South Park
Many people have commented about Comedy Central's self-censorship of the "South Park" episode, but none so well as The New York Times' Ross Douthat.
Read it. And think about it.
Cute as a Button: The Schemes and 'Confessions' of Reed Hundt
Sorry to say, there are people in public life who, were hubris a lubricant, could forego ambulation and just glide on down the road. Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the FCC, is one such person.
Hundt is back in the news these days because policies he clandestinely pursued while chairman are now thought by some (including Hundt himself) to be coming to fruition at the hands of his former FCC aides and confidantes, one of whom, Julius Genachowski, is now chairman.
This, and more, was revealed in a speech Hundt gave last month at Columbia University. The subject of his address was the national broadband plan, then set to be released by the FCC just a week later, and what he characterized as a “confession or admission” of the role he played, years earlier, in using his office as chairman to systematically elevate broadband, at the expense of broadcasting, as the “common medium.”
To quote the great man himself: “The choice to favor the Internet over broadcasting was initially made in first-draft form by some of the people who are now running the FCC.”
One can only imagine how happy this revelation must have made the current FCC chairman since, if we’re to believe Hundt, not only was Genachowski a co-conspirator, so to speak, he was just a tagalong – the horse to Hundt’s Lady Godiva.
Lest you think for even a minute that the gentleman feels remorse about any of this, be advised: He doesn’t. Quite the contrary, Hundt is pleased as punch with the way he handled things, amused even, and he wants you to see it the same way. Rather like a school boy pulling a prank on the headmaster, Hundt sees his scheming not only as smart and justifiable but as positively cute in the way it confounded all but those few in the know.
How else to explain his characterization of his efforts to suppress broadcasting – by delaying, for instance, its transition to HDTV – as “a little naughty?” Or his boast, re the ability of people to use the telephone network, for free, to connect to the Internet, as a case of the government “stealing the value from the telephone network and giving it to society?”
Not everyone sees the humor. One who is particularly unamused is Gordon Smith, formerly Senator Smith, and now head of the National Association of Broadcasters. As reported in Broadcasting & Cable, Smith had this to say when asked what he thought of Hundt’s speech: “Frankly, I was rather offended, as a former member of the Senate Commerce Committee, that his secret musings were never shared with the elected representatives of the American people.”
Actually, Hundt’s Columbia performance isn’t the first time he’s spoken (what shall we call it?) “candidly.” Years earlier there was the book, You Say You Want a Revolution, that he wrote not long after leaving the FCC.
Sandwiched between characterizations of some of his fellow commissioners as the “Gang of Three,” and innumerable accounts of the commercial rabble with whom he was obliged to spend time, Hundt wrote some things that are of a piece with his Columbia speech.
One of these describes a meeting he had in 1995 with Bill Gates. Hundt writes:
We had come to appeal to Gates’ self-interest. As everyone on the West Coast knew, computing was heading directly toward communications.... With Gates as commander-in-chief, the entrepreneurs could win a lobbying war even against the powerful broadcasters....
I wanted Gates to go after the spectrum, because the auction was such a pure and sensible goal. Later, depending on how the meeting went, we would ask for his help in connecting every classroom to the information highway....
If those who bought the spectrum at an open auction could ignore the networks’ deal with Congress and abandon high-definition television, they could transmit digital information to PCs....
Gates rocked in his chair. His eyes magnified by his glasses, he stared at me, and asked urgently, "Does anyone else know about this?"
Elsewhere in the book, Hundt describes his attendance at a meeting hosted by the Gores (Tipper and Al), also in 1995, on the topic of Families and the Media:
Then the President and Vice President each said they would support the children’s television initiative. I had become part of the Administration’s political agenda – perhaps the first time in history that FCC issues were in the center ring of the political circus. Al singled me out in the crowd. I stood up. The auditorium applauded. The event made the national news. It was intoxicating; it was much more important to be there in Nashville than at, say, an NAB convention.
Many people would agree that the Internet already is, or will become, the “common medium.” And in an age when Saul Alinsky is held up as a role model, and the ends justify the means, views and acts like Hundt’s will almost certainly escape widespread censure. But there’s this one small problem with the government picking the industrial winners and losers: What happens if they’re wrong?
Of course we know that governmental estimates and projections are never wrong. But imagine that sometime in the future it happens. Wouldn’t that be something? Because, you know, in that case the government would not only have distorted the marketplace, it might have created problems it hadn’t even considered.
As it happens, there’s a claim in Hundt’s book that hints of this very problem. In the same chapter in which he wrote of his meeting with Bill Gates, Hundt claimed that “big-screen televisions would cost so much that less than one percent of Americans would buy them.”
Imagine our surprise, then, when we check now with people at the Consumer Electronics Association, and are told that, in 2010, almost half (about 47 percent) of all TV sets sold are big screen. Could this mean, Hundt’s furtive schemes notwithstanding, that the Internet won’t be the only common medium? Go figure.
Cross posted at Huffington Post, April 21, 2010.
'Interest Groups' and the News Media
From the Pew Research Center/Project for Excellence in Journalism comes the welcome report that newspaper editors and TV news directors are not eager to be, or to be seen as being, wards of the state. This wholesome sentiment will not come as a surprise to most people, but it has to be disconcerting to the “media reform” crowd, which has been clamoring for direct government subsidies or tax breaks for the news media.
