The news across America’s front pages has taken on that sort of bland similarity one senses traveling across the country when all the shopping centers and fast food joints look exactly alike. There are reasons for it. Did you know the following ?

Welcome to life under the Washington Post-New York Times swap. As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago, the Post and Times send each other copies of their next day’s front pages every night. The formal sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.

This agreement, now 13 years old, is only a small part of the picture concerning the dissemination of news in America. The reigning petit nobility in America’s mainstream newsrooms have become victims of their own monopolizing game and with the introduction of the savages of the internet, they continue to hurl their increasingly futile pretensions against all that assails them. Behold the Associated Press and its declarations ! Veteran blogger and journalist Jeff Jarvis relays the latest assault on the Fair Use Doctrine by the wire service once declared in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by the Supreme Court of the United States.

This complaint comes from an organization that leaches off original reporting and kills links and credit to the source of that journalism. Yes, it has a right to reproduce reporting from member news organizations. But as I point out here, the AP is hurting original reporting by not crediting and linking to the journalism at its source. We should be operating under an ethic of the link to original reporting; this is an ethic that the AP systematically violates.

What would be better for journalism would be for aggregators — Daylife (where I am a partner) Inform, Google News, ProPublica — to link directly to original reporting without rewriting it through its mill. That is what is happening in Ohio, where newspapers are now sharing original stories. If the AP doesn’t watch out, that is what could happen everywhere.

The Associated Press is now trying to enforce restrictions on its content far exceeding those allowed under the Fair Use Doctrine. Their apparent position is all of their content is under copyright and they have a right to restrict its use on the internet. Oh, but wait, now it appears the Associated Press has lifted content from a Los Angeles blogger, Patterico, directly in violation of the standards it demands now from internet publishers. You just cannot make this stuff up.

Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

So am I going to be an ass and threaten to charge them, or sue them, or demand that they remove the quotes? Of course not. They benefited from my content and I benefited from their link.

Steve Boriss, of Washington University, who publishes a blog, The Future of News, wrote a recent overview of the history of the AP and how it serves presently to slowly dismantle and homogenize what we have always thought of as a free and robust press in America. Find it here at Pajamas Media. Boriss writes:

But the real problem is not the number of newspapers we now have, but that they refuse to compete with each other, a symptom of the AP-created culture of collaboration over competition. For example, in any other business, if there were a highly successful paper in one city, it would be natural for it to expand to a nearby city to dethrone the leader. But as members of the same AP network, papers assume their cities belong to them, and no other member has the right to invade it. Even if a neighboring paper did invade, the AP network makes it nearly impossible for them to succeed through competition because all papers are essentially running the same stories anyway.

It is easy to see evidence for the desperation of MSM bosses these days for, as Boriss explains:

This AP-supported journalism culture deprives Americans of their birthright as codified by the Founding Fathers. The purpose of the First Amendment was to establish a country with maximum free expression and debate — a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas. Jefferson himself created a partisan paper to challenge Alexander Hamilton’s partisan Federalist newspaper. The concept of a single set of news stories and angles is the antithesis of the Founders’ vision.

But lately, the AP hasn’t been working so well for its members either. Before there was an Internet, AP member papers could freely share their stories amongst themselves without worrying that their readers could access them from other sources. Now that the Internet allows readers to find AP stories from many different sites, local papers are left with little content that appears to be exclusive, and thus little reason for their readers to subscribe.

It really is difficult to feel sorry for these people as they sink below the horizon.

UPDATE: I was gently reminded LST had its own encounter with AP, last December, which decided to use the story we broke on the Don Black donation to the Ron Paul campaign, 55 days later. To their credit AP did acknowledge LST after David Benzion called them about it.