Author: Patrick Maines

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 now free to sponsor issue ads within close proximity to federal elections, is particularly gratifying and long overdue.

As congressional proponents of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act scramble to write legislation in an attempt to work around the Court’s decision, they will now have to confront this daunting fact: As of today, speech of the sort that was at issue in this case is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.

Halleluiah.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 the FCC had authority to pursue its ambitions in this regard.

Then, just last week, there was the White Paper filed at the FCC on behalf of Time Warner Cable by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, arguing that net neutrality as proposed is likely unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Last but not least is the report, debated but out there, that the Administration is cooling on net neutrality because it fears that it might depress the amount of capital the private sector invests in broadband deployment — an argument also made here — thereby defeating the goal of ubiquitous broadband access and stunting job growth as well.

One can only imagine the anguish such a turn would engender in the net neutrality crowd.  A conflict between Free Press and the Administration?  How could they reconcile it?  What manner of prose could they summon to express their innermost feelings?  The “vituperative retreat” perhaps, or maybe something more stylish, like an Olbermannesque commentary.  Perhaps they’d initiate, simultaneously, 100 diary threads on DailyKos.

Well, we don’t know for sure but we can dream.  What we do know is that Chairman Genachowski’s plan of extending and codifying the FCC’s "Internet principles,” announced with such confident fanfare not so long ago, is now coming under heavy fire from lots of quarters.

Laurence Tribe’s brief is particularly noteworthy, both for its line of argument and for the road map it lays out for a court challenge on constitutional grounds, should net neutrality be formally adopted.  To quote just one of several poignant passages therein:

Net neutrality proposals rest on the mistaken premise that the constitution gives the government a role in ensuring that the voices of various speakers receive equivalent attention and that audiences receive equal access to all speakers.  In fact, a central purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from making just such choices about private speech, including decisions about what amount of any given kind of speech is optimal.

That Tribe was an active supporter of the candidacy of President Barack Obama, and served as a judicial adviser to Obama’s campaign, suggests that he has the Administration’s ear on such matters.  This, coupled with speculation about the reason for the departure of Susan Crawford, a strong proponent of net neutrality, lends weight to the notion that the Administration may be reconsidering its erstwhile support of net neutrality regulation.

If so it would just be another example, as H.L. Mencken put it, that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 and regulations that govern the media.

They are doing this, they say, out of a concern for the “future of journalism,” but to the extent that policymakers act on the journalists’ recommendations they may do damage to the commercial media, old and new, and great violence to the First Amendment.

For the most part, journalists’ understanding of and support for the First Amendment is limited to their parochial interests.  They want access to government information, protection from libel laws, and the right not to have to reveal their sources.

As it happens, all of those things are of benefit not just to journalists but also to the news-consuming public, which is why legislation creating a federal shield law for reporters, to give one example, is a good idea.  But the point remains: Reporters and the commentariat generally have a very blinkered view of the scope of the Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

This explains why journalists report and opine so infrequently on the myriad First Amendment issues that impact people and institutions other than themselves.  Things, for instance, like commercial speech.

State and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have adjudicated many cases wherein they have ruled that advertising and other kinds of promotional speech is entitled to First Amendment protection, but these cases are rarely covered, other than in the media trade press, to any significant degree.

In similar fashion reporters – aside from such notable exceptions as George Will – have raised very few objections, along First Amendment or any other lines, to the speech-curtailing aspects of so-called campaign finance reform, as in McCain-Feingold’s restrictions on issue ads.

Nor have they objected much to the “speech codes” that have been implemented on so many college campuses, or to the right of government to regulate the media in ways, as with some of the broadcasters’ “public interest” obligations, where such regulations have the practical effect of undermining the broadcasters’ editorial freedom.

As with commercial speech, all of these issues implicate the First Amendment, and all have been considered by the courts as such issues, but not to the interest or concern of many reporters.

Given this track record it’s shocking but not surprising, as the saying goes, that journalists are these days recommending so many ill-considered ways that government might “save” or “restructure” American journalism.

There are a number of examples of this trend, like Dan Rather’s embarrassing speech last year at an Aspen Institute symposium, where he asked President Obama to create a government commission to “save journalism,” or the recommendations of the risibly clueless Knight Commission, with its recent call for a “federal tax credit for the support of investigative journalism” and creation of a “Geek Corps for Local Democracy.”

