Category: Journalism

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Google’s Impact on Journalism

The products and services offered by Google are well known and highly regarded.  Every day, millions of consumers around the globe visit the company’s search engine or sites like Google News or YouTube.  And for this, the company’s employees and (especially) its founders have been well compensated.

But there’s another side to Google that consumers know very little about.  That is Google the corporation, and the effect its business practices are having on competitors, and most dramatically on the professional media, news and entertainment alike.

In important measure, people know little about Google the corporation because news stories and commentary about the company’s business practices are mostly confined to industry trade publications, or technology and economic journals.

Even the public policy issues that the company addresses are complex, and hard to write about in a way that wouldn’t cause most readers’ eyes to glaze over.  How, for instance, would one popularize such issues as the district and appellate court rulings in Viacom v. YouTube, or the FCC’s “network neutrality” proceedings, or the FTC’s recently concluded investigation of Google’s search and advertising policies?

So it’s easy to understand why the public at large doesn’t know much about Google’s role in these matters, but book and newspaper publishers do.  So too do movie studios and Google’s competitors in the online travel business, to name just a few.

And what all of these other companies know is that Google’s scale, business tactics, and aggressive lobbying amount to a distinct threat to their very existence.  A single datum provides a startling view of the challenge: Through the first half of 2012, Google by itself took in more ad dollars than the entire U.S. print media, magazines and newspapers, excluding only the ads on newspaper websites, which even today generate only about 25 percent as many ad dollars as print advertising.

The ways in which Google uses its dominance in search to monetize, by corralling and aggregating (without permission) the content of others, is a story that is long in telling.  But a common feature, as stated in a White Paper submitted to the FTC in 2011 by The Media Institute, is that Google’s “main search page biases Google News results over results of news organizations and other publishers.”

Nor is this the perception and complaint just of American publishers.  On June 25, a coalition of hundreds of Europe’s leading publishers urged the European Commission, which is the EU’s antitrust authority, to  reject outright some remedies that Google offered to end an investigation by the Commission of the same kind of practices the company is accused of by publishers on this side of the Atlantic.

As summarized by GigaOm, “Google is accused of surreptitiously favoring its own services in its search results, locking advertisers onto its platform and scraping content from rival, subject-specific search engines.”

In elaboration of the European publishers’ rejection of Google’s proposals, the president of AEDE, a Spanish association of daily newspapers, put it this way: “In short, Google’s proposed remedies do not address the overarching problems and fundamental harms that Google’s conduct causes in search-related markets and none of them aims at restoring effective competition….  In some ways, they might actually make matters worse by entrenching dominance and misleading consumers.”

Here, as in Europe, the principal venues of appeal for those being harmed by Google’s business practices are the antitrust authorities, which is to say quasi-political bodies.  And that’s a problem. In this country, the FTC has already dismissed an opportunity to do a full antitrust review of Google, in part, we can speculate, because there is no great public support for the news media generally.

Indeed, a Pew poll, released on July 11, found that only 28 percent of respondents believe that journalists “contribute a lot,” down from 38 percent four years ago.  And a Gallup poll, published on June 17, revealed that only 23 percent of the public have “overall confidence” in newspaper and TV news.

Given this lowly rating by their own customers, one might be tempted to dismiss the news media’s cannibalization by Google as something they had coming to them, and there’s an element of truth in that, as with the special contempt for them that the media have inculcated in conservatives and Republicans.

But there’s a much larger issue involved in Google’s anti-competitive behavior, and that is whether this (or any) country will in future have a robust and profitable news media industry, marked not by opinion but by objective news, investigative, and feature reporting.  Surely people of all political persuasions can agree that blogs and content aggregators are not going to fill that role.

At a time when the Internet is obliging mainstream news outlets to publish online, it is not yet clear whether a way can be found to make up, in that process, for the necessary advertising revenue that once came their way – a problem not confined just to the legacy media but to prospective newer entrants in the news reporting business as well.

And it is at this crossroad where Google, the company whose fraying motto is “Don’t be evil,” may prove decisive.

                                               

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  This piece was first published in USA Today on July 19, 2013, under the headline "Beware of Google’s Power."

