Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maugh.

Okay, we're on overtime.

Senator Clubissar, some of the biggest threats we see on our democracy are at the state houses.

Yet we have fewer and fewer journalists covering state legislatures and city halls.

I assume that's true, I guess so.

You have legislation that would strengthen local journalism, oh, what exactly would this legislation do?

Well, I think this is what we've been talking about today is that if you don't have coverage of things, democracy dies.

Right.

And what's been going on around the country's more and more local newspapers, local radio TV have been folding.

And a lot of this has to do with the fact that they generate content and Facebook and Google put it up and they get like a little snippet of it and they don't have to pay them for anything.

And what this bill does and it's bipartisan, we're just introducing it.

It basically says, you've got to let these smaller venues, these newspapers, TV stations, be able to join together and get an exemption from the law so they can join together to negotiate better rates with Google and Facebook.

Because otherwise they're just going to die on the vine.

Because their revenues, Google's went up $66 million, $1 billion in three months, $66 billion in three months from ad revenue.

And meanwhile, more and more newspapers, thousands of them are shutting down.

So this evens a playing field, Australia just did it.

They're able to get better rates for their news content.

And you're able to pay the journalists that are doing the investigation and writing the stories and just plugging it into the big tech companies.

Yeah. And it's a shame about local papers.

I mean, I remember when I was a kid, the Bergen Evening Record was on our doorstep and there was like an afternoon in the dish.

Yeah, well they covered the football games, they covered it.

It's also things that bring the community together.

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