’t go to jail. He wrote a great story, and it wasn’t soon thereafter that he was hired by the Sacramento Bee and had a few more years in the profession, before becoming a priest. I guess taking down quotes prepared him for confession. I don’t know. But Jim is a great guy, and it was fun to visit with him recently.

“Given that more than 65% of journalists have lost their jobs since 2005, it was quite ironic to have the state Chamber of Commerce label [my] bill a ‘Job Killer.'” – Senator Steve Glazer

Now, many of us loved the lore of a good journalism moment. By the way, with the Paris Olympic Games around the corner, I wanna say congrats to Ashley Zavala for qualifying 100 meters carrying a microphone. For some of you have seen some of that lore on the internet. But enthusiasm for the craft can only go so far. You still need the numbers to keep up with everything that’s going on, to dig into what’s happening behind the scenes, the relationship, the power, the influence that so often decides how policy is made. That is why I have been so saddened by the decline in the news industry over the past 20 years. And as I have witnessed this, I’ve tried to figure out what can I do to support it in my profession in the Senate?

Well, two years ago, I carried a bill appropriately named Senate Bill 911. And its purpose was to try to create a public media fund for California. The bill would have created an independent board to award grants to news organizations to increase coverage of local affairs. Some thought a public board giving out grants would be a way for government to control the media. We took those concerns to heart and amended the bill to insulate the board and the industry from that type of pressure.

But ironically, the bill was blocked, thanks to opposition from some of the state’s largest publishers. The largest publishers opposed the bill. They said they were concerned about keeping the press independent.

But they were really worried about competition from startups who might use state grants to create new media organizations to cover the news that the old line media was ignoring. It’s not that they didn’t want public money, they just wanted most of that money to go to them. They killed that bill. But we did not give up.

I had to go around that defeat and put the program and $25 million in a – wait for it – Budget Trailer bill. That will raise the hair of a few reporters. That was how the new Journalism Fellowship Program at UC Berkeley was created. I believe you heard about their good work on a panel earlier today.

The program places journalists in 40 newsrooms for pay on two-year stints, and they’re located at an incredible diversity of outlets. Now, of course, the publishers who opposed my efforts are now happy to welcome a fellow to their staffs. It saved each of them about $150,000 for a two-year placement. I’m very proud of that program, but it is not enough.

Earlier this year, I introduced Senate Bill 1327 to grant $500 million worth of tax credits per year to media organizations to help pay the salaries of working journalists. Upon its introduction, I talked about two gold rushes that put California on the map, two gold rushes.

The first one in 1849 is well known for extracting gold from California’s hills and streams. You can still travel to the foothills to see the entrails soiling the hills from the mines long ago abandoned. The environmental damage never fully mitigated. But we had a second gold rush here in California, less known, but equally enriching.

“It’s worth noting on the subject of editorial independence that it only matters if your news outlet still exists” – Senator Steve Glazer

It started about 25 years ago, and was the extraction of data from Californians who utilize social and shopping websites. They turned that acquired data into an advertising bonanza. Now, it was a credit to their ingenuity of these companies to seemingly give free services in exchange for personalized information from millions of Californians. The specialized targeting of their ads was the difference maker to various enterprises. And of course, it was incredibly profitable, not just for their work that they did in California, but worldwide.

In 2023, the three largest platforms reported profits of $142 billion. $142 billion.

Now, as mentioned earlier that I did come from local government, and we approve a lot of development plans in local government. And when a development plan creates environmental… a road or school or traffic damage, they are required to pay a mitigation fee for that development. My bill, Senate Bill 1327 applies the same principle.

The proposed data extraction mitigation fee would pay for the damage to the advertising model that has sustained newsrooms for a century or more.

Now, given that more than 65% of journalists have lost their jobs since 2005, it was quite ironic to have the state Chamber of Commerce label the bill a “Job Killer.” I tell my staff when we debate many issues, it’s all about definition, and Job Killer isn’t always about people, certainly not in this case. In this case, it’s all about profits.

So you have to adjust your understanding of what that label really means. As some of you have reported the bill that I’ve just mentioned stalled on the Senate floor last week short of the two thirds vote required. But I wanna take a closer look at the reasons that Google, Meta, Amazon, and even some publishers opposed this bill, and similar efforts to sustain local journalism. I think you’ll find that examination informative.