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Britain Opts To Censor the Press

With its peerage and royals, Beefeaters and such, Britain in the 21st century sometimes seems like a large theme park, but its historical influence on the USA is clear.  From language to culture, and above all to law, what’s happened in Britain hasn’t stayed in Britain.

Which is precisely why that nation’s new press law, which creates by “royal charter” a speech-suppressing media “watchdog,” is so much to be rued.  Briefly stated, the watchdog will have the power to oblige participating media to post apologies and take complaints into arbitration, thereby creating a system of government regulation of the press that hasn’t happened there since 1695.

It is commonly said that the tracks that led to this train wreck were laid by the misbehavior of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, and there’s truth in that.  Caught in the act after years of hacking into private e-mail and phone calls, and bribing public officials, the tabloids acted outside the bounds not just of ethical journalism, but of the law.

But the better explanation for why the British have now endorsed regulation of the press (rather than relying just on the enforcement of criminal laws already on the books) is because that country has no First Amendment. That, and also because there (as here?) there exist large numbers of people who value political correctness, and political advantage, over freedom of speech.

Indeed, though the new press rules are said to have become inevitable given the failures of Britain’s (recently extinct) Press Complaints Commission (PCC), another way of looking at it is to say that the very existence of the PCC inadvertently cleared the way for the more intrusive regulations.

Some years ago there existed in the United States a National News Council (NNC), whose charter was similar to the PCC.  It failed to take root for many reasons, but perhaps most notably because the New York Times’ Abe Rosenthal wisely refused to cooperate with it.  Rosenthal’s concern was that the NNC would fail to satisfy press critics, and that some sort of government program would then be invited to succeed it.

The British have long been accustomed to a significant degree of governmental oversight of their broadcasting companies’ content through what is called Ofcom (Office of Communications), but until now the print media have been spared that oversight.

Though billed by its parliamentary sponsors as a voluntary arrangement, the terms of the new press regulation carry onerous potential liabilities, specifically including “exemplary damages” in court, for media companies that don’t join the quango.  This may even include some companies that are based elsewhere. Indeed, one of the most powerful criticisms – from such as the New York Times and the Committee To Protect Journalists – is that the regulation assumes authority over bloggers and websites, large and small, foreign and domestic.

“In an attempt to rein in its reckless tabloid newspapers,” said the New York Times, “Britain’s three main political parties this week agreed to impose unwieldy regulations on the news media that would chill free speech and threaten the survival of small publishers and Internet sites.”

But the most compelling and powerful criticism has come from The Spectator, the British publication said to be the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.  As Nick Cohen wrote on March 18:

The regulator will cover “relevant publishers.”  If they do not pay for its services and submit to its fines and rulings … they could face exemplary damages in the courts.  It is not just the old (and dying) newspapers, which the state defines as “relevant publishers” but “websites containing news related material.”

What “news related” material can get you into trouble?  It turns out to be the essential debates of a free society.  Dangerous topics to write about include “news or information about current affairs” and “opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs.”  Any free country should want the widest possible range of opinions about current affairs.  As of tonight, Britain does not. 

There will be a temptation among many in this country to look past what the British have done as nothing more than the antics, as someone once put it, of an exhausted stock; not to worry about anything similar happening here.  And there’s some truth in that.  Because of our First Amendment and strong case law in defense of it, such regulation is unlikely in this country.

But it’s worth remembering that this happened in Britain at the hands of parliament and that we too have a “parliament,” and regulatory agencies, and that, as in Britain, we have organizations, like the cynically misnamed Free Press, that are constantly pushing for an expansion of government oversight of the media.

Thanks to the Founding Fathers we have some additional protection against the kind of thing that’s just happened in Britain, but vigilance is required, now more than ever.

                                             

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  A version of this article titled "Keep U.K. media rules out of U.S." appeared in the print and online editions of USA Today on April 23, 2013, and can be viewed here.

