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  • February 23, 2010 4:18 AM The Intrinsic Menace in 'Media Reform' Christian theologians refer to the first three books of the New Testament as the synoptic gospels. This, because of their similarities in content and order. The new religion of “media reform,” whose principal tenet is that government needs to “save”...
    Patrick Maines
  • February 16, 2010 11:10 AM The American Samizdat Back in the bad old days, “samizdat” was the name given to that body of politically forbidden literature that was clandestinely published and circulated in the Soviet Union. In 2010, the Internet serves as an American samizdat, to the advantage...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 27, 2010 10:19 AM Citizens United and the Commentariat Nothing’s quite so inspiring as the sight of journalists, in high dudgeon, trashing the First Amendment. Such has been the rule since last Thursday, when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the campaign finance case called Citizens United. For...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 21, 2010 4:17 PM How Sweet It Is! The opinion handed down today in the Supreme Court re McCain-Feingold is good news for everyone who values free speech in general, and political speech in particular. The relief it grants to labor unions, nonprofit and for-profit corporations, who are...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 19, 2010 7:28 AM Net Neutrality in Retreat? If you’re a “net neutrality” critic, and dabble in schadenfreude, things are looking up! First, there was oral argument in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (Comcast v. FCC), during which the panel clearly appeared to reject the notion that...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 13, 2010 10:04 AM Media 'Reform' and the First Amendment Despite their general lack of experience or expertise in law, commerce, finance, or technology, people with journalistic backgrounds are these days testifying before Congress and regulatory agencies, sponsoring seminars, and writing papers in a broadly coordinated effort to influence laws...
    Patrick Maines
  • December 17, 2009 10:24 AM Stuart Benjamin: The FCC's 'Spectrum Reformer' Amid their other problems, broadcasters now have a new one: the FCC’s recently appointed Scholar in Residence, Stuart Benjamin, a law school professor at Duke University. According to an FCC press release, Benjamin will work on “spectrum reform,” among other...
    Patrick Maines
  • December 15, 2009 1:15 PM Net Neutrality: Whose First Amendment? It shouldn’t come as any great revelation that when the government proposes regulations affecting the media, there very well might be implications for the First Amendment. Raising such concerns, and then examining their validity, is a normal part of the...
    Rick Kaplar
  • November 30, 2009 3:05 PM The MSM: In a Horse Race to Irrelevancy? Perhaps because of their declining prospects, much of the mainstream media are acting very hinky these days. On the one hand we have the spectacle of such as the Associated Press and Newsweek openly adopting opinion as their journalistic motif....
    Patrick Maines
  • November 24, 2009 4:14 PM Dueling Philosophies on Minority Ownership What happens when you invite the FCC’s two veteran commissioners to speak about the media at a Rainbow PUSH Coalition symposium? When one of the commissioners is Michael Copps, and the other is Robert McDowell, you get two very different...
    Rick Kaplar
  • November 16, 2009 2:56 PM News and Opinion It’s not often that a parenthetical aside is the most notable part of a speech or written document, but that’s exactly the case with an opinion piece published in today’s Washington Post by that paper’s columnist Robert Samuelson. Writing, and...
    Patrick Maines
  • November 3, 2009 12:32 PM Commissioner Michael Copps and Media Ownership Owing to his earnest and mild-mannered (if intellectually scruffy) ways, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has rarely inspired anger. No matter how wrong-headed his views – and he’s been wrong about virtually everything for the whole of his time as a...
