Over the weekend, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times published a column urging Congress “to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival.”

Rutten is half-right. There is indeed a legitimate and an increasingly pressing need for government to intervene in the journalism crisis. But the policies Rutten prescribes would actually undermine the goals he professes to champion. Suspending antitrust protections to allow digital collusion, whereby newspapers erect online price-fixing schemes and place their content behind “pay walls,” is exactly the wrong policy to encourage democratic discourse.

As Rutten notes, there is a rich history of government involvement aimed at enabling and protecting a free press. But circumventing antitrust law will not achieve those ends.

At best, pay walls would forestall the inevitable by artificially extending otherwise diminishing corporate profits as the business model of advertising-supported journalism continues to falter.

At worst, pay walls would create a media system that shrinks the range of political debate, penalizes commentary in the blogosphere, and drives an already struggling media system into the ground.

Rutten invokes a gross misconception of the First Amendment to support his argument. He writes, “If the 1st Amendment is to mean anything, Congress has to suspend antitrust rules for the newspaper industry so publishers can determine as a group how much to charge for online content.” But contrary to enabling more concentration, our “first freedom” was never intended to allow for a press system dominated by a handful of corporations. As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black noted in the historic 1945 Associated Press case, the First Amendment “rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.”

It is difficult to imagine how exempting antitrust laws and allowing collusion among our major news media would add a single new voice to crucial political debates.

What we need instead are policies that rescue good assets from bad owners, return media production to the communities they serve, and transition old commercial media into a new public service media system. These policies include expanding our public media system and passing tax laws to facilitate low-profit and nonprofit alternatives for struggling news organizations.

To be sure, journalists should be paid for their work. But there are means for compensation that do not create a police state on the Internet and do not encourage an already overly concentrated, hyper-commercialized media system to become even more so. Rupert Murdoch is not a role model under any scenario.

Colluding to erect industry-wide pay walls merely props up a crumbling status quo: It is bad for democracy, it is illegal, and, even if it were allowed, it will not save journalism. What our democracy requires instead is a transformation from a purely commercial, for-profit press, to a public service-oriented media system. Government must be involved. Just not in the way that Rutten suggests.