Media and Communications Policy : Media Policy & First Amendment Foundation : The Media Institute : Free Speech, Media Regulation, Content Controls

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Two items in the Washington Post in the past three days point up how the relentless march of technology will affect news in the months to come – both how it is generated by the White House, and how it is reported by at least one local TV station.

President-Elect Barack Obama sees new technology as a means “to reinvigorate our democracy,” according to senior adviser David Axelrod.  And, as Chris Cillizza reported on Dec. 14, Obama is starting with the Saturday morning radio broadcast begun by Ronald Reagan in 1982.  

“The speech is still beamed out to radio stations nationwide on Saturday mornings, but now it is also recorded for digital video and audio downloads from YouTube, iTunes and the like, so people can access it whenever and wherever they want,” Cillizza reports.

It’s part of a “broader revolution” in how the Obama White House will communicate, according to Doug Sosnik, a senior aide in the Clinton Administration. "The mainframe for this White House will be the Internet, not TV," he told Cillizza.

Only two days earlier (Dec. 12.), Paul Farhi reported that WUSA-TV, Channel 9 in Washington, D.C., had reached a new labor agreement that would scrap the traditional two-person news crew of reporter and photographer.  Under the new pact, an individual “multimedia journalist” will report, shoot, and edit stories alone using digital tools.  Reporters will double as their own camera crew.  Camera operators will take on reporting tasks as well.

In the case of WUSA, however, the impetus is economic. The one-person operatives are part of a broad budget-cutting scheme under which these “multimedia journalists” will actually be paid less than current reporters.

It’s encouraging that Obama embraces digital technology and plans to use it extensively.  At the same time, it’s ironic that digital technology has siphoned viewers from broadcast television and weakened some local news operations to the point where they can only be saved by changes in news-gathering built around ... digital technology.

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Microsoft’s Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, Tom Rubin, recently gave a speech to the UK Association of Online Publishers that has made some waves.

At its most basic, Rubin’s speech was a call for greater copyright protection of “quality content,” and an appeal to content providers for new approaches to the dissemination of their content online.

“The evidence is in,” he says, “and I think we can safely say that the ‘information wants to be free’ approach not only does not work, actually it has been a disaster for almost all newspapers.”

Even if, as a columnist for CNET suggested, Rubin’s speech was meant to position Microsoft, at Google’s expense, as the “safe” technology partner for content companies, many of the specific observations, and the very language employed, provide a welcome contrast to the carelessness and condescension that mark so much of the digerati's take on the subject.

Speaking of the Evil One, turns out that Google and Yahoo! called off their joint advertising deal just in the nick of time.

A story in the December 2 issue of Am Law Daily quotes Sanford Litvack as saying that the Department of Justice was just three hours away from filing antitrust charges to block the deal when the two companies abandoned their pact.

Litvack says that had the deal not been withdrawn the DOJ would have challenged it under sections of the Sherman Act that “ban agreements that restrain trade unreasonably,” and “make it unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade.”

As noted here in September, because of its opacity and potential harm to online publishers and advertisers, the deal alarmed many people, including us. Glad to see it go away, unwept.
 

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Say what you will about the FCC, but you have to admit they’re a scrappy bunch when it comes to pursuing their crackdown on broadcast “indecency.”  First they persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case they lost in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit – the one about Cher and Nicole Ritchie uttering a couple of verboten words during Fox’s “Billboard Music Awards” shows.

Now the FCC crowd is asking the Supreme Court to hear yet another indecency case they lost – this one in the Third Circuit involving the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe incident during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show on CBS.

The Supreme Court hasn’t even ruled on the Fox case yet, and in fact heard oral argument only about a month ago (Nov. 4).  But the word on the street is that the justices seemed sympathetic to the FCC’s arguments in Fox – perhaps even sympathetic enough to rule in the agency’s favor.  Handicappers are predicting that a vote favoring the FCC would be slim (say 5 to 4) and decided on narrow procedural grounds, rather than reaching the constitutional issues.  IF the vote goes the FCC’s way at all, that is.  

The common wisdom, of course, is that predicting Supreme Court decisions based on oral argument is a fool’s errand.  So, an unreliable prediction that foresees such a tepid outcome would seem a double whammy, enough to give one pause.

But not the FCC.  They reportedly are buoyed by the oral argument in Fox to the point that they want to pile on with the Janet Jackson matter.  The Commission did, however, request that the High Court defer a decision on whether to hear the Third Circuit case until after the Court rules on the Second Circuit case.   

This begs the question of why the Commission petitioned the Court at this particular time at all.  (The Court is not likely to issue a ruling in Fox until next spring or summer.)  Maybe this is just the Commission’s way of warning broadcasters that the indecency watchdog is not about to roll over and play dead.  To this observer, however, it seems a transparent ploy that might well prove all bark and no bite.