    Patrick Maines
  • November 2, 2009 5:12 AM Orts and All FCC's "OpenInternet" The FCC website, now in Beta, called OpenInternet.Gov is interesting. It’s not great, but it’s better than you might expect and sort of refreshing. Ostensibly given over to a public discussion of the “important issues facing the Internet,”...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 26, 2009 10:23 AM Fox News and Its Critics Criticism of the Fox News Channel by the Obama Administration is neither inexplicable nor unprecedented. But the response to this flap by the press is all of that and then some. From the near-total silence of most, to the blinkered...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 12, 2009 12:03 AM The Knight Commission: Much Ado About Nothing As in the title of the book about Southern belles, We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier, the report of the so-called Knight Commission, released on Oct. 2, is in some ways amusing and in other ways annoying. It amuses in...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 28, 2009 11:22 AM Keeping the Bluest of the Blues Alive For those whose professional lives are spent in or around politics there is often a yearning for something that unifies. This, because even at its best politics is a science of division, where people are separated – by class, philosophy,...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 22, 2009 9:32 AM Chairman Genachowski's Modest Proposal re Net Neutrality FCC Chairman Genachowski’s proposal to extend and codify the FCC’s “Internet principles,” delivered in a speech just yesterday, has already attracted a substantial amount of commentary. There is no doubt that his proposed rulemaking will be the subject of much...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 14, 2009 11:53 AM A Unitary First Amendment - Redux By guest blogger LAURENCE H. WINER, Professor of Law and Faculty Fellow, Center for Law, Science & Technology, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz. “[W]e don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of...
    Guest Author
  • September 9, 2009 8:24 AM Citizens United and 'Hillary: The Movie' If you’re feeling, like so many of us, that our life and times are too harmonious, smart, and principled, you might welcome something completely jumbled, uninformed, and hypocritical. If so, here’s just the thing: an article by E.J. Dionne of...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 8, 2009 10:28 AM The AP and Joshua Bernard The decision made by the Associated Press to publish a photograph of a mortally wounded Marine in Afghanistan has been condemned by many, including the slain soldier’s family and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The photo itself is both horrifying and...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 3, 2009 8:14 AM The Washington Post's Health Care Coverage: The Whole Megillah The Washington Post published last Sunday what is probably their best piece ever about the health care debate. The irony is that the story was written not by a Post reporter but by the newspaper’s ombudsman, and the thrust of...
    Patrick Maines
  • August 26, 2009 1:04 PM More on Newspapers and Aggregators If newspapers ultimately survive, they might owe a debt of gratitude not only to Rupert Murdoch (as Patrick Maines suggested here recently), but also to two brothers who have combined their expertise in economics and the law to analyze the...
    Rick Kaplar
  • August 16, 2009 10:48 AM Another Chance to Undo McCain-Feingold A case scheduled for argument next month in the Supreme Court provides another opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of the worst part of the abominable campaign finance law, commonly referred to as McCain-Feingold. The case (Citizens...
    Patrick Maines
  • August 10, 2009 12:34 PM Rupert Murdoch and the Future of Journalism It's reported that Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., pledged last week that his company has plans to charge for the online news content of all its newspapers and television channels. Though the announcement came with few details as to...
    Patrick Maines
  • August 3, 2009 4:30 PM Aggregating Newspapers Into Extinction Hardly a day goes by without another reminder that the demise of newspapers is in full swing. In the Outlook section of yesterday’s Washington Post (Sun., Aug. 2) came the latest, an anecdotal example by Post reporter Ian Shapira titled...
    Rick Kaplar
  • July 31, 2009 10:50 AM Dan Rather Has an Idea According to stories in the Aspen Daily News and the Aspen Times, newspapers of record for the nation’s elite snowboarders, Dan Rather gave a speech at the Aspen Institute on Tuesday, asking that President Obama create a national commission to...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 28, 2009 10:33 AM Filling the Open Seats at the FCC Late Friday afternoon the Senate confirmed Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Baker to fill the last of the open seats at the FCC. Though not yet sworn in as this note is being posted, it is assumed that both will be...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 14, 2009 11:56 AM Bad Prescription for the First Amendment It’s a good thing the USA isn’t experiencing any financial or economic problems, because if we were someone might notice that plans being hatched in committees of both the House and Senate will hurt all kinds of American businesses—and...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 9, 2009 3:13 PM Keeping Kids Safe Online Everyone, it seems, has had a hand in trying to keep children safe online. For more than a decade, various groups and individuals representing parents, children, educators, law enforcement, government, and industry have weighed in with suggestions. Now, however, a...
