A Bailout For The First Amendment?

by on August 12, 2009 · 21 comments

Dan Rather actually made the following two contradictory statements in the same speech:

I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media.

and then:

A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom.

He’s right that the free press is a “watchdog on power.” But that’s not compatible with the idea that, as reported, “the government makes an effort to ensure the survival of the free press.” A press funded, promoted, propped up, subsidized by government is not a free press. Nor is it in any position to be a watchdog; it’s more likely to become a megaphone for the states preferred ideas and expansion of government in other spheres, like health care, energy, finance, telecommunications, scientific research and policy and so on.

Democracy as a concept and political system is not at stake, as Rather thinks, when a particular business model engaged in public communications and broadcasting suffers at a particular point in history. It’s been beaten to death, but everyone knows the transformative importance of the Internet and its role in making voices heard that never had a chance when Rather and his two rival channels dominated the news and airwaves for 30 minutes each evening.

We already have a Public Broadcasting System that takes taxpayer money; we have a Federal Communications Commission engaged in expanding its reach and intervention rather than — why not say it — yielding to the First Amendment and the blessings of competing ideas, content and broadband business models. Dan Rather is playing with fire in advocating marriage or co-habitation between the national government and media. It’s a dangerous idea. I once got riled up about issues like this in a paper I wrote called “Is the Internet Bad for Democracy?“:

Nothing in government’s legitimate scope qualifies it as a fountain of superior, purer information or a source of social cohesion. In fact, it’s more prone to corruption. Governments are well known for censorship and propaganda, or control, like the mandating of library filters and ratings for movies, music and videogames.

Most fundamentally, [intervention] fails because it rests on the notion that capitalism and freedom are inimical to civil society and the diffusion of ideas, when they are, in fact, the prerequisites. We cherish a free press, dissent, and debate precisely because governments can threaten these values. We need markets to maximize output, including that of true and useful “public” information. The inclination of some academics and public servants to despise the commercial Internet grows tiresome, not just because they often occupy a stance parasitic with respect to the commerce they denounce, but because their notion of public spaces would enshrine a political rather than civil view of social interactions.

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Wayne Crews / Wayne Crews is vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He started the Dysfunction Network as a side project. He is a dad of four. Wayne's work explores the impact of government regulation of private activity: Areas of interest include antitrust and competition policy, safety and environmental issues, and information age concerns like privacy, online security, broadband policy, and intellectual property. Wayne is the author of the yearly report, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, and he co-authored the recent reports This Liberal Congress Went to Market? a Bipartisan Policy Agenda for the 110th Congress and Communications without Commissions: A National Plan for Reforming Telecom Regulation. Prior to the assorted government bailouts now taking place, he wrote the report Still Stimulating Like It’s 1999: Time to Rethink Bipartisan Collusion on Economic Stimulus Packages. Wayne is co-editor of the books Who Rules the Net: Internet Governance and Jurisdiction (2003) and Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property In the Information Age (2002). He is co-author of What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism (2003), and a contributing author to others. He has published in the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Communications Lawyer, the International Herald Tribune and others. He has made various TV appearances on Fox, CNN, ABC, CNBC and the Lehrer NewsHour, and his regulatory reform ideas have been featured prominently in such publications as the Washington Post, Forbes and Investor’s Business Daily. He is frequently invited to speak, and has testified before congressional committees on various issues. Earlier Wayne was a legislative aide in the United States Senate to Sen. Phil Gramm, covering regulatory and welfare reform issues. He was an Economist and Policy Analyst at Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, and has worked as an economist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and as a Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. He holds an M.B.A. from William and Mary and a B.S. from Lander College in Greenwood, South Carolina. He was a candidate for state senate as a libertarian while at Lander.

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