First let me go to claim number one. The cost of advertising would increase as the platform’s passed on the cost of, in my case, the mitigation fee that my bill proposed, they would pass on those costs. This claim ignores market forces of supply and demand. The platforms will charge whatever the market will bear for their ads. And the more people selling ads, the lower the price will be. So the more news organizations we have selling ads creates pressure to lower, not raise rates. Yet, that claim, you’ll hear it often in criticism of my bill and others.

Claim number two. Just like my fellowship legislation, the big publishers sat on their hands rather than support my bill. They fretted again about the threat of government influence. Now first, my bill proposed a tax credit for each journalist on the payroll, content neutral. Second, for years, we’ve had a tax credit for the film industry, and there’s never been an instance of government using the tax credit to exert influence over the film industry’s creative or ideological independence. I don’t think you’ve heard of a single one.

By the way, it’s worth noting on the subject of editorial independence that it only matters if your news outlet still exists. California has lost about a third of their news outlets just in the last 20 years.

Claim number three, my proposal in particular discriminates against large publishers, because it gives a higher tax credit to newsrooms with 10 or fewer employees. How about that? The big boys with hundreds of qualified journalists are concerned about the upstart community or ethnic outlets with a couple of reporters. Not only is it selfish, it undercuts the importance of growing the news ecosystem at the ground level.

Senator Steve Glazer delivers the Keynote at Covering California: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

Claim number four. If you charge a data mitigation fee for ads to the big guys, it’s only a matter of time before you charge our news outlets for ads that they do. Now, of course, that ignores the elements of the bill that requires what we call a barter requirement, where you have to have data extraction and advertising as a condition for being charged the mitigation fee. But my bill specifically exempts media companies. But as we know from being in politics a long time, opponents always sell the ghost that’s in the closet, even if it doesn’t exist.

Claim number five, and I saw Neil Chase here earlier, I don’t know if he’s still out here in the room. You shouldn’t help nonprofit newsrooms as they do not pay taxes. Now, at least this is an honest concern that you want less competition. It’s also selfish and hurtful to growing the broader journalism community. The news business is facing an existential threat, and they are fighting with each other over who will be the last passenger on the Death Star.

Claim number six. “I don’t like the folks who are in charge of the news.” Now, whether it’s ownership by venture funds or news owners you don’t agree with, I ask you to please get over it. We are trying to solve for Democracy. There have always been folks backing the media that are on one side or the other of your viewpoint. Keep in mind, government has numerous programs that help people you may dislike. Saving news should be content neutral, and ownership neutral.

Claim number seven. “Steve, you’re supporting a dying medium.” Actually, we’re supporting the entire ecosystem of news gathering and reporting. Print is only one communication style, and we’re trying to help original news content in every medium.

Claim number eight. They say, we give tens of millions of dollars in charitable support to news initiatives. Isn’t that enough? Charitable giving is nice, but it shouldn’t be a chain around the neck of an independent media. That’s not a self-sustaining model at the scale required to provide news and information to the population.

By the way, if a news outlet is concerned about receiving tax benefits for keeping Democracy alive, consider the alternative. Or they just don’t have to take the money.

Democracies make up a very thin slice of the history of civilized societies. The United States system of Democracy was seen as an experiment that has happily lasted 248 years. Today, only about half the countries in the world would be called Democracies. From a population standpoint, 71% live in autocracies.

In recent years, we’ve seen major Democracies backsliding into authoritarian styled governments, such as Turkey and Argentina and Hungary. Backsliding out of Democracies typically starts with limits on press freedom and coverage. The foundation of our Democracy has always rested in the freedom of the press. People are led to authoritarian rule when the flow of information is limited.

These platforms should pause for a moment, and think about how they would do if our Democracy went away. Would they be nationalized like industries have been in those circumstances? Can you name an example of where independent news survives under authoritarian rule? We should all want to invest in Democracy.

So yes, it was a blow that the platforms defeated my bill, and they’re out there now poised to deal another blow to one proposed by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, which would require a link tax. But what is doubly concerning is their exercise of control over the access to factual reporting that is going on today.