    Rick Kaplar
  • July 7, 2009 3:27 PM Ship of Fools Imagine that every person in the United States were aboard a large life raft, in the open ocean, amidst a hurricane. In that circumstance how many of the nation’s factions would be pressing their special interests? Would the environmentalists yammer...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 1, 2009 10:49 AM "Whale Wars": Just Another Fish Tale If you believe, as I do, that Greenpeace is to conservation what televangelism is to religion, all that would need to be said about Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars” is that the “captain” of the Sea Shepherds’ vessel, Paul Watson, is...
    Patrick Maines
  • June 22, 2009 10:56 AM With Friends Like These Signs of institutional meltdown are everywhere apparent. Wall Street and Detroit are obvious examples, as are the states of New York and California. But nowhere is the collapse of standards and credibility more alarming than among journalists and their profession....
    Patrick Maines
  • June 12, 2009 2:49 PM The Big, Uneventful Day A blog about media and communications policy would be remiss if it did not mark the fact that this is a watershed date in television history – even if nothing much seems out of the ordinary. This, after all, is...
    Rick Kaplar
  • June 3, 2009 12:06 PM 'Breaking Bad': An Appreciation Every once in awhile something happens in medialand that elevates and refreshes, and at least partially reclaims the enormous potential of the industry. Media coverage of the events of 9/11 is one example, and the minor miracle that is AMC’s...
    Patrick Maines
  • May 28, 2009 3:10 PM Leave PBS Stations Alone Since 1985, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has had a policy on the books stating that its member stations must offer a “nonsectarian, nonpolitical, noncommercial educational program service.” It might be going a bit far to say that PBS has...
    Rick Kaplar
  • May 17, 2009 10:08 AM Whither Journalism? Part II If journalism of a satisfactory depth, independence, and scale is going to survive, it will have to be produced by professional journalists employed by profit-making organizations. As such it will require revenue streams that are sufficient for the purpose. As...
    Patrick Maines
  • May 14, 2009 4:03 PM Whither Journalism? Part I As evidenced by recent hearings in the House and Senate, the future of journalism is attracting a lot of attention these days. And why not? Hardly a week goes by without news of the shutdown, bankruptcy reorganization, or downsizing of...
    Patrick Maines
  • May 4, 2009 5:04 PM Back to Square One Two of the Supreme Court’s decisions most awaited by First Amendment advocates this term have landed with a thud. Or maybe a whimper. But certainly not with a bang. On April 28, the Court upheld the FCC’s power to implement...
    Rick Kaplar
  • April 20, 2009 1:00 PM Time Warner Cable and Consumption-Based Billing Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;...
    Patrick Maines
  • April 17, 2009 4:11 PM A Disappointing Delay on Cross Ownership Since January we’ve heard a lot of talk about changing the way the government does business. At the FCC, however, it looks like it’s still just talk. When it comes to the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership rules, at least, the times...
    Rick Kaplar
  • March 30, 2009 5:35 PM A Unitary First Amendment By guest blogger LAURENCE H. WINER, Professor of Law and Faculty Fellow, Center for Law, Science & Technology, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz. In last week’s Supreme Court oral argument of the “Hillary: the...
    Guest Author
  • March 25, 2009 4:42 PM Blaming the messenger, and why not? A program held at Rockefeller University last week—an Oxford-style debate on the subject of the financial crisis—inspires and dismays. It inspires because it demonstrates how much can be learned when knowledgeable people communicate honestly and intelligently, even where they...
    Patrick Maines
  • March 18, 2009 10:26 AM 'Fixing' CNBC From a viral video to an online petition campaign, the Jon Stewart smackdown of the hapless Jim Cramer has spawned quite the kerfuffle. As an Associated Press story describes it: “Some liberal political activists and economists are seizing on comedian...
    Patrick Maines
  • March 13, 2009 3:47 PM The First Amendment's Fleeting Friends If anyone has seen his share of First Amendment friends and foes over the years, it’s Floyd Abrams, that iconic New York attorney whose name can hardly be uttered without the words “First Amendment” somewhere in the same sentence. But,...
