Category: Business

CNN finally breaks the blackout in the proposed FCC rule changes on media ownership:

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The Federal Communications Commission has received so many public comments on its Web sites regarding Monday’s vote on media ownership consolidation that the agency is having “problems” with its server, an FCC official said Friday.

And the messages aren’t just coming via e-mails. The official said the FCC is experiencing problems with their voice comment phone line, which has also been swamped.

The official said the agency is working to fix the problems.

As blackouts go, this one was pretty lame, but it does prove one thing: there are so many alternative sources of news these days, it doesn’t matter how concentrated media ownership is in the big cities. The news gets out anyway.

Jarvis reported on a complaint from NY Daily News columnist Zev Chafets on Maureen Dowd’s use of ellipses to alter the meaning of a statement by the president on Al Qaeda:

Here’s what she wrote:

“‘Al Qaeda is on the run,’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated … they’re not a problem anymore.'”

Here’s what Bush actually said:

“Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”

The Times has now altered the on-line version of the offending Dowd column to restore the President’s actual quote, to wit:

“Al Qaeda is on the run,” the president said in Little Rock, Ark. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely, being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”

This correction was done silently, so the reader has no clue as to what Dowd actually wrote in the first place. Somebody needs to give those folks an ethics course, and any number of bloggers could teach it.

But now that the Times is re-writing columns in response to emailed complaints, some major rework of the Krugman, Kristoff, and Rich oeuvre is surely in progress.

UPDATE: See comments by Robert Cox of The National Debate, who broke the story initially.

Hosting Matters is down, and with it a number of blogs such as Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit. There is an Instapundit backup site if you can’t live without your hourly fix of Professor Reynolds. Oddly, the Hosting Matters status page is silent about the problem, which has persisted for several hours. They must have pissed off Stacy Tabb, who would naturally destroy them for that offense.

On the plus side, the evil Vodkapundit is also down.

UPDATE: Jarvis is up now.

Tim Blair reports on the successful hacking of Michael Moore’s fictitional web site. Oh dear.

ABC’s Frisco station, KGO-TV, had a little get-together for the national audience with Peter Jennings and a bunch of local media folks (the PG&E guy from the Bay Guardian, local news anchor Pete Wilson, an ethnic media guy, the deputy editor of the Frisco Comical, and Barbara Simpson, the right-wing talk radio “Babe in the Bunker”) and a live studio audience.

One of the subjects was the proposed FCC rule changes that will allow more consolidation. So obviously, this discussion didn’t happen, because if it did there could be no Blackout. Seriously, it was the one issue that all panelists agreed on, left, right, center, and loony: bad, bad, bad. It was as if you had proposed privatizing the schools to a meeting of the teachers’ union.

Which leads me to believe it must be a good idea.

Happy Fun Pundit has a serious claim on the title “The New York Times of the Blogosphere” once seen somewhere else.

Stefan Sharkansky has done an amazing feat of research in the Robert Scheer Canard-o-Matic, a chart of the repetitive set of canards that recur in Scheer’s columns.

Like any good citizen, Scheer recycles. Or maybe he composts, I’m not sure.

The usual suspects (Lessig, Salon, Gillmor, free software blogs) are floating a myth to the effect that Big Media are hiding proposed FCC rule changes from their viewers. Let’s see what we can find in five minutes of looking for the story.

MSNBC: Broad media ownership rules floated

ABC: Fed Ruling Could Make More Media Monoliths

CBS: Media Giants Want Room to Grow

CNN: nothing.

Fox News: FCC Proposal Would Ease Media Ownership Restrictions

Another myth bites the dust.

Now what about the rules? The criticism generally makes the same point, whether it’s from conservative Bill Safire or Bushwacking Salon: fewer voices. Given that we only have two today – Fox News and the rest of the right against the East Coast Establishment and the rest of the left – I don’t really see that happening. Media companies are still going to compete for eyeballs, and if there’s only one media company in the world, then departments are going to compete for eyeballs. So that doesn’t persuade me.

There are some potential benefits that could come from more streamlined and efficient news-gathering, however. To give one example, you used to be able to get fairly decent coverage of state government from TV, radio, and print almost anywhere in California, but today you only get it from the Sacramento Bee. Oh, the LA Times, the Frisco Comical, The Union Trib, the Register, the CC Times, and the Murky News put up a front, but their coverage is episodic and incoherent to all but insiders who’ve been studying for years.

