Five Things I Learned at #NCMR11

This weekend I attended the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston. This was the fifth such conference, the first in three years, and my first ever. Hosted by Free Press, the conference brought together 2500 policy makers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, comedians, academics, and lawyers who share a vision of a press and national discourse that actually serve their democratic functions to challenge power, challenge orthodoxy, and promote the free exchange of ideas. I thought the conference was fantastic: I learned a ton about the way media reform is actually working from many different angles, I made many new friends and twitter followers (the two are not mutually exclusive), met many people whose work I greatly admire: Glenn Greenwald, Greg Mitchell, Bob McChesney and John Nichols (two of the founders of Free Press), law profs Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, and Marvin Ammori. As cheesy as it sounds, I even learned something about myself.

So, with that introduction, a few of us that attended have agreed to write "what we learned" posts, which I hope will both demonstrate the breadth of knowledge being exchanged at the conference and serve as a reference for me when I want to remember what we talked about. (I seem to be the only person that didn't take notes.) I will link the posts from my fellow conference attendees at the bottom of this post.

Antitrust for the 21st Century

I've been thinking about antitrust laws a bunch lately. And no, it's not just about football, though antitrust in professional sports is actually pretty interesting and current. I've been thinking more about cell phone and media companies, with the NBC/Comcast merger, and yesterday's news that AT&T is buying T-Mobile. Now, I'm not at all an expert on antitrust law. (I haven't even taken the class, so I don't get to even pretend I'm an expert around finals time.) The way I think it roughly works, though, is that the important question is monopoly and monopoly practices. So, when Bell Telephone ran all the phone lines in the US, the court ordered them to break into competing companies (the so-called "baby bells"). Additionally, when multiple firms collude to intentionally fix prices or otherwise "break the market" (my highly technical phrase), they are subject to harsh penalties.

Our "Liberal Media" Cowering in Fear

Conservative Liars James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart

If we had systematically pointed out that the pre-Murdock Wall St. Journal was a touch on the right, do you think they would have tried to resurrect Joseph Stalin to bring him in as a blogger? No? Then why the fuck do media organizations accused of being liberal need to hire (or validate) not just conservative, but the most discredited, lying, and bigoted conservatives they can possibly find to throw off the dreaded liberal label?

Here are three examples, just from the last year. (I'm therefore excluding, among other incidents, MSNBC hiring Michael Savage and the NYT and Washington Post hiring half the neo-con crazies in the world for their op-ed pages.) In May, CNN hired Erick Erickson. Most of us just chalked that up to CNN being as ridiculously, vapidly, stupid as they usually are. I mean, liberals and anyone paying attention to the media were upset, naturally, but CNN is an easy target, and they were worthy of nothing but scorn long before that.

A Practical Lesson in Media Ownership

Friday, Keith Olbermann gave his last Countdown. He had signed a four year contract in 2008, and apparently part of his buyout deal keeps his off the air for "'maybe not for two years' but for an extended period of time." One day prior, it just so happened that Comcast's purchase of NBC became final, as the FCC and DOJ approved it officially. Of course the NBC execs are stating that the two have nothing to do with each other, but I'm honestly not sure how we're supposed to credit that statement. Even if they weren't doing it with the intention of pleasing their new corporate overlords, Olbermann was fired after the new people took over, and still worked there when the old people were in charge.

Rarely are there such brazen demonstrations of corporate power over our discourse. He was loudest lefty in mainstream discourse, and that's intolerable to large corporations like Comcast, despite crazy right wingers like Beck and Palin staying on the air and inspiring assassination attempts. I'm guessing Comcast just prefers to hear right wing views for their pro-corporate slant rather than some other reason (as opposed to Murdoch, where I really just don't know). By that conjecture, they'd probably keep "centrist" Democrats on too, since they're all corporatist. But regardless, the end result is that now, as Josh Silver of Free Press put it:

The new Comcast will control an obscene number of media outlets, including the NBC broadcast network, numerous cable channels, two dozen local NBC and Telemundo stations, movie studios, online video portals, and the physical network that distributes that media content to millions of Americans through Internet and cable connections.

And they have an agenda - to ensure a political climate that grows their profit.

Health Care Polls and the Unrepresented Left

Greg Mitchell asks a question today:

Obviously, he's correct about this. People have noted this fact from the beginning. There have also been polls saying this for a while. However, it's just now, finally, that people are listening. The reason people are somewhat shocked is that the left simply has no voice and cannot penetrate media coverage with facts. Because it's a favorite pastime of the MSM to claim the everything is good news for Republicans, we tend not to hear about these sorts of things.