    Rick Kaplar
  • February 27, 2009 12:05 PM Truth Is No Longer Absolute Libel Defense By guest blogger ASHLEY MESSENGER, Editorial Counsel to U.S. News & World Report, L.P., Washington, D.C. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently ruled in Noonan v. Staples, Inc. that truth is not necessarily a defense to...
    Guest Author
  • February 23, 2009 10:35 AM What Do Political Reporters Know? One of the differences between, say, your everyday community organizers on the one hand, and investors on the other, is that while both have opinions, the investors have money. Not only do they have some money, in a very practical...
    Patrick Maines
  • February 18, 2009 11:44 PM And Now for Something Entirely Different... In Washington, the lingua franca of policy discussions is "lobbyspeak," a form of communication that seeks, among other things, to conceal any hint of personal belief or interest. The allure of lobbyspeak is that it allows the speaker to say...
    Patrick Maines
  • February 10, 2009 3:16 PM Eating Their Seed Corn From the New York Times comes word this week of big changes looming at one of the country’s oldest newsweeklies. “Newsweek,” they say, “is planning a redesign and some shifts in content to fashion an opinionated take on events, aimed...
    Patrick Maines
  • February 6, 2009 11:06 AM Hate Speech and the First Amendment “If you bring up the First Amendment, you’re a racist.” In so many words that’s the message – or threat – to anyone who would dare question the constitutionality of a proposal that the government launch an inquiry into media...
    Rick Kaplar
  • February 4, 2009 11:06 AM Shadow Debate By guest blogger ROBERT CORN-REVERE, partner, Davis Wright Tremaine LLC, Washington, D.C. During the presidential campaign, and particularly since the election, conservative talk radio and the blogosphere have been abuzz with rumors that the Democratic agenda would include reviving the...
    Guest Author
  • January 22, 2009 2:18 PM A Refreshing Start (With a Hiccup) By guest blogger BARBARA COCHRAN, president, Radio-Television News Directors Association, Washington, D.C. Supporters of open government could hardly have asked for a better beginning to the Obama administration, when, as one of his first acts, the new president declared “the...
    Guest Author
  • January 20, 2009 5:22 AM Kevin Martin, and the Peril of Fixed Ideas Like the man who appointed him to the position, today marks FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s last day on the job. That both he and President Bush are leaving office to the relief of most, and the glee of many, is...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 12, 2009 9:41 AM Obama and the Media, Part II Apart from the economic effects of President Obama’s fiscal and regulatory policies, there arises the question of how “business friendly” he may prove to be. The media and communications sector plays a large and important role in the general economy,...
    Patrick Maines
  • January 5, 2009 8:32 AM Obama and the Media, Part I Writing in Broadcasting & Cable as chairman of the American Business Leadership Institute, the gifted Adonis Hoffman* suggests that business has nothing to fear from an Obama Administration. Some early tests of Hoffman’s thesis will come in that corner of...
    Patrick Maines
  • December 15, 2008 1:41 PM Digital Technology: Double-Edged Sword 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...
    Rick Kaplar
  • December 8, 2008 8:46 PM New Tech and the Old Media 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...
    Patrick Maines
  • December 2, 2008 4:26 PM FCC on the Offensive 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...
    Rick Kaplar
  • November 26, 2008 5:13 AM The Media and the Economy Virtually everyone who’s taken an objective look at the subject agrees that media coverage of the presidential race was tilted in favor of president-elect Obama. The latest to make the claim is Time magazine’s Mark Halperin, who last week characterized...
    Patrick Maines
  • November 19, 2008 12:38 PM Digital Copyright Questions Deserve Answers The U.S. Supreme Court has an opportunity to chart a clearer course for copyright protection in the digital age if it agrees to hear a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The matter involves a...
    Rick Kaplar
  • November 17, 2008 7:44 AM Call Me Ishmael In Herman Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab’s obsession is with Moby Dick. In the morality play that’s been running for years at the FCC, Chairman Kevin Martin’s obsession is with “a la carte” for cable TV. Missing from this analogy is...