If the Bee were part of a conglomerate that included papers in LA and Frisco, their Sacramento coverage would be part of the deal, and if they were connected to TV and radio stations, it would probably penetrate to the mass audience that doesn’t read a daily paper.

News companies used to live and die by local and regional stories, depending on wire services for state, national, and global coverage, but the wire services aren’t cutting it any more, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. So our media is moving in a new direction, where news companies depend more on broadly-based audience for news with a particular attitude. So you’ve got your Fox News fans with their conservative point of view and your ABC News fans with their progressive point of view, happily enjoying news that reinforces their beliefs. So markets are defined differently these days, thanks to cable and satellite and the Internet, than they were in the days when the existing FCC rules were drafted, and that’s just a fact.

Having invested money in researching and reporting a story, why shouldn’t Fox and ABC be able to present it to radio and newspaper audiences as well as their TV audience? After all, these are just different delivery vehicles serving the same public. Outside the US, the myth of impartial news has no standing; you know when you pick up a paper in France, the UK, or India where its bias lies, and you interpret accordingly.

This isn’t too much for the poorly-educated American public to do for themselves.

Another interesting aspect of this story is the criticism of the belief that the Internet can ever be a check on the networks. The Internet can’t, in its present form, deliver broadcast-quality audio and video, but isn’t this exactly as the very critics of “MediaCon” have said they wanted it to remain? (I’m referring to the “World of Ends” concept that the Internet is perfect and shouldn’t be improved.)

An enhanced Internet capable of carrying broadcast-quality programming is a technical possibility. If we were to have that, what would the objection to relaxed FCC rules then become? There has to be one, because bigger is always badder, in this analysis, even when it isn’t.

Lawrence Lessig deleted a comment I left on his blog about this phony claim of his:

Remember, we had to increase our term to harmonize with the rest of the world; now the administration is pushing the rest of the world to increase its term to harmonize with us.

The comment: You can’t be that ignorant. The US extended the term of copyright to harmonize with the EU, and now we seek to bring other nations, such as Singapore, into compliance.

When I lived in Singapore in the mid-80s, their copyright law didn’t protect the works of non-Singaporeans. It was possible to buy all the popular software of the day (Lotus 1-2-3, MS-DOS, Microsoft C, dBase) for the price of a floppy, and photocopied manuals were available for a minimal charge. Pirated audio and videotapes were also available for next to nothing, complete with fake liners. It was a Napster-lover’s dream.

I think you would have liked it.

Oftentimes, the folks who scream the loudest about commercial interests trampling their free speech don’t respect the concept when it applies to those with whom they disagree. Lessig proved himself to be one such person. Of course, the boy has no obligation to let me disagree with him on his blog, but if he wants to be taken seriously as a First Amendment champion he should at least try and confine his rants to the general neighborhood of the facts.

UPDATE: Lessig claims he didn’t delete my comment, so I’ve reposted it to see if it sticks. He also posts, in my comments, some misdirection on CTEA and the EU.

By way of observing the universality of TV criticism, here’s a piece by a well-known reviewer where I’ve switched shows: Before I add my voice to the din that’s discussing where “Buffy” may have gone astray, let’s first take half a second to acknowledge the obvious: This is one of the best dramas on television, with writing so intelligent and dialogue so strong it laid the groundwork for the current generation of great TV dramas. Furthermore, while most TV writers are willing to grapple with vampires or cheerleading as little as is necessary to make it through the next predictable courtroom or autopsy scene, Whedon has taken on incredibly difficult subject matter with enthusiasm, presenting the bizarre twists and turns of policymaking with humor and no small amount of suspense. Of course now we take for granted that watching a bunch of vampire slayer support group members could be riveting, unpredictable and even touching, but before “Buffy,” making a fictional TV version of the high school office warren look romantic seemed almost unthinkable. Whedon has a unique style, voice and vision; on almost every show, there’s an innovative plot device or a revelatory moment that maximizes the drama of an otherwise dry subject.

Now for a free beer, what TV show was this piece written about originally, and for bonus points, where?