A few weeks ago, Google announced they were throttling back access to news sites. I’ve talked to numerous news outlets, some of whom are here in the room today, and for some traffic to their site has been significantly reduced. So nice job, Google. It’s working.

They also, according to Axios, are telling nonprofits who receive their charitable giving through the Google News Initiative that it would end if my data extraction mitigation fee legislation was enacted. Add to that Meta cutting off links to news in Canada, and you have in plain sight the threat these platforms have made to the independent access and exchange of news.

And of course, we’re hearing more about the fact that artificial intelligence will allow platforms to create their own artificial news and information. This would replace real on-the-ground news gathering and reporting, an existential threat to the very work that you do.

This type of dominance on information exchange is a serious second threat to our Democratic institutions. We have seen monopolistic conduct in the private sector, and government has acted to protect the consumer. Think back to the dominance of the railroads, or even AT&T over essential phone service, or even the liquidation of Enron in the energy space. We don’t need to wait for the meltdown of an AIG-like event to realize how a confluence of the powerful can take down an economy and even a government. Now AIG was a subprime lending company, and their meltdown blew up our economy, for those of you who were around then. The hollowing out of independent news can melt down our Democracy.

Without the press holding government accountable and exposing its foibles, and worse, the public’s ability to elect honest and capable representatives, it’s all very seriously compromised. That’s why James Madison called a free press one of the “great bulwarks of liberty.” That’s why he argued for the First Amendment to protect the freedom of the press as a check against the abuses of government.

Now many Western Democracies have long had public support for media without any problems. Look at the numbers around the world and compare that to the United States, who puts out a few nickels for the Public Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio. I have a chart here below the podium that those who are watching can’t see.

Germany invests $142 per capita in public news. The United Kingdom spends $81. France, $76 per capita. Japan, $55. Canada spends $26. And here in the United States, what do we spend? We spend $3.16.

We have a long ways to go to get to where our Western Democracies see the importance of journalism as I know many here in the room do. As I close, let me say a couple of things. First, I do hope The New York Times and the other news outlets prevail in their copyright lawsuit against the platforms and AI to protect their proprietary content. It’s going to take a while. I hope that they are successful.

There’s activity in Congress, but I know a lot of us don’t have a lot of hope that they’ve got their act together to do something in this space. We have had setbacks, and we have a lot of work to do to fix this, but I certainly am not giving up. I wanna thank you for dedicating your life to journalism. It is integral to the liberties that we enjoy here in America. It should never be taken for granted. Thank you.

RE: Thank you, Senator Glazer. We are going to open the floor to questions. If you’ve got something you wanna ask, get my attention, or get Tim’s attention, and we will head on over.

I’ll start, since I don’t see any hands pop up right this minute. We’ve been talking a lot about SB 1327 today. And I know it’s… Talk about it a little bit. I know right now you feel you don’t have the votes. Give me the nickel tour on what might happen now, ’cause as I noted in the intro, your time is short. Is there any future for this bill or something like it from one of your colleagues?

SG: Thank you for the question. Well, first, and certainly I’m doubling my enthusiasm and help for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ bill that’s in the Senate. I think I’d like to see some enhancements to that bill, and I will talk to the author about that.

Number two is I have some bills over the Assembly that may be in need of an amendment. So I’m going to continue to look for vehicles in which to advance real solutions to the problem that I identified in my remarks today, not giving up. And we have a pretty long runway still in our legislative year.

RE: I see a hand right over here.

ANTONIO HARVEY: Senator Glazer, thank you for coming and… Thank you for coming and sharing these. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you, Rich. Antonio Harvey, California Black Media. Thank you for coming in and share this information with us since the bill’s stalled.

Just wanted to get your perspective on the big three, the Amazon, Meta, and Google, their feelings towards this bill directly to you and you trying to work with them, trying to get this over the finish line.

SG: Yeah, so they would prefer that they don’t have a problem with helping the news media, they just don’t wanna have any specific obligation to doing that. Their answer is, “Steve, if it’s a priority for the state, then you should put it in your state budget.” Ignoring the fact that we have a, depending on how you count, a $30 to $50-billion deficit.