But the mother lode of the literature in promotion of this unfortunate movement is a lengthy piece published last year in the Columbia Journalism Review.  Titled “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” the article was co-authored by Michael Schudson, a Columbia University journalism professor, and Leonard Downie, Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

Among their recommendations:

  • The IRS should explicitly authorize news organizations to be created or converted into nonprofit entities, regardless of their mix of financial support, including advertising.
  • Public radio and television should receive increased funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for which their programming should be “substantially reoriented” so as to provide significant local news reporting.
  • The FCC should create a “Fund for Local News” with money the Commission collects from fees imposed on broadcasters, telecom users, and/or Internet service providers, said funds to be distributed through grants from “Local News Fund Councils” to news organizations (commercial and nonprofit alike) that propose “worthy initiatives in local news reporting.”

Breathtaking.  And it begs the question: Is it too much to ask that a professor of journalism, and the former executive editor of a leading U.S. newspaper, have some understanding of the crucial need for a separation of government and the press?  Does it not occur to either of these gentlemen that it’s insufficient just to give lip service to that concept?

Though we live during a time when journalists spend more time reporting on corporate rather than governmental malfeasance, the greatest value of a free press is in its check on government.  The marketplace, after all, provides some control on the conduct of corporations (and particularly so where government regulators aren’t in bed with them) but without an independent and credible press there really is no check on government.

Journalists often speak, and wisely so, of “following the money trail.”  It’s a good practice, and one that immediately illuminates the profound error in any scheme that proposes to deliver funding from the government to the media.  It’s really pretty simple.  Where the media do not receive government funding – directly or indirectly – they are free to speak critically of the government without fear of a loss of revenue, a condition that is undone if they do receive funding.

Apart from the long-term effects, the mechanics of doling out government assistance itself invites abuse.  Take, for instance, the idea of taxpayer funds being funneled to the commercial press through the Orwellian-sounding “Local News Fund Councils.”  What kind of people, you might ask, would be appointed to serve on such councils?  The authors recommend journalists (?), educators, and diverse “community leaders.”  In practice what this would mean is a veritable Noah’s Ark of single-issue and special-interest groups (all of which would call themselves public interest groups) with strong political connections.  And woe to those would-be grant recipients who failed to successfully run the PC gauntlet laid down by this crew.

And what about those who did receive funding?  Well if, for instance, they happened to be broadcasters they could look forward to the day when their “Local News Fund Councils” hooked up to compare notes with their “Community Advisory Boards,” as some at the FCC are proposing be created.  Wouldn’t that be a great idea?  Democracy in action.

The headlines on some news stories suggest that schemes like these have appeal not just to “media reformers,” but to the very people that free press advocates should fear most: politicians.  Thus, from Reuters, this recent nugget: “Gov’t Will Need to Help Shape U.S. Media: Rep. Waxman”; and from Broadcasting & Cable: “FTC Will Team With FCC To Vet Journalism’s Future.”

Speaking before an FTC workshop in December, Rupert Murdoch made some remarks that ought to resonate with journalism professors and former editors.  Here is part of what he said:

“The future of journalism is more promising than ever – limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to over-regulate us or subsidize us….

“In my view, the growing drumbeat for government assistance for newspapers is as alarming as overregulation.  One idea gaining in popularity is providing taxpayer funds for journalists.  Or giving newspapers ‘nonprofit status’ – in exchange, of course, for papers giving up their right to endorse political candidates….

“The prospect of the U.S. government becoming directly involved in commercial journalism ought to be chilling for anyone who cares about freedom of speech.”

Bad as the Schudson-Downie opus is on First Amendment grounds – and this is its worst aspect, to be sure – there are other problems, most importantly the commercial impact government subsidies would have on unsubsidized news organizations, whether old or new, that had to compete for readers, viewers, and advertisers with those who were subsidized, either directly or through tax breaks of one kind or another.

An example of this problem could arise in the prospects after launch of what is called mobile TV, or mobile DTV.  Made possible in part by broadcasters’ conversion from analog to digital transmission, the mobile TV service about to be test-marketed in Washington, D.C., will likely be free and interactive.

Consumer electronics companies and broadcasters, who are the principal players in the development of the technology, believe there may be a $2-billion market for it, gained through advertising.  If so, those funds would be helpful to an industry that has been reeling from the combined effects of the disastrous economy and competition from the Internet.

