How the Obama administration can save newspapers

As a consequence, major American newspapers -- with the notable exceptions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, which have consciously sacrificed to maintain their journalism -- now are qualitative shadows of their former selves. Unless the cutting stops, by the time most newspaper owners screw up the courage to charge for online content, they won't have anything to sell that's worth buying.

Readers -- and democracy itself, which depends on a vigorously free and independent press -- will be the ultimate losers.

The problem is that newspapers can't begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once. That's currently illegal under laws barring collusion and price-fixing.

I've suggested before that newspaper proprietors ought to go to Congress and demand at least a temporary exemption from the antitrust and price-fixing statutes, such as the one Major League Baseball already enjoys. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has endorsed the idea. The law, she said recently, needs to be adjusted to "reflect current market realities."

The Justice Department's antitrust division, however, opposes the baseball-style exemption. "We do not believe any new exemptions for newspapers are necessary," Carl Shapiro, the antitrust division's chief economist, told a House subcommittee last month.

The Obama administration ought to listen to Rupert Murdoch, whose sprawling News Corp. operates the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. In an interview this week, he said that newspapers that have gone "rushing on the Web to try and get a bigger audience, more attention for themselves, have damaged themselves. And now they're going to have to pull back from that and say, " 'Hey, we are going to charge for this.' "

Readers, he said, are "going to have to pay for [their] favorite newspaper on the Web. ... The Web as it is today will be vastly improved, [there will] be much in [newspapers] and you'll pay for them."

You will, and it will be -- if the government will permit it, which is why the Obama administration needs to change its mind.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com