Posts tagged as:

And so the Comcast-NBC Merger Hysteria Begins: Help Me Document It!

by on December 6, 2009 · 19 comments

As I noted in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,” every time a media merger is proposed we hear all sorts of silly Chicken Little predictions of impending doom. Among the more entertaining claims we hear are conspiracy theories about supposed nefarious schemes to take over the media universe and control our minds,  predictions of the death of journalism or democracy, or just good ol’ fashion screw-the-consumer price hikes. But, as I showed in my paper, those predictions have always proven to be bunk once the historical record is in–which usually only takes a few years. While most media mergers do end in misery–it’s for the merging firms and their shareholders, not the public. Unforeseen technological innovations and expanding media marketplace options typically doom most media mergers, while the viewing and listening public enjoys the fruits of continued marketplace evolution.

But the critics never acknowledge any of this. And, sadly, history repeats. The media worrywarts just keep mouthing the same lines and conveniently avoid any reference to their past predictions. No one bothers looking back and trying to match up those past predictions with present day facts. I’m out to change that.  I am going to attempt to keep a running inventory all the Chicken Little predictions about the Comcast-NBC Universal deal so that, a few years from now, we can look back and see how well those predictions match up with reality.  I suspect that, as was true of those earlier case studies, reality will look quite different than the rhetoric we are hearing today.

To kick things off, here are some rather outlandish comments from someone who should know better — Dan Gillmor, author of the excellent 2006 book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, which I have cited quite favorably in much of my own work through the years.  But when it comes to the Comcast-NBCU deal, Gillmor has gone off the deep end in an essay entitled, “Comcast-NBC: The Road Toward Control Over What We Create.” He argues:

A Comcast-NBC combination is brazenly anti-competitve and anti-democratic. It would give one company far too much ownership over not just professionally produced media but also the ways media consumers can receive it. Worse, if approved, it could mark the tipping point in Big Media’s push to take control over the Internet itself. That’s where we need to focus our attention.

But wait, there’s more… Continue reading →

SHARE: 19 comments

Guidelines & Best Practices for Anonymous Blogging (Pt.2)

by on August 29, 2009 · 18 comments

Dan GillmorIn a post earlier this week, I discussed Randy Cohen’s “guideline” for anonymous blogging. Specifically, Cohen argued in a recent New York Times piece that, “The effects of anonymous posting have become so baleful that it should be forsworn unless there is a reasonable fear of retribution.  By posting openly, we support the conditions in which honest conversation can flourish.”  While sympathetic to that guideline, I noted I agreed with it as an ethical principle, not a legal matter.  In others words, what might make sense as a “best practice” for the Internet and its users would not make sense as a regulatory standard.  I prefer using social norms and public pressure to drive these standards, not regulation that could have an unintended chilling effect on beneficial forms of anonymous online speech.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media of the Harvard Berkman Center has a new column up at the UK Guardian in which he takes a slightly different cut at a new standard or social norm for dealing with some of the more caustic anonymous speech out there:

One of the norms we’d be wise to establish is this: People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. In many cases, anonymity is a hiding place that harbours cowardice, not honour. The more we can encourage people to use their real names, the better. But if we try to force this, we’ll create more trouble than we fix.  But we don’t want, in the end, to turn everything over to the lawyers. The rest of us — the audience, if you will — need to establish some new norms as well.

Specifically, Gillmor argues that, ” We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age,” because “We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear.”  I think Gillmor has too little faith in most digital denizens; most of us take anonymous comments with a grain of salt and assume that the ugliest of those comments are often untrue.  And that’s generally the “principle” he recommends each of us adopt going forward: Continue reading →

SHARE: 18 comments