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

DOL Reportedly Postponing New ‘Lock-up’ Policy

Published reports suggest that the Department of Labor is poised to delay implementation of a policy announced in April that would require reporters working in the DOL’s “lock-up” room to use government computers and transmission lines when writing stories about DOL reports and data as they’re released.  The proposed policy caused a flurry of criticism from media outlets and prompted a June 6 hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  DOL will announce a new start date this week, according to reports quoting an e-mail from DOL media specialist Carl Fillichio.

We’re glad to see that DOL is at least planning to postpone the policy.  Media Institute President Patrick Maines was an early and outspoken critic of this bureaucratic folly, questioning the wisdom of such a move in his May 7 post.

Let’s hope that any delay becomes permanent, and that this attempt to extend the government’s hand into reporters’ notebooks is forever banished to the dust heap of bad ideas. 

                              

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils. 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

On Growing Old(er)

Owing to a desire, after posting so many pieces about communications policy, to establish a more personal relationship with the five or six people who read this blog regularly, herewith a piece on something altogether different.

I speak, as do so many, about the phenomenon of aging, and about the dread “D’ word associated with it.  Have you ever noticed that, whatever their age, most people say that they’re “getting older” rather than that they are old?  They can be 80, or even 90, and still they describe themselves as getting older.  For such people old age is a destination never to be arrived at in their lifetimes, no matter how long they live.

I can relate to that.  I have reached an age where I’m made uncomfortable about surrendering my driver’s license to some youngster, especially the females.  Equally disturbing are those scroll-down date-of-birth features on so many websites.  By the time I get to mine, so far down the list, I often don’t even care anymore about whatever product or service required the information.

And there are other things.  Like doctors and doctoring.  When I was young, whatever ailments I had were always recognized, and treated, immediately.  Now that I’m (getting older), I find that my ailments are not only undiagnosable and untreatable; they cause, more often than not, the doctors’ eyes to glaze over upon hearing about them.  The impression one gets on such occasions is that they think you’re lucky to be alive, and should stop with the complaining.

Luckily for me, I look and act like a person who is 20 or 30 years younger than I am.  (Well, actually nobody has ever said that, but that’s the way I see it.)  And for this reason I have every expectation that, when I go to my reward (it should be so good), I’ll arrive there fresh as a daisy.

And speaking of death – the Great Oblivion, as it were – I have some ideas about that too.  It’s hard for many people to imagine the world without them, even as the world itself has no trouble at all, and in some cases positively relishes the thought.

But I have a different take on it.  Whereas most people believe death of the elderly is a consequence of cellular decay or disease, I incline to the view that, when you’ve reached a certain age, God (like your wife) is just tired of putting up with you.

So to wrap it all up, let me leave you with something that, though it has nothing at all to do with the subject at hand, is also worth sharing.  I refer to a quote by that other great man, Albert Einstein: “Gravitation cannot be held responsible,” he said, “for people falling in love.  How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?  Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour.  Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.  That’s relativity.”

                                  

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Sugar and Spice

Every month or so, poll results that rankle are published by somebody.  A good example of the genre is the Gallup poll, published June 23, wherein it’s revealed that, by a more than two-to-one margin, men (young men especially) would prefer a boy child to a girl.

Gallup put the question this way: Suppose you could have only one child.  Would you prefer that it be a boy or a girl?  Men as a whole said they would prefer a boy, 49% to 22%, while young men (18 to 29 years old) favored a boy over a girl 54% to 27%!

Not for the first time, such results lead one to ask the question: Are you guys nuts?  Never mind that girls grow up to be women, among the most beautiful things in this world, even before then, as children and babies, girls are among the greatest treasures any man will ever find.

I know this first hand because, as the father of two girls, and the grandfather of four, I’m an expert on little girls (and big girls too).  When my younger daughter was two, and being held by her mother one night, she noticed faintly an image in her mother’s pupils, and told her she had “angels in her eyes.”  With her blond hair and pink nightgown it was an easy mistake to make, but the truth, of course, is that the angel was in her mother’s lap.

For men especially, girls of whatever age can provide a unique kind of refuge – to a calmer, less materialistic, and more nurturing place – that by their nature boys and men would otherwise experience only rarely.

None of this, of course, is to say anything negative about boys.  I have a grandson too. But the poll in question suggests that boys are already held in sufficiently high regard.