A Columnist Fills the Gap Left By the Ombudsman and Media Critic

Thank you to E.J. Dionne (who is neither Andrew Alexander, the Post's ombudsman nor Howard Kurtz, their resident so-called media critic) for writing in the Washington Post what needs to be said over and over again where more eyes can see it.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.

Government Subsidies are a Part of the Future of Journalism, and That's Not a Bad Thing

Ready for a controversial statement that I fully believe? Here goes: Government subsidies and funding of journalism will be included in future news models in this very country, and I don't believe that's a bad thing. As far as whether it will happen, I just think it's pretty much a given, since there's just no other way the papers will be able to afford to keep making quality news. Advertising’s drying up; non-profit models just don't work because there's not enough money, unless the paper is beholden to a few very wealthy donors, which is also problematic.

Government funding raises a couple very interesting questions though. Why are we so viscerally opposed to it, and does it make sense to be? Is it worse than what we will, (or already do) have? Could it be better? (By the way, this post was inspired by the discussion in the comments section of Dan Kennedy's post berating a local paper from taking a rotating small business loan from the local government. The comments hash out a lot of the issues on all sides of this debate, and are quite interesting.)

When Is a Terrorist Attack Not a Terrorist Attack?

There was a terrorist attack on US soil Monday. I was going to write myself, but Matt Yglesias wrote about it in close to the same tone that I would have, so I'll send you there. Like he does, I'll leave the answer to my headline question as an exercise for the reader.

A Sign of Improvement in Journalism?

A recent surge in fact-checking in the MSM turns out to be pretty popular. Who knew? The trend started with NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen's "simple fix," and was picked up first by ABC's Jake Tapper on This Week, then by the always inept CNN and Howard Kurtz that managed to take a good idea and apply journalistic "balance" to it. Here's Jay Rosen's timeline of the whole thing, including the ridiculous refusal by David Gregory, host of MSNBC's Meet The Press to adopt it, saying that viewers can fact-check "on their own terms," whatever that means. This prompted the creation of Meet The Facts, a website attempting to crowdsource the fact-checking that Gregory refuses to do, for whatever reason. (I apologize for for the link barrage on a new topic - I had a draft post about this a month ago and just realized I never posted it. This topic is important, however, and the links are well worth reading, particularly the timeline.)

Right around the time David Gregory said no, Colbert even jumped in on the action. (I linked it because embedding the video isn't working for some reason.)

Anyway, so the fact checking is catching on, and the AP is noticing its popularity. Amazingly, they've even noticed that Kurtz's version of "both sides lie equally," "balanced" fact-checking is not what people want.

PostPartisan Adds Zero Value to the Kagan Discussion

The PostPartisan link (which we have listed in our collection) is pretty funny.

On the Elena Kagan nomination to the Supreme Court, the White House has won the initial battle -- the battle over expectations.... Kagan’s qualifications for the court can only be called thin.... She cannot be regarded as a strong nominee, but the White House clearly believes she is a safe nominee.... During a pastel career, Kagan made one neon decision -- to ban military recruiters from the Office of Career Services when she was dean of Harvard Law School, based on her strong opposition to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy....Standing in the way of military recruiters may seem normal in academic circles, but it will seem radical in much of the country....This may not be enough to derail the Kagan nomination, but it will complicate it.

That's his whole story, basically. He starts out by saying that her record is thin, and her greatest asset is the ease of her nomination. He then proceeds to nitpick this one thing that might make her nomination harder, saying Obama gravely miscalulated but it probably won't derail her nomination.

So 1) Kagan's one virtue - ease of nomination - won't be so easy. (I also think Republicans will make up something if it isn't there, and his one military recruiter thing might very well be on the list, but it hardly matters), and 2) Obama gravely miscalculated, except it won't derail his nomination.

He claimed two things, and then refuted them. What exactly was the point of his post?

Obama Contributes to the Noise (Part II - The Not So Good)

This is the second half of the review of President Obama's commencement address at the University of Michigan this past Saturday. The first half is here, and the text of the speech is here.

Ok, so I still think that on the whole Obama's speech was fantastic, but there are two glaring flaws, one of which I'd like to just note - his hypocrisy on our democracy, and the other of which this post is primarily about - the false equivalence between right and left. After that, there's one more side point I'd like to address - the lack of even a mention of other problems with the media - particularly with respect to race.