Neil chase of CalMatters poses a question to Senator Steve Glazer at Covering California: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

So they prefer that somebody else take the responsibility. What I have tried to point out to them, and it’s in my bill, is that it is their conduct and their work that has contributed to the hollowing out of news here in California. That’s their success. And good for them in creating this advertising model that has extracted our data. They didn’t pay you for it. But it has allowed folks who wanna advertise to be able to personalize that advertising in a way that a lot of traditional media isn’t able to do.

And so I feel like they have an obligation to help mitigate the damage they have caused. And they obviously don’t like that. And it’s why they’re fiercely opposing the bill. But it’s what I have said to them in regard to their opposition.

TIM FOSTER: I do have a question for you. So there are other countries that are doing programs that fund journalism through the government. I’m thinking of Australia and Canada, both who have come up earlier in this conference. Have you talked to anyone from those jurisdictions? Or do you have any experience there that you could share with us?

SG: Well, we had had communication in terms of what happened in Canada ’cause it happened so recently. But on the broader question, the BBC is funded by England. And it’s all out there for everyone to see about how they’re doing: their objectivity, the industriousness in which they do their work. And so it’s really… There’s been no criticism that I’m aware of that somehow it’s been tainted by support from their country in that work.

So beyond that, I think what’s in the public realm is what I have seen and what colleagues that have been working with me on this bill have seen. That give us the belief that we can, the government can play a role in reviving and sustaining local journalism.

RE: Senator, we have a question over here.

NEIL CHASE: Neil Chase from CalMatters. Senator, how do you react to the, what might be called bullying by the platforms? “If your bill or Assemblymember Wicks’ bill passes, we’re going to cut off the journalism funding.” The test that’s already cutting off traffic to a lot of the sites. The fact that a lot of our news organizations get a lot of our traffic from these platforms. What’s the legislative approach, obviously, you’re going to say, we don’t wanna be bullied and we wanna do this, is there a… Is it going to be further legislation that tries to restrict the bullying or makes them use the content? Like, how do you react, presuming they do the things they’re threatening to do?

SG: Well, a lot of the feedback that I’ve gotten have been from the entities themselves, and most of them small, medium-sized, community, and ethnic media, that really are feeling that pressure point because they get support, and it means a lot to them ’cause they’re small. And they’ve had to go and kind of crunch their own numbers about, wow, if they support the Glazer bill, what would we be able to get versus what we’re getting now from Google?

So obviously it’s created a lot of animosity. It’s a serious threat. And I, it also, and underscores how much they feel threatened to do something like that. For me, in the conversations that I’ve had with legislators, it underscores how you can’t think that that’s a sustainable model to have charity, as I mentioned in the claims that I went through, that’s just not a sustainable model.

If we’re really gonna try to solve this problem in a serious way, that’s not at all part of the solution. And we need something that can rise to that occasion, which is why, the data mitigation fee that I proposed to the cost of the platforms is a billion dollars. A billion dollars. I mentioned their profits this past year, $140 billion worldwide.

It’s not an insignificant amount of money to them, but it’s a very serious amount of money to what we can do to provide journalism in California, because for me, it’s not pretending to solve a problem. We do that a lot in politics. We pretend. I could go on and on on policy areas in our state where we’ve pretended to do that, but I won’t.

But I really wanted my legislation to be very serious. And a part of I’m glad that that seriousness provides is an amount of money that can exceed what Google’s threatening to cut off. So I think it’s hurt them. I think the flex shows how seriously they’re taking this threat from my bill. But underscores that a Democracy shouldn’t be dependent upon the charitable giving of a private enterprise. That’s not what we wanna count on to sustain our Democracy.

LARRY LEE: Senator Glazer. Over here. Larry Lee, Sacramento Observer. You’ve mentioned during your points about the pushback that you are getting from larger newsrooms in California related to your legislation. Can you articulate why you think that is and what can we do to close that divide or that, I don’t wanna call it a rift, but it’s an issue.

SG: It has certainly been, the three years that I’ve been working in the journalism space, it’s probably my biggest frustration is the point that you’re making, is that we should all find ways to be together. We have a big enough threat that we’re facing that we all have to… We should find out that common ground.

