26-05-2025
Gov. Moore should convene the legal ads forum he promised
A worker poses by the presses of the Daily Republic in Fairfield, California, in this 2018 file photo. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Amber Carter/U.S. Air Force)
Maryland law mandates that estate beneficiaries pay hundreds of dollars, plus transaction costs, to place legal ads in a local newspaper announcing an estate's opening.
In 2024 and 2025, Maryland's legislature introduced bills to revoke that mandate and instead allow such notices to be posted for free on a more publicly accessible government website.
Experts knowledgeable about estate legal ads know that virtually no potential beneficiaries and creditors learn about a deceased person via such ads. But the mandate is politically impregnable because it benefits one of Maryland's most politically powerful industries at the expense of the politically weak; that is, monopoly local newspapers receive millions of dollars per year while the average Marylander only pays hundreds of dollars per lifetime.
This incentive structure of concentrated industry benefits and diffuse public costs constitutes the classic incentive structure of special interest politics. The problem is compounded by the local newspaper lobby's unique power, as reflected in the politicians' motto: 'Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.'
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Today, Maryland mandates some 190 separate statutory legal ad subsidies for the local newspaper industry, of which the estate subsidy is only one. But the industry worries that revoking even one of these subsidies will cause a domino effect, so fights accordingly.
The case against the obsolete estate legal ad mandate was so compelling that the 2024 legislation revoking it passed both the Maryland House and Senate unanimously (175-0). (Assisting such support, when the bill was introduced, Maryland's leading newspaper chain was owned by an unpopular, out-of-state hedge fund.)
But Gov. Wes Moore then vetoed the legislation, justifying his veto on the basis that the issue needed more study:
'This veto should not be seen as the end of the conversation, and in fact the administration believes we need a broader conversation about public notices rather than a conversation focused solely on estate notices. Our administration looks forward to engaging with … all of the advocates on that topic during the interim,' he wrote.
This year the same bill was introduced in the legislature and again passed unanimously (132-0) in the House. But it wasn't allowed even a vote in the Senate's Judiciary Committee, whose chair, as is said in Annapolis, 'placed the bill in his desk.' The chair didn't respond to my written query asking him to explain his opposition.
I first got a sense of how dirty newspaper legal ad politics was when decades ago I tried to gather data to study them. I had worked at a D.C. think tank studying media public policy and knew that legal ads were the newspaper industry's largest government subsidy.
No scholarly data existed on this subject because other scholars who had tried to study such subsidies had run up against the same brick wall I had; that is, I could find no industry data because national and state newspaper organizations, while aggressively lobbying for such subsidies, had refused to provide authoritative data on them, and politicians were too terrified of the industry's political power to ask how much their subsidies cost the public. So most Maryland legislative sessions some legislation passes that expands legal ad newspaper subsidies without accountability provisions.
I was curious: Did the governor fulfill his veto statement's promises? The answer is no. In the year between the end of the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions, neither the Governor nor his staff participated in, let alone orchestrated, such a public discussion.
My sense is that the best hope to eliminate Maryland's obsolete estate legal ad laws would be to shame the governor into acting consistent with his own stated values, as he has promised to support the poor and politically weak, and that's whom estate legal ads most hurt. On the other hand, since the media have negligible incentive to expose this hypocrisy, such hope appears quixotic. Moreover, the governor's politically astute aides have undoubtedly counseled him not to risk the newspaper industry's wrath, given its power to shape his and his opponents' public image.
Conversely, recall that the governor won a Bronze Star for bravery. Accordingly, the governor should convene his promised public forum to discuss the merits of newspaper legal ads. Until then, he should instruct his staff to stop lobbying to kill legislation that only reduces but not expands legal ad subsidies. (The largest new newspaper subsidy last session reduced newspapers' legal ad costs).
If the governor's policy is only to call for public discussion when reducing but not increasing newspaper industry subsidies, that double standard should be called out.
