The Italian government is considering making it illegal for its citizens to post videos on the Internet without a license.
The free speech implications are obvious. But could the proposal also be a move to restrict unwanted economic competition against Italy’s state-dominated media?
Innovations like “Living Stories” from Google Labs along with better and much cheaper e-readers to replace newsprint, will ensure that much of the legacy media survives. Which, for all that media’s faults, is good.
Let’s face it; for all the talk of a “new business model” needed for the legacy media, the so-called “citizen media” isn’t it. An infinite number of untrained, amateurs MIGHT theoretically give you what the major newspapers do, just as an infinite number of monkeys might tap out all the works of Shakespeare. But how much time do you have to read through all that monkey typing? No one will ever expand the day to longer than 24 hours; our reading time will always be precious.
Too, there is the aspect of the citizen media that I’m hardly the first to point out – most of the news the citizen media “break” comprises links to the legacy media, even if it’s in a negative connotation. There’s very little generation of fresh content out there other than at the fringes, such as commenting on the legacy media’s fresh content. You hear about each and every true scoop, as with the Acorn revelations, precisely because they are so very rare.
The citizen media can be a good supplement – and it can also be trash – but at its very best, it cannot be a replacement for trained, skilled reporters working full-time at their jobs. Before you bloggers take a jab at me, tell me the last time YOU broke a truly original news story. No, not somebody else – you.
David Boaz makes an excellent point about media coverage of President Obama’s health care proposal:
The media tendency to refer to the defeat of a big-government scheme as “failure” reflects a possibly unconscious bias toward government action.
Well put. Why not make it conscious, then? Call it truth in advertising.
An objective media would be nice. But we are unlikely to ever see such a thing. Even the very best reporters are human. And humans are biased. Different people are biased in different ways, of course. But objectivity is still a fiction. Being open about this ugly truth could do much to reduce public confusion.
If readers have a clearer idea of what exactly they’re reading, they can run the articles through their liberal and conservative B.S. filters as needed, and more easily get to the heart of the matter.
Few readers seem to bother so long as the liberal Washington Post and conservative Washington Times continue with their objectivity charades. Bias can be harmful and misleading, true. But denying it only avoids the problem. Let’s tackle it instead.
CNNMoney.com ran a story today about some of the jobs saved or created by the stimulus package. “A civil engineer, Sara Kelley owes her job to President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package,” it begins. Five other short vignettes follow, each with a name and a face that we can see and identify with. All six are thankful to the stimulus for helping them get through these troubled times.
All of these people clearly benefited from the stimulus package. But where did their free money come from? To help these fortunate people, others had to be hurt. Where are the stories about them?
When will we see a story about a company that was unable to raise job-creating capital because government bonds necessitated by stimulus debt ate up precious investor dollars? When will we see a story about a job that was never created because the government decided to take that money and use it on Sara Kelley’s civil engineering job?
The media is great about reporting on what is seen – Sara Kelley and the others. The media is not so good at reporting on what is not seen – opportunities taken away by the stimulus; opportunities that never came to be because the money they required was instead spent on Joab Gonzalez’s youth training program.
This does present some difficulties. You can’t put a name and a face on a company that was never founded, or a worker who was never hired. Just try and write about something that never happened. It’s hard.
Maybe it is asking too much of our reporters to see the unseen. But we live in a complicated world, and not all of it is visible. To report on that world as it actually is requires an understanding of sometimes-difficult economic concepts such as opportunity costs.
Economic journalists who don’t know basic economics too often write stories that are at best incomplete, and at worst misleading. Reporting only on what is seen leads to the impression that fiscal stimulus is a free lunch; seeing the unseen reminds us that there is no such thing.
Apple's 1984 "Big Brother" ad
An article over at Ad Age brings up an angle on the whole auto industry bailout probably not considered much before. The fact that a yet-to-be-appointed “car czar” will have control over a multibillion dollar advertising budget for the big three. Under the guise of “oversight,” this would effectively “Create World’s Most Powerful Marketing Exec[utive].”
The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar” who will oversee the Big Three automakers’ expenses over $25 million — which, by extension, would include media buys. Based on Advertising Age’s estimates of spending by General Motors Corp., Chrysler and Ford Motor Co., that would give the as-yet-unnamed car czar control over some $7.3 billion in marketing spending in the U.S. alone.
The most disturbing thoughts about this (particularly to those concerned with liberty) are provoked here:
The car czar would wield a budget more than double those of AT&T, Verizon, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, which round out the nation’s top five marketing spenders, and give the car czar more clout with media and agencies than such famed names in marketing as Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Quinn and Anheuser-Busch VP-Marketing Dave Peacock.
…If the bailout goes through, agencies that work for the Big Three will essentially be toiling on a government account, with all the associated red tape and strictures that involves.
So there you have it. We should all be concerned about this for many reasons. As mentioned, the large ad budget that comes with a czar-controlled U.S. auto industry will allow a government bureaucrat to wield unbalanced and unchecked influence over not only who gets ad contracts, but what media outlets get ad money. The czar can simply refuse to give business to an advertising agency who works for a foreign competitor of the big three (or a “non-compliant” corporation), or refuse to pay money to show ads on outlets that they deem “unfriendly” to the administration or its mission. This will be an unequivocal disaster. We have already seen the lengths to which administrations (and pre-administrations) have gone to influence and/or silence media they do not like. What kind of power plays do you think are possible when the administration’s appointee controls a major source of media outlets’ ad revenue? Whatever it ends up being, it won’t be pretty.
Veteran journalist and editor Andrew Sullivan pens a love letter to the his favorite literary format, the blog:
No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Sullivan acknowledges many of the pitfalls of writing without the kind of prior editorial review that accompanies more traditional outlets, but emphasizes that, for him, the advantages of spontaneity outweigh such hazards. As he puts it, his first experience with unrestricted self-publishing was “intoxicatingly free…like taking a narcotic.” I can’t say I’ve ever felt quite the same while blogging, but perhaps that just reflects my lack of narcotic-taking experiences to compare it to.
Thanks to Megan for the link.
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