And so it’s been a point of great frustration to see not only on the Fellowship bill that I advanced earlier, but in my latest iteration that the big publishers aren’t supporting it. And it’s hard for me to come to a different conclusion that they’re being selfish about it. That they’re looking at their bottom line not about how we support the whole ecosystem of journalism, small, medium and large, community, ethnic, all the things, digital, print, broadcast, the whole ecosystem is what we need everybody to be supportive of.

And so it has frustrated me that they say, “Well, what are we getting for this?” Now, they sometimes couch it in different language. They say, if you help out the smaller newsrooms, you’re creating a litigation risk. That’s a more recent criticism that kind of hides the selfishness of it. That by helping the smaller ones, you’re creating an inequity and therefore you’re gonna create some… You can be sued and they can stop the bill, the law from going into effect.

Larry Lee of The Sacramento Observer poses a question to Senator Steve Glazer at Covering California: The Future of Journalism in the Golden State. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly.

But that’s my plea that I’ve tried to incorporate in my remarks today is that, keep everybody… Keep their eye on the ball. And everything’s not perfect in this world. And there are people who thought that they didn’t need to come on board with my bill to have it move along. They’ve been proven wrong. That just didn’t work. Bill died.

So I hope that that’s a stark reality. But you do see that in a lot of… I’ve been around a long time, 40 years, and I used to be a student leader, and we used to have a lot of fights between campuses. And a phrase was coined that students are their own worst enemies. They get in their own way.

And I’ve seen that in a lot of coalitions and a lot of places. And I think it exists right here in the news media community, is that, can’t we all get along? Can we… Are we really gonna be our own worst enemies?

The Los Angeles Times had a column by the Deputy Managing Editor last week. Said it’s a Do or Die Summer for journalism. A do or die summer for journalism. Never made a reference to my bill, only to the Wicks bill, which they like better. It’s like, ah, there you go again.

Just saying, I have a first choice. So I don’t want to… I don’t care about anything else, I have a first choice. And you can argue from a tactical point of view that that’s the right thing to do. And now what do you have left when it’s all done? They left $500 million a year on the table because they had a first choice.

And so you see that bias out there. And my plea is, come on guys, if it is a Do or Die Summer, then we gotta figure out a way to come together. Because we, there’s some landing room here but it’s getting narrower and narrower, and we gotta find that way. That you don’t see who we’re fighting with. They’re the richest, most powerful platforms in the world. And you just can’t snap your finger and succeed in that space, in the political realm, where I come from. You gotta be together.

So Larry, I appreciate your question. It’s a good one. And it’s a point of frustration. And I hope we can find some way over the next few weeks, and there’s not a lot of time to come together and get something serious done.

RE: Senator, question about leadership here. And I wanna thank you for yours. I think for those of us who cover the Capitol on a regular basis, we recognize that. It’s one of the reasons we’re very appreciative of you being here.

That said, being bluntly honest, we have a governor who treats us in the press corps with almost disdain. And I think as you know, especially for a guy who is such a tech guy, who makes a big deal out of being a tech guy, I’m really wondering where the leadership is from that office? And how big of a difference that would make in dealing with these giant tech companies if we had the governor taking on even half of the leadership that you’ve shown in trying to resolve some of these issues?

“Here in the Capitol, there’s over 2,000 registered lobbyists. 2,000, for every interest under the sun, 2,000 registered lobbyists. But none of them have on their client list ‘Democracy.'” – Senator Steve Glazer

I’m not trying… Well, I am putting you on the spot. Give me… What do you think about that? And, ’cause the governor has such a bully pulpit. Where has… Have you had private conversations with him? Is there anything that we can or should be expecting from this governor?

SG: I’m gonna… I’m a pretty direct person, but I am gonna dance a little bit. All right. It’s better if you own up to that upfront, I think. Well, first, let me say a couple of things. Number one, six years ago when Governor Newsom was sworn into office, his first state of the state, he talked about the need for a data dividend to be returned to the people of California.

And what he was saying at that time, six years ago, he was saying something very similar to what I’m saying today. These platforms have taken all your data and they’ve utilized it in very profitable ways, but they’ve never returned that value to you. They didn’t say if you go on Facebook, we’ll send you a nickel.