Gallup has been asking this question for 70 years, and the results in 2011 are little different from those in 1941, so if you’re a glass half-full kind of person you might be relieved that things haven’t gotten worse over time. But guys, please, if Gallup ever asks you this question, remember what Dave Barry said: “If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base.”

                                 

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Dodging a Bullet: The FCC’s Report on the Future of the Media

Seventeen months ago the FCC teed up what until last Thursday was known as the “Future of Media” project.  For all practical purposes the project’s report, now called “The Information Needs of Communities,” is likely to be forgotten in half that time.

On the face of it this sounds like a criticism.  Far from it!  For its thoroughness and level-headed analysis, and especially for its acknowledgment of the constitutional limits on governmental involvement in the media, this report, and its principal personnel – most notably the man brought in to oversee the effort, Steven Waldman – are owed a debt of gratitude.

Before this project began there arose a powerful network comprised of ideologically motivated activist groups like Free Press; academic institutions and their publications, like Columbia University’s CJR; and deep-pocketed grant-giving groups, most importantly the Knight Foundation; all in the vanguard of what is euphemistically called the “media reform” movement.

And as Chairman Genachowski himself acknowledged, it was the work of these players – most notably the Knight Commission (a creation of the Knight Foundation, which two years earlier released a similarly titled report) that prompted the FCC’s own project.

So with this as its provenance, who would have been surprised if the report had embraced the media reform crowd’s recommendations?  But, mirabile dictu, it did not!  Instead, the report effectively dismisses the worst aspects of the media reformers’ governmental agenda.  Missing or explicitly rejected, for instance, are increased funding of public broadcasting, a “Geek Corps” for local democracy (patterned after AmeriCorps), federal tax credits for investigative journalism, and calls for a halt to media consolidation.

In fact, one of the few “action elements” in the report was a call for less government regulation.  As remarked by media reporter John Eggerton, the report “recommended scrapping the FCC’s ascertainment rules … as well as closing the localism proceeding without taking steps like creating community advisory boards to weigh in on public interest programming.”

There are those of us who believed that it was a mistake for the FCC to engage in this project at all – first out of conviction that the FCC had no authority to venture so far afield, and second out of fear that the report might provide the impetus for intrusive and unconstitutional regulations or legislation.  But in light of what the project report says, and doesn’t say, the feeling now is that some good will come of it.

After all, the “media reformers” will never have a better setup than they had here. With a Democratic majority on the Commission, a substantial infrastructure of activists and their financial enablers, and a media industry that is in fact struggling, if ever there were a time when the reformers’ wish lists might find policy traction this was it.  And now they have their reward: an exhaustive report that almost completely ignores that part of their agenda requiring governmental action.

During the Clinton era, many of the same kind of people who today support media reform helped man a presidential commission that came to be known as the Gore Commission.  Its focus was on the “public interest obligations of broadcasters in the digital age.”  And like the agenda of today’s media reformers, it encouraged government action in ways that undermined the First Amendment.

In the end, the Gore Commission produced its own report, a document that was as dense as it was feckless, and the whole enterprise sank from public consciousness almost immediately – as well it should have, since it produced nothing of value.  The guess here is that the FCC’s Information Needs of Communities report will also sink from public consciousness – not because it lacks value (its scholarship and usefulness as a research document are undeniable, for instance), but because it wisely steered clear of recommendations advanced by the more feral elements within the media reform community – people, for instance, like Commissioner Copps, a long-time spear carrier in that army, who immediately released an impassioned denunciation of the report.

Had the report endorsed radical (and preposterous) things, like a federal tax credit for investigative journalism, it would have attracted more ink, and been the subject of conversation far longer.  But it’s a credit to its authors, and to Chairman Genachowski, that it did not do so, because it shows they possess both a realistic view of the scope of the FCC’s limited authority and a healthy respect for the First Amendment.

                                  

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Political Reporters and the ‘Dismal Science’

The story is told that five years after Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, with his troops camped outside the very gates of Rome, the Roman Senate auctioned off, at full price, the very ground upon which Hannibal was standing; perhaps the first example in history, given the Carthaginians’ subsequent retreat, of the market as a predictor of future political events.