According to the study, 75 percent of the respondents, drawn from the ranks of members of ASNE and RTDNA, had “serious reservations” about direct subsidies from the government, and approximately half had such concerns about tax credits for news organizations. (Note: These figures do not indicate how many of the respondents had “reservations,” only those who had “serious reservations.”)
It’s in the matter of non-governmental support, of the sort that issues from “interest groups” or nonprofit organizations, that the picture becomes a little murky. According to the report, a whopping 78 percent of the respondents had serious concerns about accepting donations from “interest groups that engage in advocacy of some kind,” while a little over half expressed either serious or “some” reservations about funds issuing from nonprofit foundations.
Buts what about those groups, like the investigative news organization ProPublica, that are funded and led by people with extensive, and clearly defined, political profiles? Is ProPublica an advocacy group or just a nonprofit news group? The question takes on a practical significance in light of the Pulitzer recently awarded to ProPublica and The New York Times for their collaboration on a piece published in the New York Times Magazine.
As reported here, the founder, chairman, and principal financial backer of ProPublica is billionaire Herbert Sandler. Since selling his interest in the bank (Golden West Financial) through which he made his fortune, Herbert and his wife, Marion, have become big-time philanthropists, with substantial sums going to “progressive” organizations like the Center for American Progress and Acorn.
Along the way the Sandlers acquired an interest in bankrolling a news organization that would create “journalism in the public interest,” as ProPublica calls itself, and hired Paul Steiger, then the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, to act as editor-in-chief.
As reported in The New York Times, Steiger, who was then nearing the WSJ’s mandatory retirement age, didn’t know the Sandlers well but regarded them as “civic-minded people who were kind of partial to lefty or progressive causes.”
From its inception in 2008, ProPublica has proclaimed its independence and impartiality — a claim that is undermined by its avowed goal of producing journalism that “shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong,” and by the looming presence of Mr. Sandler who, rather than donate his money as a lump sum and walk away, installed himself as chairman and is parceling out his contributions over time.
At a recent conference of the American Bar Association, the general manager of ProPublica who, like Mr. Steiger, was formerly with the Wall Street Journal, defended the organization against criticism of Mr. Sandler’s role by suggesting that ProPublica, like the WSJ, is capable of producing journalism that is independent of the political views of management. Unfortunately, this is an inapt analogy. In fact it’s worse than that — it positively undermines the argument it’s meant to buttress.
This, of course, because the reason that the Wall Street Journal, or any commercial news organization, can produce news stories that are not a reflection of the political views of management is because they, like all for-profit organizations, operate on the principle of maximizing returns to the shareholders, rather than as a forum for the expression of management’s political or ideological views.
But contrast this dynamic with the very different operating principle of ProPublica, or any nonprofit enterprise. As Slate’s Jack Shafer asked at ProPublica’s launch, “What do the Sandlers want for their millions? ... How happy will they be if ProPublica gores their sacred Democratic cows? Or takes the ‘wrong’ position on their pet projects: health, the environment, and civil liberties?”
In fairness, most of the reports produced by ProPublica to date do not suggest an organization that is marching in lockstep with the progressive agenda. For the most part they are ideologically value free. But that’s only half the story. The real issue with a group like ProPublica is not the kind of issues it does cover but the kind it doesn’t. As Jack Shafer asked, what kind of investigative pieces will ProPublica do — not counting the rare expose that proves the rule — that discomfit progressives? That will be the true test of its independence from its benefactor, and of its suitability as a partnering organization with mainstream news organizations.
In the meantime, close your eyes and try to imagine the kind of reception that would have come to Paul Steiger and ProPublica if, instead of Mr. Sandler, the group's founder, chairman, and bankroller had been someone who, politically, was Mr. Sandler's polar opposite — someone who had supported conservative or libertarian causes and organizations. How do you think that would have gone down with the J-schools, journalism reviews, and grant-giving foundations?
D.C. Circuit's 'Net Neutrality' Decision
The D.C. Circuit Court's decision, while obviously correct, will not slake the thirst of anyone looking for intellectual arguments for or against the FCC's proposed regulation of the ISPs' network-management practices. Because the court ruled that the FCC lacked the "ancillary" authority it asserted, the body of the decision amounts to little more than a refutation of the respondents' argument that earlier Supreme Court decisions provided precedent for the FCC's claims.
The "legalistic" nature of this decision aside, there is something important here. It is widely surmised (and feared) that, thus rebuffed, the FCC will attempt to get to its desired result – network neutrality, as it's called – by attempting to regulate ISPs, like phone companies, under Title II of the Communications Act.
But look what's happening here. On the basis of claims of abuse so slim they're very nearly invisible, the FCC has proposed to expand and codify that agency's "Internet principles" in a way that guarantees its regulatory oversight of the freest, most democratic, and fastest-growing communications medium in the country. And for what? Because of fears that Internet providers might look for ways to insulate everybody else from the negative consequences of the actions of a relative handful of bandwidth hogs?
One of the intervenors in this case – Free Press, whose sole reason for being is the subjugation of the commercial media and communications companies to the yoke of government – coined the phrase "Net Neutrality: The First Amendment of the Internet." The reality, as someone put it, is that codified net neutrality is more nearly "The Fairness Doctrine of the Internet."
For now, nobody knows for sure what will happen next – whether the FCC, or Congress, will push ahead in the conviction that this too is an issue of such "transformative" importance the only thing that matters is getting it done. But in this, as in so many things, the wiser course would be to rethink the matter entirely. It rarely happens that government acts more efficiently than the marketplace, and net neutrality is almost certainly no exception to that rule.
