No doubt following the advice of TLF, the House commerce ommittee chair Joe Barton has rejected the idea of holding hearings on the Rathergate controversy. “A news organization’s responsibility is to facts and truth, but the oversight of network news generally is a matter best sorted out by the viewing public and the news media,” he said. “I do not personally believe these documents are legitimate, and it seems clear that the press and the two presidential campaigns are properly dealing with that issue.”
Welcome news for anyone worried about government interference in the media. Of course, had Dan Rather bared his chest on 60 Minutes, that would have been a different story.
Excellent piece by Alorie Gilbert of CNET News.com today on the Oracle-PeopleSoft decision. Begins as follows…
“The U.S. Justice Department’s dramatic defeat in the Oracle antitrust trial underscores the unique character of software: It’s a fast-paced, dynamic industry that makes a lousy target for trustbusters.”
Amen to that.
Is the wireless revolution making political polls less accurate? Jimmy Breslin argued yesterday in Newsweek that it is– pointing out that most poll are done by telephone, and none include cell phone users. “Beautiful”, he says. “There are 169 million phones that they didn’t even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham.” And most of those missed are younger voters who are more likely to have cut the cord, and who are more likely to be Kerry voters. An interesting thought.
Communications Daily (sorry, no link; it’s subscriber-only) reported today that FCC officials may be interested in auctioning off nationwide blocks of spectrum as part of the next round of spectrum auctions. The story quoted Bryan Tramont, chief of staff for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, saying that the FCC has learned from past auctions that there is “a huge transaction cost on constructing networks” by buying and patching together licenses in various cities: “This is not a local business, by and large.”
Bryan has it exactly right. While spectrum auctions were a huge leap forward from the old era when we just gave spectrum away or handed it out randomly through lotteries, the problem form the beginning with almost all the auctions was the way the wireless properties were aggregated for sale. The FCC, obsessed with the notion of smallness in communications, foolishly decided to carve wireless markets into tiny geographic chunks and auction as many licenses as possible. (The agency also imposed spectrum caps on the overall amount of spectrum one company could hold in a region.) Anyway, you can see the (feeble-minded) logic that was at work here: more licenses = more competition.
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Has anyone else noticed that while CBS TV is taking a hard line on the document controversy–being strident and defiant–the stories on CBSNews.com seem much more even handed? Perhaps not all, but most of the on-line stories report on the controversy in an (almost) balanced way–perhaps not openly critical of Dan Rather, but at least giving both sides in a relatively objective manner. The stories read–as one of my colleagues put it, like an out-of-body experience–discussing CBS News in the third person, as if the common name were only coincidental.
I’m not sure what this means, if anything. It could be one more bit of evidence that even news outlets under the same ownership roof are not necessarily monolithic. Or, perhaps it means that Dan Rather is such a creature of “old media” that he hasn’t noticed what the “new media” folks down the hall are saying.
I’ve recently read two very important columns on the regulation of online pornography that I want to bring to everyone’s attention. The first is a column entitled “Free Porn” by Professor Lawrence Lessig in this month’s Wired magazine that I find deeply troubling.
The second is a impressive new essay in The New Atlantis entitled “The End of Obscenity” by Jeffrey Rosen. Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, and a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. Rosen’s essay is must reading for anyone still searching in vain for a way to censor online pornography. But let’s begin with Lessig’s new article.
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In the past few days, it has become increasingly obvious that CBS used (badly) forged documents in a 60 Minutes hit piece on George Bush. Each day, its defenses seem to become weaker, and the attacks stronger. As John Stossel said in an interview last night, CBS has circled its wagons, only to find them on fire.
Now comes word that Congress may join the fray: Rep. Chris Cox has asked the House Telecom Subcommittee to launch an investigation into CBS’ reporting on this matter. As wrong as CBS was to run its story, it would be even more wrong for Congress to get involved. Simply put: the government should not be policing the media. No matter how sloppy, biased or irresponsible, Congress simply should not be telling the media what it can or can’t do. Or even “investigating” what it has done. That is the road to censorship.
Dan Rather and CBS will doubtless suffer tremendously for their outrageous conduct–because of investigations by other private media outlets (including blogs), with likely sanctions being loss of reputation and credibility. A congressional investigation is neither necessary nor welcome.
Technology is altering the way we do business in a host of markets, in large part because of new capabailities for acquiring and managing information. While this does create efficienices, many remain leery due to the incursions on privacy this entails. Car insurance provides a recent example. Progressive Insurance has created a pilot program for TripSense, which uses a device that plugs into a car’s onboard diagnostic port to track driver behavior.
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Brian Cooley of ZD Net had a very entertaining essay on Spam yesterday that is must-reading. I agree with every word of it and absolutely love the line about the grandmas on AOL and people in John Mellencamp videos. Click here (and scroll down a bit).
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.