More than 2,000 years later, the markets are still the best single predictor of political events, but you’d never know it if you get your clues about such things not from financial and economic data but from that breed of journalists called political reporters.

A couple years ago this was the subject of a blog called “What Do Political Reporters Know?”  The answer given to that question (little of value) is as true today as it was then, but more about that later.

First, let’s take a brief stroll down history lane.  For all the angst and surprise now being expressed by many about the state of the American economy, it’s not as though we couldn’t see some of this coming.  Indeed, many people (those who follow the markets) knew by election time, 2008, that the country was in great economic distress.  Some knew this even earlier.

And how did they know?  Let’s count the ways: They knew because commodity prices, especially oil and gold, were rising rapidly; that unemployment was rising and the dollar was falling; and that two of the most iconic names in American industry – General Motors and Chrysler – were petitioning the government for assistance to avoid bankruptcy.

They knew because in September of that year Lehman Brothers bellied up, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history; and because, after peaking in 2006, house prices began a steep fall, such that by December 2008, the Case-Shiller home price index reported the largest price drop in its history.

All of this was known by people who follow the markets; this, and something else too: They knew that government at all levels – state, federal, and local – were running big and unsustainable deficits, tricked out with accounting gimmicks and featuring licentious borrowing, often to pay off unfunded liabilities.  In short, they knew that governments were running the same kind of game for which Bernie Madoff would later get a life sentence in the slammer.

Given that nobody had ever seen anything like this kind of economic maelstrom since the Great Depression (even as aspects of it – most notably, housing and unemployment – were to get vastly worse in the years following), and given too that this was occurring right in the middle of a presidential election, one would expect that historians reviewing the period would find that the “people’s sentinels” – political reporters – shined a bright light on the economy and its portents, and obliged the candidates for the presidency to do likewise, right?  Forget about it.

Not only did political reporters fail to oblige the presidential candidates to focus on the economy, they didn’t spend any quality time on the subject themselves. Instead, they treated the economy like a sideshow to the main event – the political horse race.

Now in fairness, it should probably be acknowledged that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain knew the first thing about the economy, and Obama’s only passionate comment about the matter – that he inherited the mess from President Bush – is not without some factual bases.

But none of this is to excuse the triviality and nonperformance, then and now, of the nation’s political reporters.  More importantly, the mere knowledge of reporters’ shortcomings isn’t enough to enable citizens generally to make smart and informed decisions about those economic and socio-political developments as will affect them personally down the road.

If, for instance, they wonder how they – or anyone without a defined-benefit pension plan – are going to be able to retire with interest rates near zero; or if they are concerned about the likely effect on crime and our civic culture of the impoverishment of millions of formerly middle-class people; or if they worry about the effect on their assets of further significant declines in the purchasing power of the dollar; or if, mindful of the growing might of a country like China, they are concerned about the future, including the future security, of their children or grandchildren; if, in other words, they are interested in things more serious than which political party is best spinning the misery, or likely to be awarded at the polls, then they need to begin to familiarize themselves with finance and economics.

There is no guarantee, of course, that a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, or any such, will make of you a veritable soothsayer.  But it’s a safe bet that if you follow the markets you’ll get a better handle on those things that matter than if you rely only on political reporters for your news of the world.

And there is my lesson for the day. That’ll be $50 (payable in silver bullion).

                                   

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Orts and All

Can’t Miss TV

Comes now the news that Michael Moore, the merry propagandist, is joining Keith Olbermann on Al Gore’s Current TV, the legendary television network.  It’s practically a miracle!  Even now the crowds are queuing up to catch a glimpse of this dynamic duo.

One can only imagine the kind of material that, in collaboration, they may produce.  Perhaps an investigative report on the link between Citizens United, the Tea Party, and global warming.  Or maybe something even more intellectual, like a video essay on how the alleged indebtedness of the federal and state governments is just a rumor started by the gnomes of Zurich.

Whatever, isn’t it great to know that we live in a country where bombast and imbecility can have their day in the court of public opinion?  As they say in the ad – “mm, mm, good!”