But by going on their sites, they’re taking all of your data. They know everything about you. And they’ve utilized it and they’ve never paid you for it. So he said, there ought to be some return to source on that. And so it was an acknowledgement of a foundational principle in my bill that that was a value that was really never… We’ve never been compensated for. And I call it a mitigation fee. So I think that’s a foundational point of communication with him.

Secondly, I have been a part of conversations with him on this issue. He is very well aware of what happened in Canada. So a variety of folks have talked to him about that. That’s the link tax. That’s a little bit more a part of Assemblymember Wicks’ bill. So he is generally aware. Look, you know that I come from a place of advising governors. And so I always wanna tiptoe in that space of giving advice to any other governor.

There’s a lot on his plate that he’s juggling. There’s a lot of issues out there. I think there’s a lot for him to like about this, my bill. My bill also put $400 million of new money back into schools, by the way. Which I thought was a real good plus for the budget crisis that we’re facing today.

And I hope that he will allow the legislative process to run its course and see if we can find some way to find that common ground. Could have been my bill and the Wicks’ bill, but right now it’s the Wicks’ bill. And seeing if we can get legislative support that can move something to his desk.

And I feel that if we can do that work, that he will appreciate the energy and the importance of it, and will be open-minded to being partners as we see how we get it across the finish line. If you’re saying, well, why doesn’t he champion your issue today? There’s 30 other folks in that line, and it’s always a competing challenge to get his attention. The budget pie is a pie, and there’s only so many ways to slice it.

So I’m hopeful that he is listening and watching this debate. I’m sure he sees the same thing we see in terms of the hollowing out of journalism. I know… from any politician, now a lame-duck politician, it doesn’t really apply the same to… but most politicians will want people that use ink by the barrel, to use an old term, to like them. So despite some of your concerns about your access points to him and the relationship that you have with him, I think anybody would want to help save democracy, and with the Fourth Estate as a foundational part of doing that.

RE: We have time for probably one or two more if anyone else wants to poke the bear.

You have questions?

AG BLOCK: Yeah. Let’s assume lightning strikes and your bill or the Wicks bill passes and the governor signs it. Do you anticipate these mega corporations to go to court to try and stop implementation?

SG: Yeah, sure. One of the advantages that I’ve had is that there’s only one advertising tax enacted in America that’s in Maryland, and that’s the litigation. On a variety of points. So we’ve had a chance to examine how the platforms have gone after the, in this case, the Maryland ad tax.

And that’s why, if you look at the formulation of my bill, you’ll see a lot of very important differences that maneuver through those litigation risks that that law in Maryland is facing. They’re gonna sue on anything just to try to slow it down or stop it. So we’ve consulted with a lot of legal experts and others to craft our work, to try to minimize that, even though eventually they’ll do that. I think it’s the same issue that Assemblymember Wicks is trying to figure out as she massages her bill going forward is to anticipate that future litigation.

RE: We have a question.

AH: Yes, Senator Glazer, piggyback on that question, I had something similar to, with that Maryland case, because I know you were asked by a lobbyist, and I believe Senator Dahle too, who’s in opposition of this bill, why not wait until, see what happens to the litigation in Maryland before you move forward?

SG: Yeah, yeah. I’m going to take the Deputy Managing Editor of the Times word for it, that this is a do or die summer. This is no time to wait.

There’ll always be litigation risk. The threats are so real. You see the layoffs that are happening all over the state. They’re tragic. There’s a story, a personal story behind every one of those of a successful journalist now having the bottom fall out of their life in the profession that they’ve chosen. So I don’t think there is any time to waste in this space. We’re coming to the end. I wanna make one final thought.

RE: Please do.

SG: Here in the Capitol, there’s over 2,000 registered lobbyists. 2,000, for every interest under the sun, 2,000 registered lobbyists. But none of them have on their client list “Democracy.” None of them have that. That’s not their client.

It’s up to us here in the legislature to recognize the torch that’s been passed to us and how we protect our liberties, and what makes a Democracy survive and thrive, going back those 248 years to the founding of our country. And so we need the folks that can get over the influence peddling that happens around here, the power, the interest groups, and remember the torch that’s in their hands, in our hands, and I’m hoping that we keep it alive this year for the benefit of journalism and the benefit of our Democracy. So thank you.

RE: Senator, thank you very much. Senator Steve Glazer, thank you very much.

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