So here we have an industry – whose declining fortunes, along with those of newspapers, are most often cited as the reason for government to lend a hand – working to find a way to grow and prosper, without taxpayer dollars or other subsidies, as independent sources of news.

But standing on the sidelines are current and former journalists, and their financial enablers in the grant-making world, proposing to erect a national system as would invite competition from taxpayer-subsidized companies that would be crucially dependent on the goodwill of their governmental patrons.  Such is the idealism of journalism reformers and “reconstructors.”

Their perfunctory acknowledgment of the need to be wary of government funding notwithstanding (Schudson and Downie admit that “political pressure has played a role at times in the history of the arts and humanities endowments”), they show themselves to be pretty adept at knowing how to apply that pressure themselves.

Toward the end of their recommendation about the need for PBS to reorient its programming toward local news (through “significantly increased” appropriations for CPB), the authors write this: “The CPB should encourage changes in the leadership of public stations that are not capable of reorienting their missions.”

So in other words the plan here is that, if PBS stations won’t voluntarily submit to the kind of local news programming that Schudson and Downie want to see, the CPB should use its control over the purse strings to oust the management of those stations.

Yes, just so.  That’s it exactly.

First published here on The Huffington Post, Jan. 12, 2010.

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Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 issues.  The problem that broadcasters have is with some articles written by Professor Benjamin, earlier this year, on that very subject.

One such, “Roasting the Pig To Burn Down the House,” seeks to answer the question being asked by all fair-minded people: “Should we welcome new regulations on broadcasters that will make broadcasting unprofitable?”  And the answer, according to Benjamin, is “yes.”  Or, as he puts it: “Some regulations that would be undesirable standing on their own will be desirable once we factor in the degree to which they will hasten the demise of over-the-air broadcasting.”

In the same piece Professor Benjamin happily acknowledges, in passing, something that broadcasters have argued – namely that some new administrative regulations, like the so-called advisory boards, “could prove fairly costly.”

A few months later, whilst opining on the Volokh Conspiracy blog site, Benjamin gleefully commented on another rueful development, a Supreme Court decision on indecency regulations (FCC v. Fox) that, as he puts it, “makes life worse for local stations” that can’t afford tape delay systems.  As with the added expense of advisory boards, Benjamin sees this too as a good thing.  “Local television broadcasters,” he says, ”have a new disincentive to airing live local events – and viewers have less reason to watch local broadcasters.”

Never mind for a minute that Benjamin’s comments are informed by what he sees as the inevitable collapse of broadcasting (he gives it only about 20 years to live, even without a nudge), and that he sincerely believes that broadcast TV is not the highest and best use of the spectrum.  The remarkable thing is why the FCC would bring aboard, and give this particular portfolio to, someone with Benjamin’s baggage?

It would be funny if it were a joke.  But as one long-time broadcasting executive put it, it raises real questions about the kind of personnel vetting that’s going on at the FCC.  If views like those that Benjamin has published aren’t enough to disqualify him from appointment to the position he’s just been given, what would it take?  A manual on how to poison station managers?

The dust has barely settled on the government’s years-long campaign to engineer TV’s digital conversion – a conversion that many broadcasters think holds great promise for their industry – and along comes this character, as out of some film noir production, whose ghoulish fantasy is to put broadcasters out of the broadcasting business.

Not to worry, though.  Once broadcasting has been polished off, the FCC can focus all its energy on regulating the Internet.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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.  While on the other we see newspapers, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, awash in the kind of political reporting that reduces even the most important policy issues to the banalities of “horse race” journalism.

This latter development has become all the more insufferable in the current nightmarish environment, where every current and proposed law or regulation should be more carefully analyzed for its effect on the economy than for its impact on politicians and political parties.

Coverage of the health care debate has been singularly inadequate for precisely this reason.  For every news and feature story that has delved into the effects, say, of the “public option” or the “employer mandate,” a hundred have dwelt on the chances of legislative passage, or on the political winners and losers.

Comes now the leaked e-mail  messages from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, just days before an important environmental summit in Copenhagen, and the question is whether the MSM, in the wake of it, will finally treat the subject of global warning with the care and objectivity that such a complex subject demands.