    Patrick Maines
  • November 15, 2008 5:24 PM Obama Names FCC Transition Team President-elect Obama has named the members of his FCC transition team. They are Professors Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford. Here is an election day post from Mr. Werbach's weblog, and an earlier one in criticism of John McCain's technology plan....
    Patrick Maines
  • November 11, 2008 11:23 AM Fairness Doctrine Redux? It comes as no surprise that Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), perhaps the most partisan politician in America, has indicated his support for a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. Neither is there any surprise in the reasoning he conjures up for...
    Patrick Maines
  • November 5, 2008 11:11 AM Digital Politics Comes of Age Pundits, pols, and political scientists will spend months and years dissecting this presidential election. But one fact is unmistakably clear: We have seen the future of politics. And it’s digital. Digital technologies played a bigger and more decisive role in...
    Rick Kaplar
  • October 27, 2008 10:45 AM The Financial Crisis and Horse Race Journalism In 2001, the events of 9/11 were covered by the news media in a way that reassured and unified an angry and fearful country. In 2008, a financial crisis that in its own way is as dire as 9/11 is...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 21, 2008 11:41 AM A Time To Celebrate Free Speech National Freedom of Speech Week – NFSW for short – is upon us. This week of Oct. 20-26, 2008, marks the fourth year in which freedom of speech has been remembered with a commemorative week of its own. When The...
    Rick Kaplar
  • October 14, 2008 5:47 AM Fact and Opinion Name a national news organization that commands the respect both of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Can’t do it? Neither can I, but as the head of The Media Institute, and as a citizen, I wish I could. At...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 10, 2008 5:57 AM Political Reporters, the Economy, and the Presidential Race In 1991, the Greek-owned cruise ship Oceanos sank off South Africa’s eastern coast. All of the crew, including the captain, abandoned ship before many of the passengers got off, leaving them to the safekeeping of the shipboard entertainers. Watching the...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 6, 2008 9:00 AM The Good and the Bad of It Because, as they say on TV news promos, "you need to know," herewith some thumbnail opinions of certain journalists and media outlets: Daily Kos—Not since the Ku Klux Klan started wearing sheets has anonymity been put to a more malevolent...
    Patrick Maines
  • October 1, 2008 10:48 AM Fairness Doctrine: The Talk Goes On The Fairness Doctrine, or at least talk of a reimposed Fairness Doctrine, just won’t go away. It was finally killed off in 1987 but the current Democratic Congress has been making periodic noises about bringing it back. The big question...
    Rick Kaplar
  • September 25, 2008 11:00 AM A Matter of Trust We’ll know soon whether the proposed Google-Yahoo! advertising deal will be challenged by the Department of Justice. Certainly there are signs, most notably the hiring of antitrust litigator Sanford Litvack, that it may do so. But figuring out what is,...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 15, 2008 10:40 AM Journalists, and the future of the media. Part II From Johannes Gutenberg to the dawn of the Internet, the press (or the media as we now call it) has been characterized by two things: It has been one-way, and it has flowed from the few to the many. Comes...
    Patrick Maines
  • September 8, 2008 3:36 PM Journalists, and the future of the media. Part I “Ladies and gentlemen, The Network News Hour with Sybil the Soothsayer ... Jim Levitt and his Almost Truth Department ... Ms. Madahare and her Skeletons in the Closet.... Tonight, another segment of Vox Populi.... And starring the mad prophet of...
    Patrick Maines
  • August 26, 2008 12:46 PM Sheer Lunacy: Taxing the Technologies of Freedom Imagine that someone came up with an idea to solve the “problem” of information overload (a.k.a. “too much information”) by levying a tax on the technologies that have sparked our information explosion. Making it too expensive for many people to...
    Rick Kaplar
  • August 18, 2008 1:47 PM Conservatives and the Media For maybe 50 years, self-described conservatives have been alienated from the dominant U.S. media — the Big Three TV networks, big-city newspapers, the national newsweeklies. This alienation of a group that comprises as much as a third of the electorate...