Obama's Still Got It (Part I - The Good)

(updated below)

Yesterday, President Obama gave the commencement address at Michigan, and I immediately realized that a) I was basically the only law student that didn't see it (I was at a friend's wedding - congrats again Johnny and Jen!), b) it was worth the hours of waiting in line, and c) it was a speech that could have been designed just for me (I was told so by several friends). So I read through it, and I almost began tearing up and couldn't stop smiling, except in the points where I wanted to yell out that he's being a hypocrite. And again, this was just while I was reading (full text here). But I've also seen enough of his speeches that I could recreate the delivery in my own head. Anyway, given my varied and strong reactions to his address, I figured I'd write about the different parts. This post is incredibly long, so I'll write here about the good, and about the bad separately.

Enough with the chicken jokes

A few weeks ago, Sue Lowden made a comment about how people used to barter with their local doctors (the infamous "chickens for health care" statement). Many bloggers and pundits whom I respect have taken this snippet and run with it.

Hilarious? Yes. Substantive? Not so much.

Weeks later, I'm still seeing references made to it on Twitter, blogs, MSNBC, etc. I'm here to say, stop it. There's such a vast array of horrible *actual* policy suggestions being made on the right that there's no reason to twist a relatively innocuous statement "Al Gore invented the Internet"-style and make hay out of it endlessly. That's Fox News territory and I'd like to stay out of it.

Saving CNN Should be About News, Not Business

(updated below)

Let's look at two different proposals for how CNN can and should fix itself.

A couple weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column for the NYT about how to save CNN, that was fundamentally flawed. The basic problem with his column was that while he identified the core of CNN's problem: its vapid, empty version of non-partisan journalism that basically says nothing at all and is thus just boring, he proposes an inherently problematic solution, essentially merely calling on them to bring more "debate" into the news room.

Partisan News Trumps Pretty Graphics?

Bad news for CNN:

CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.
...
At the same time, Fox News, which had its biggest year in 2009, continues to add viewers. Greta Van Susteren’s show was up 25 percent from a year earlier. Bill O’Reilly, whose show commands the biggest audience in prime time with 3.65 million viewers, was up 28 percent, and Glenn Beck was up 50 percent from a year earlier.

I've actually often wondered whether the partisan news model or the "ooh shiny..." news model was worse at getting the information out - off-handedly, I'd guess the latter. I guess it's becoming clear which is worse as a business model, at least. I guess if you're not gonna get useful news either way, crazy wingnuts are more entertaining than pretty graphics. So yeah, CNN sucks.

Quick Health Care Notes and Quotes

Noam Chomsky basically said he'd vote for the HCR bill despite it mostly sucking, echoing the thoughts of basically every progressive everywhere at this stage of the game. The "kill the bill" folks seemed to have backed off a bit once talk of reconciliation began, though no one could really explain why a public option backed by a majority of the country could be passed via reconciliation when the typical Democratic excuse was always "we don't have sixty votes."

Chomsky had a couple lines in the piece that I'd like to echo here, since it speaks to not just healthcare, but everything that's wrong with our country:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it’s a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it’s viewed by the populace.

"It didn't have 'political support,' just the support of the majority of the population," Chomsky quipped, "which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy.... There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what's been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted," Chomsky said. "There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media." 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

And just for fun, in the kind of bluntness I'd like to see more of in our discourse, Sarkozy welcomes us to a not-so-exclusive club.

Small Policy Choices in the Future of News

The future of news is a hot topic these days. One troubling trend, however, among those that oppose reform of the established media is to just sort of hand-wave and say, "oh the internet will take care of it all."

What these people have to realize is that policy choices made by the people who shape the internet will have huge consequences for the future of the internet, and probably none are quite as big as net neutrality.

Here's one smaller example:

The question is this. If Twitter is a news-delivery service, and I believe it is, what are the real dimensions of a nugget of news?

...

The actual number, the average [character] length of a Times "nugget-of-news" is this: 185

...

[T]he answer is fairly clear. 140 [characters] is not enough, not even for the average nugget. And to be able to hold the largest one, the max would have to be 250 or 300. And there would be no room for the link, even shortened, in that size nugget.

So the future of news seems to rely heavily on new technologies like twitter. I don't doubt for a second that that's true, and we're already seeing it. It's just important to understand that policy choices in the structure of these technologies, even as small as how many characters to allow per tweet, can have huge impacts on our future discourse.

A special comment on journalism.

...and for the latest on the state of today's media, we turn to T-Rex.

Some perspective, please?

How did our discourse get to this point?

I'm really just sick of discussing this health care bill already. Yeah, it passed. Cool. But we've been talking about it for, counting the campaigns, three years. I'm sick of it. But what people are actually saying about it fascinates me (in some horrifying train-wreck sorta way).