Even without so-called cap-and-trade legislation looming on the congressional horizon, the many national and international environmental laws that are now being implemented or considered require that global warming be closely scrutinized for its scientific findings, and for the impact and efficacy of any public policies as may be pursued in consequence.  The unseemly aspects of the CRU correspondence simply adds fuel to what should be a brightly burning subject even without it.

Consider, for instance, the critical linkages that have to be established and explained if “global warming” is to be understood by people generally (as distinguished from “warmists” or “skeptics”), as a subject they should care about.

First, it has to be clear that warming is happening, and that it is man-made, a subject about which there was, in fact, debate even before the CRU debacle.  Then it has to be determined that said warming is of such peril something needs to be done about it.  (Again, the subject of debate.)  Then, of course, it has to be shown that there is something that can be done about it.  And finally, we have to know that what we do won’t have negative consequences (like, for instance, on the economy) that are worse than the effects of the warming itself.

Seen in this way the opinions of climatologists are just one element, and not even the most important one, that needs to be considered and fully examined.  But is that happening in the coverage of this issue by the MSM?  Doesn’t look like it.  Instead, as with their coverage of health care reform, news stories about global warming tend to be either (1) preposterously opinionated, and wrapped in the familiar blather of political correctness, or (2) woefully superficial, a consequence of their horse-race aspects and focus not on substance but on the political sideshow.

Hardly a day goes by without someone, somewhere, lamenting the prospective demise of journalism, by which they mean, even if they don’t say so, what we have come to call the mainstream media – the broadcast networks, big-city papers, the newsweeklies, the wire services.  But as shown in their coverage of global warming and health care reform, today’s MSM appear to be adrift, and operating apart not only from their traditions, but also from what is in their own, and our, best interest.

Cross-posted in Huffington Post, here.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 brilliantly as always, about health care legislation, Samuelson takes The New York Times and The Washington Post to task not just for what he sees as their mistaken characterizations of this legislation, but for their inclusion of these mischaracterizations in the papers’ news pages.

Thus does his piece, titled “Obamacare: Buy Now, Pay Later,” contain these words: “[Obama’s] health care plan is not ‘comprehensive,’ as Obama and The New York Times (in its news columns) assert, because it slights cost control….  If new spending commitments worsen some future budget or financial crisis, Obama’s proposal certainly won’t qualify as ‘reform,’ as the president and The Washington Post (also in its news columns) call it.”

To fully appreciate the gravamen of this parenthetical charge, you have to appreciate the lengths to which newspaper editors will go to insulate themselves from charges of editorial bias, part and parcel of which being their frequent assertions that opinions are confined to the editorial and op-ed pages.

That this criticism issues from someone with such sterling journalistic credentials is also noteworthy.  Far from being an outside critic, Samuelson is very much a part of the journalistic establishment, and for him to fault the papers’ journalistic judgment — particularly when it was extraneous to the subject of his piece — is sure to be noted by his editors and colleagues.

Which is just to say that it was a brave thing he did, and something that he probably would not have done had he not been seriously exercised by the subject, and the papers’ treatment of it.

That frustration resonates in these parts because, like Samuelson, The Media Institute too is closely allied with media companies — most notably by the fact that they provide virtually all of our operating support — and yet we have felt the frequent need these days to be critical of their journalistic performance.

Many years ago I co-authored a content analysis of The New York Times and published the results in National Review.  The article was titled “Is It True What They Say About The New York Times?” and much to the dismay of many of NR’s readers, we found that the paper’s public affairs reporting, on its news pages, was balanced, and contrasted sharply with the opinions on the editorial and op-ed pages.

Hard to imagine anyone writing such a piece today, about the Times or the Post. 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 Commissioner – he’s been accorded that kind of tolerance that people bestow on those seen to be sincere and to mean well.

That’s about to change.  In the midst of the worst economy – and potentially fatal problems for that part of the economy occupied by American newspapers and broadcasters – Copps is saying and doing things that infuriate.

The most recent, and onerous, examples occurred just yesterday and today when, according to stories in Broadcasting & Cable, Copps demonstrated, yet again, how insulated he is from the world of fact and logic.

Presiding (alone) over an FCC workshop convened to hear the views of academics on the subject of media ownership on Monday, “Copps warned against putting too much stock in the doom and gloom scenarios about the health of TV and newspapers, suggesting that trying to ‘save’ the media should not translate to a lighter re-regulatory hand.”

