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.

In general, there have been three kinds of responses to the calls for President Obama to endorse a commission to on the future of journalism and public media in America:

1. “Keep the government out of my journalism.”
2. “What good will a commission do?”
3. “Thank goodness, it’s about time!”

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post exemplified the second and third responses in his article earlier this week, essentially arguing, “We don't need no stinkin' presidential commission.” My colleague Josh Silver has already outlined a few of the flaws in Kurtz’s article, but I want to step back and explore these responses to the commission idea in more depth.

The telecom sector is too important to be allowed to hold back the U.S. economy, writes Andy Kessler in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. But that's exactly what it's doing by overcharging for voice calls, eliminating network choice and stifling mobile phone innovation.

"U.S. carriers are some of the most backward, unscrupulous and anti-customer companies in the nation," writes Mike Elgan of IDG News Service. And he tells us why in a list of the 10 best reasons to hate your mobile network provider.