“Federal and state Justice Department officials are aggressively pursuing an antitrust investigation of New Times Corp., owner of the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, and Village Voice Media and are looking into whether the two alternative newspaper chains are cutting back on news coverage.” Essentially, the two companies may have acted in restraint of trade in a ‘horse trade’ in which each of them agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where the other one had a competing paper. The Justice Dept. is oh-so-concerned about the cutback in “hard-hitting news coverage and analysis” that occurs when competition is killed in this fashion. It certainly does seem that the alternative weeklies are “moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to”, as this SF Bay Guardian piece opines (although, as an aside, it ought to be “conglomerates to which they were meant to provide an alternative”, not to be pedantic or anything…). However, can’t you just see Ashcroft and his minions salivating at the chance to go after the Village Voice while ignoring the far more egregious control of the information flow practiced by the media giants?