Then today, at yet another workshop, Copps expressed the opinion (as reported by B&C) that “if the FCC can’t rejuvenate shuttered newsrooms, put the brakes on ‘mind-numbing "monoprogramming"’ and otherwise turn the tide … of consolidation, then ‘maybe those who want the spectrum back have the better of the argument after all.’”

And so there you have it.  The parlous state of the TV and newspaper industries, according to Michael Copps, is nothing to be worried about.  It’s just a rumor.  No need to lighten the regulatory load.  In fact, if broadcasters don’t start programming the way Copps would like, maybe we’ll just take their spectrum away from them.

The series of workshops in question have one more day to run. Plenty of time, in other words, for Copps to give us the benefit of even more of this stuff.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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,” the site’s primary focus is on one issue facing the Internet: Chairman Genachowski’s plans to extend and codify the FCC’s so-called Internet principles.

Unlike the FCC’s main site, which is as unreliable as it is difficult to navigate, OpenInternet actually works pretty well.  Much more importantly, it’s attracting, in addition to fans and the usual sycophants, a fair number of people who are critical of the Commission’s plans.

The public’s views are communicated in two ways, through the posting of opinions on the “Join the Discussion” page, and by posting comments there and on the “OpenInternet Blog” page.  Check it out.

Love That AMC

Close observers of this blog will remember an earlier piece written in appreciation of the impressive AMC series “Breaking Bad.”  Yesterday’s was the penultimate show this season of the other award-winning AMC series, “Mad Men.”  And coming to AMC on Nov. 15 is a miniseries remake of the classic 1960s series, “The Prisoner.”

All of which begs the question: What’s the deal with AMC?  Are they trying to make us love them?  If so, they’re succeeding.

Hugo Chavez and Friends

Many of the editors at a magazine I used to work for had “laws.”  One’s law was “never go west of Fifth Avenue unless you absolutely have to.”  Another’s was “the love of evil is the root of all money.”  But the one that I recall most often was “when you find a good thing run it into the ground.”  (The same person who authored that law once told me that in order to handle New York cabbies you need to have iron lungs, a nasty disposition, and a law degree, and he had all three.)

Anyhow, I’m reminded of the “good thing” law whenever I reflect on the endless joy it gives me to say something truly unkind about people who’ve earned it.  It’s in this spirit that I’m pleased to present this week’s Trousered Ape Award to Sean Penn, Danny Glover, and Oliver Stone (who also receives a Golden Homunculus), for their support of Hugo Chavez at precisely that moment when he’s cracking down on free speech, and every other human right, in Venezuela.  One can only wonder where we’d be, as a nation, without such people.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 and self-righteous response of a few, the affair casts an unflattering light on the mindset and pretenses of much of the Washington press corps.

Take, for instance, Jacob Weisberg (please).  Here’s a gentleman who, when not inflicting his shrill and politically marginal opinions on the three or four people who still read Newsweek, presides over Slate, an online magazine that counts, among its reporters and editors, precisely one (out of 57) who voted for John McCain in the last presidential election.

It’s with these credentials that Weisberg wrote the following on Oct. 17: “Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tactical political question.  Whether we journalists do so is an ethical one.  By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations.  Respected journalists … should stop appearing on its programs.”

The very idea that “respected journalists” might advance journalistic ethics by ostracizing another media company solely because of the perspective that company brings to the news of the day — as though other news organizations were value-free vessels of the purest objectivity — is hundred-proof claptrap.  That this corrosive idea is the brainchild of a journalist says much more about him, and about journalists generally, than it does about the facts at issue.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the great disconnect in our national dialogue (and the reason for the popular success of Fox News) is that the press corps, and the journalism they produce, skew center-left in a country that is overwhelmingly center-right.  It is (fortunately) true, as Marxist and other leftist critics are wont to complain, that the media are to the right of them.  However, the media are most assuredly not to the right of the electorate, but to the left, and that’s a problem — first for the country, and also for media companies themselves.