Those ‘Public’ Airwaves

The Speaking Freely essay written by Erwin Krasnow, recently co-published by The Media Institute and The Thomas Jefferson Center, is striking in a number of ways, not least because its author is a former general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters.  As such, Mr. Krasnow has known for years of broadcasting’s embrace of concepts like “scarcity” and the "public interest" standard as useful tools in re certain policy issues, like cable TV’s “must carry” obligations.

So how to get a handle on Krasnow’s call now for an end to such concepts, and to the notion that the public “owns” the airwaves?  Perhaps it’s the prospect of forced spectrum surrender, or maybe the notion that broadcasters are able these days to charge for their carriage by cable that explains it all.  Whatever, it will be interesting to see if, in days ahead, the NAB echoes some of Krasnow’s arguments.  For that matter, it would be interesting to know what those at NAB think of Krasnow’s essay, which has attracted rather a lot of attention.  Goes without saying that we at TMI would be more than happy to publish any such.

It’s the Gospel (‘Jesus Dropped the Charges’)

Doubling down on my earlier reckless confession of love for the blues and gospel music, herewith a link to a piece by the late O’Neil Twins.  (Yes, the title is amusing, but I’ll fight any man in the bar who says he doesn’t like the music.)  Check it out here.

Drudging Respect

Writing in The New York Times, David Carr has this to say about the extraordinary influence of the Drudge Report: “Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  But if you believe that his huge traffic numbers are a byproduct of an ideologically motivated readership, consider that 15 percent of the traffic at Washington Post.com, which is not exactly a hotbed of Tea Party foment, comes from The Drudge Report.”

Say what?  Featuring, on its editorial pages, such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jennifer Rubin, Robert Samuelson, Mark Thiessen, and Michael Gerson, the WAPO may not be a hotbed of “Tea Party foment,” but it is the source of a lot of conservative opinion of the sort that Drudge links to often.

Carr’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding (and how many times do we have to say this?), the primary reason for Drudge’s success – as for the success of conservative talk radio and the Fox News Channel – is its political point of view, which is different from that of most of the MSM, and popular with a large number of people.  Sheesh!

                                   

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

The WHCD: ‘Arianna Huffington Wore Nanette Lepore’

Online and off, the magazine called POLITICO sets the standard for political reporting in the U.S.A.  It doesn’t set the standard very high, mind you, but by its signature amalgamation of horse race journalism, rumor and innuendo, POLITICO represents a model of sorts for wannabe political reporters everywhere.

Thus it is that one dare not neglect to pay attention when the magazine focuses on Things That Really Matter … like, for instance, the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Once a year this affair provides a backdrop for every other political reporter’s fantasy: a stage on which all the people who count (stars and starlets, politicians and reporters) can rub elbows, see and be seen.

This year’s dinner, held just last weekend, was no exception.  Some examples, as chronicled in a few of the numerous stories in POLITICO:

“Star Strut – Scenes from the Red Carpet,” a “minute-by-minute” account of “the events leading up to DC’s biggest night,” complete with a photo of Bob Schieffer and a blond woman in a red dress.

“Seth Meyers Skewers DC,” on the “SNL” head writer’s remarks, wherein it’s revealed that “outgoing Commerce Secretary Gary Locke (soon to be ambassador to China) admitted to POLITICO that he’s been a huge fan of Meyers for years.” 

“What the Stars Wore” – “FLOTUS wears Halston to dinner.”  “On the red carpet, CBS’s Lara Logan, a very early arrival, wore cobalt blue Badgley Mischka." “Arianna Huffington wore Nanette Lepore.”  And Matthew Morrison (?) (I don’t know, you tell me) said: “I’m wearing Calvin Klein underwear.”

In other words, everything was perfect! The glamour, the wit, the very essence of it all.  Of course there are probably some cranks, mindful of those Americans who gave their lives last week in the Middle East, or of the millions more who are now facing the imminent prospect of abject poverty, who may be less than thrilled by the spectacle.

But hey, at a time when, according to a 2010 Gallup poll, mainstream journalists still outrank organized labor in the confidence people have in them, why worry, right?