    Patrick Maines
  • August 8, 2008 6:33 PM Is China Big Enough for Free Speech? The Olympics are now in full swing in Beijing after a spectacular opening ceremony that displayed many of the Chinese people’s finest attributes. The Chinese government and free speech, however, are another matter. Our friend Kurt Wimmer has written an...
    Rick Kaplar
  • July 28, 2008 9:23 AM Of Men and Machines You know that idealism has taken an odd turn when it’s associated more with the function and marketing of machines than with the creative work of human beings. That is, or should be, the take-away from the latest copyright flap...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 25, 2008 11:30 AM The FCC, Indecency, and the Rule of Law Call it a victory for the rule of law. And a victory for common sense. On July 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overturned the Federal Communications Commission’s fine against CBS televisions stations for airing the...
    Rick Kaplar
  • July 12, 2008 1:55 PM Tony Snow, RIP Last October The Media Institute presented Tony Snow with our Freedom of Speech Award. It was, among some people, a controversial decision. Tony was a well-known conservative commentator even before he was press secretary to George Bush, facts seen by...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 10, 2008 5:04 PM The Problem With Google For a company whose corporate motto is “Don’t be evil,” Google has an unfortunate capacity to look past the most obvious things. Take, for instance, its stance in favor of “net neutrality.” Insofar as this concept is more than a...
    Patrick Maines
  • July 9, 2008 2:27 PM Those "Outlaw" Television Networks? George Carlin’s death on June 22 came only days before the 30th anniversary of what has become his legacy in Washington policy circles: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Pacifica decision. That ruling centered on Carlin’s comedy bit "Seven Words You Can...
    Rick Kaplar
  • July 7, 2008 1:28 PM Some People "Get It." Imagine our relief, just when we thought that nobody cared, as we read the editorial in the Dallas Morning News. Published on July 4th, and titled "All hail the First Amendment," it recounts the ordeal of Canadian journalist Mark Steyn,...
    Patrick Maines
  • June 30, 2008 12:09 PM The Real Problem With Radio Washington radio icon Chris Core was given the boot in February after 33 years behind the microphone at WMAL-AM in the Nation’s Capital. He was part of a cost-cutting move by the station’s owners, who also fired the entire on-air...
    Rick Kaplar
  • June 19, 2008 12:01 PM The Silence of the Lambs The failure of mainstream U.S. journalists even to mention the abominable trial of Canadian journalist Mark Steyn speaks volumes about the state of the industry, and about the speech-killing nature of political correctness. As my colleague Rick Kaplar posted here...
    Patrick Maines
  • June 17, 2008 11:53 AM The Threat to Free Speech Is Just Across the Border Note to American journalists: Step across the border into Canada and you will give up every vestige of your right to free speech and free press. If you write a piece that someone finds offensive or that merely hurts his...
    Rick Kaplar
  • June 10, 2008 3:48 PM The (Il)liberal Critics, Part II Unless you hang in the fever swamps of the hard Left, you’re probably not aware that the group calling itself Free Press hosted last weekend the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform. Like the name of the host organization,...
    Patrick Maines
  • June 3, 2008 6:30 AM The (Il)liberal Critics One of the most underreported stories in the country today is the extent to which media bashing--formerly the almost exclusive preserve of conservatives--is these days being waged by liberals and leftists. From blogs like DailyKos and the Huffington Post, filled...
    Patrick Maines
  • June 2, 2008 1:37 PM Cross Ownership: That '70s Show in the Senate There they go again. No, not the FCC. This time it’s the U.S. Senate, still worried after all these years that the same company might own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market. The Senate recently passed...
    Rick Kaplar
  • May 30, 2008 3:37 PM Where Are the First Amendment Champions? First Amendment advocates must acknowledge a stark reality: Too many players in the new generation of digital media either do not understand the First Amendment, or think the First Amendment is irrelevant to their piece of the digital action, or...
    Rick Kaplar
  • May 29, 2008 2:34 PM Taking Care of Business The challenges facing broadcasting as an industry have been told so often there’s no need to recite them all here. Unfortunately, broadcasters’ understandable focus on business issues is being offered up by some as an excuse for doing little to...
    Patrick Maines