Still, it’s one thing to have mainstream journalists who are out of sync with, and resented by, millions of people, and another thing entirely to have journalists who are unwilling to rally around a news organization under assault by this or any White House.  Worse still, of course, are those, like Weisberg, who actually join the assault and invite others to do likewise. 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

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 the way that it showcases the most pedestrian observations, as though they were the product of unique and weighty cerebration.  It annoys in the way that it pretends to a kind of grandeur and perspective – at precisely that moment in history when either would be useful – that it simply doesn’t possess.

Officially called the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, the Commission is a collaboration of the Aspen Institute and the Knight Foundation (assets pushing $2 billion), which paid for it all.  Early on the report makes clear that this is a commission with uncommon ambition and a high regard for itself.

Referring to the earlier Hutchins, Carnegie, and Kerner commissions, for instance, the Knight Commission co-chairs write: “In pursuing our work, we have been well aware that we are following in the path of other (emphasis added) distinguished Commissions.”  This, while a “background” document states that the Commission’s goal is to “start a national discussion – leading to real action.”

Given such a lofty calling one would expect the Commission’s observations to be trenchant and uniquely insightful.  One would be wrong.  From the foreword to the appendices, the Knight Commission report is a veritable cornucopia of the mundane, sortable into three categories: things that are already happening, and should be (like rapid broadband deployment by the private sector); things that are happening, and shouldn’t be (like the codification of the FCC’s net neutrality principles); and things that are not now happening and never will.

The best example of the latter comes in the Commission’s recommendation number 12 (of 15).  So as not to lose any of the rhetorical flavor of this recommendation, I quote parts of it verbatim: “Imagine,” they say, “a ‘Geek Corps for Local Democracy’ where, as a post-college opportunity, American youth volunteer to help connect a physical community to the networked infrastructure….  Geek Corps participants would teach community members how to use technology….  A Geek Corps would weave together the local and the national through networks of passionate youth.  Ideally, such a program would have the same stature as the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, such that participants would be welcomed into jobs with open arms.”

Open, shmopen.  The notion that vast numbers of “post-college” American youth would (or should) line up for such a thing is the kind of idea that is dreamed up only by government bureaucrats – and nonprofit organizations that think like them.  How about getting or creating a job in the networked infrastructure, paying taxes, and buying things with whatever’s left over as might help the economy?

Speaking of rhetoric, that’s the other thing about the Knight Commission report.  Approximately every other paragraph, even the short ones, has the density of a black hole, so that after wandering into the first sentence you find yourself being stretched thin, like a strand of linguine, and by mid-graph frantically searching for a way out of the thing.

This said, if the only problems with the Knight Commission report were its immodesty, dense language, and commonplace insights, one could just ignore it completely and go about one’s business.  Unfortunately, however, the report is also marred by something else, specifically the timing and nature of its recommendations in the context of what is happening in the real world.

As it happens, on the very day that the Knight Commission released its report (on the premises of Freedom Forum’s Newseum, another billion-dollar foundation) the government announced that unemployment in the United States had reached 9.8 percent, and that more than 7 million people have lost their jobs since the onset of the current recession.

It is also a time when there is scarcely a state or municipality that is not on its financial uppers; when the national debt and federal deficit are at record highs; and when personal bankruptcies, home foreclosures, and credit card defaults are in the stratosphere and climbing.  To say that these data constitute an ongoing tragedy, and the deepest kind of threat to every person in this country, is not the tiniest exaggeration.

Enter into this environment a Knight Commission report whose recommendations are notable mostly for their exquisite attention to what, in the realm of communications policy, are little more than politically correct platitudes.  In this fashion, the report endorses things like governmental transparency, higher education, public libraries, broadband availability, net neutrality, diversity of media ownership, young people, old people, and ensuring that “every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.”  (If only there’d been an opportunity to say something about global warming.)

In other words, the Knight Commission report is frivolous and ill-timed.  This is the kind of report – with its recommendations of greater funding for public broadcasting, “public digital displays of news and culture,” a “federal tax credit for the support of investigative journalism,” and the aforementioned Geek Corps for Democracy – that should be released, if at all, only at a time when the country is so prosperous that people who should know better might actually go for it.

It didn’t have to be like this.  It would have been possible, even at this time, to create a commission that investigated the information needs of communities, in the context of our economic crisis, that was relevant and helpful.  It just didn’t happen.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx (“I’ve had a wonderful night, but this wasn’t it”), you can find some stimulating ideas about the future of journalism and the information needs of communities, but not in this report.