                                    

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

One Toke Over the Line

I know the law won’t be forgivin’,
But that’ll be the choice I made,
I used to farm for a livin’,
And now I’m in the growin’ trade.
— Levon Helm/Larry Campbell, “Growin’ Trade”

California’s Proposition 19, formally known as the “Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Act,” was a ballot initiative that would have legalized diverse kinds of marijuana-related activities and permitted local governments to tax the sale of the drug.  Despite early poll results showing that a majority approved of the initiative, it was rejected by voters on election day last week, 54 to 46 percent.

Contrary to the prevailing meme that everything political in the United States is predictably conservative or liberal, red state or blue, the story of Prop 19 is the story, among other things, of unexpected alliances and media diversity, and proof that complex issues can be covered in ways that do justice to that fact.

Powerful arguments, both pro and con, can be and were made in the debate over the initiative.  Those who favored it argued that it would yield an important new source of revenue in a state that is on its financial uppers; that it would result in significant savings due to the smaller number of individuals incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses; and that it would do damage to the Mexican drug cartels that provide much of the marijuana used by Californians and others.

Those who were opposed to Proposition 19 argued that it would not yield the financial benefits advertised; that it would greatly increase marijuana consumption with concomitant ill effects all around; and that it was made unnecessary by the earlier passage, and signing into law, of S.B. 1449, which decriminalized the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.

Further complicating the matter, and an aspect of the initiative used in argument by the opposition, is the fact that, whatever California law might be on the subject, federal law makes possession a crime, thereby conjuring up an image of California cops looking the other way as federal agents continue to make arrests in the state.

Which is just to say that much of the debate about Prop 19 turned on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of specific aspects of the initiative, rather than on the larger question of whether citizens could or should be allowed to grow and use marijuana at all – a perspective perhaps mooted by the fact that a great many Californians are growing and using even now.

As drafted, the initiative would have allowed Californians to cultivate, for their personal use, 25 square feet of marijuana in their back yards, but enforcement, regulation, and taxation would be left up to the state’s 478 cities and 58 counties.  What confusion might result, some wondered, when abutting jurisdictions had different laws and regulations?  If, for instance, the standard was 25 square feet in one town but 30 in another, might this not make matters confusing for law enforcement?  Not only would they need to know at all times the different marijuana laws of abutting jurisdictions, but in busting the perps they’d need tape measures as well as guns and handcuffs.  Or what about the guy who scoped out his marijuana garden while using the product, such that it came out not to 25 square feet but 25 square yards?  (Well, that dude could just kiss his sweet cannabis goodbye.)

So anyhow, in this as in other ways, it isn’t easy being a Californian.  Their difficulties were compounded not just by the complexities inherent in Prop 19, but also by the unfamiliar alliances. Much of the state’s Democratic Party organizations (and all of the Libertarian organizations) came out in support of the initiative, but all of the major party candidates for statewide office – Republican and Democrat – opposed it.  (Even in San Francisco, for instance, Nancy Pelosi opposed the measure, while her Republican opponent supported it.)

Happy to report, this strange-bedfellows phenomenon extended even to the state’s leading newspapers.  Though there were some, like the San Diego Union, which editorialized in familiar ways (“No to ganja madness”), there were many who took what might seem like unexpected positions on the subject.  The conservative Orange County Register, for instance, though never taking an official position on the initiative, twice ran editorials that clearly leaned in favor of Prop 19.

Meanwhile, the more liberal Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, along with the Sacramento Bee and the Mercury News, came out in opposition to the measure.  In all events, though, the truly encouraging thing about the media coverage is the thoroughness of it.  Despite the many complexities and competing views, the state’s newspapers did a good job of providing their readers with a comprehensive understanding of the nature and potential consequences of the initiative, intended and unintended alike.

That the vote went the way it did is a subject about which honest people can disagree, but there is something deeply refreshing about media coverage of a complex issue in which journalists and editorialists provide a window on all points of view, and illuminate the best arguments of the competing parties.  Were that the standard practice with respect to media coverage of all complex issues, journalism would enjoy a spike in its reputation and the nation would be better served.

                                                 
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.