Media Regulation

Violent Video Games Head to Supreme Court

by on November 1, 2010 · 3 comments

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Schwarzenegger v. EMA, a case that challenges California’s 2005 law banning the sale of “violent” video games to minors. The law has yet to take effect, as rulings by lower federal courts have found the law to be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment.

There’s little doubt that banning the sale of nearly any content to adults violates the protections of Free Speech, including, as decided last year, video depictions of cruelty to animals.

But over the years the Court has ruled that minors do not stand equal to adults when it comes to the First Amendment. The Court has upheld restrictions on the speech of students in and out of the classroom, for example, in the interest of preserving order in public schools.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 3 comments

Private Media Providers Shouldn’t Be Forced to Fund Public Media

by on October 31, 2010 · 2 comments

I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.”  After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or any other agency the ability to force private media providers to fund their public media competitors.  Moreover, it takes a lot of chutzpah to try to spin NPR’s recent Juan Williams fiasco into an excuse for private media providers like Fox News to fund NPR, but, shockingly, that’s exactly what Coll does. “The Williams imbroglio is teachable, but its lessons actually point in the opposite direction: America’s public media system, including NPR, requires more funding, not less.”  Hmm… that’s not exactly the lesson most of the rest of the world took away from this episode!

Coll first argues it makes sense for private media funds to be transferred to NPR becuase “In this time of niche publications and cable networks that thrive on ideological anger, we should be seeking to strengthen NPR’s role as a convener of the public square, a demagogue-free zone where all political and social groups — including conservatives and others opposed to federal funding of public media — should be welcome on equal terms.”  This is indicative of the all-too-common “progressive” impulse to force media upon us that we don’t want or even find offensive.  To be clear, I am not one of those people who finds NPR to be a hopelessly biased bastion of Leftist thinking.  While I think it’s clear to everyone that many of NPR’s stories and reporters do lean that direction, I also think there’s some outstanding reporting to be found there.  But if Steve Coll and his colleagues at the New America Foundation want to see NPR get more funding, they should do the same thing I do:  Open up their wallets and make the voluntary choice to fund it. To force everyone else to do so is despicable.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 2 comments

Television More Competitive, Diverse & Fragmented Than Ever

by on October 25, 2010 · 2 comments

I’ve grown increasingly tired of the fight over not just retransmission consent, but almost all TV regulation in general.  Seriously, why is our government still spending time fretting over a market that is more competitive, diverse and fragmented than most other economic sectors?  It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the innovation happening on this front, although I’ve tried here before. Every metric — every single one — is not just improving but exploding. Just what’s happening on the kids’ TV front is amazing enough, but the same story is playing out across other programming genres and across multiple distribution platforms.

More proof of just how much more diverse and fragmented content and audiences are today comes in this excellent new guest editorial over at GigaOm, “The Golden Age of Choice and Cannibalization in TV,” by Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv. Hudack notes that, compared to the Scarcity Era, when we had fewer choices and were all forced to watch pretty much the same thing, today’s media cornucopia is overflowing, and audiences are splintering as a result.  “Media naturally trends towards fragmentation,” he notes.  “As capacity increases so does choice. As choice increases audiences fragment. When given a choice people generally prefer media that speaks to them as individuals over media that speaks to the ‘masses.’”

Indeed, he cites Nielsen numbers I’ve used here before illustrating how the top shows of the 50’s (like Texaco Star Theater) netted an astonishing 60-80% of U.S. television households while more recent hits, like American Idol is lucky if it can manage over 15% audience share. He concludes, therefore, that: Continue reading →

SHARE: 2 comments

FCC and its Technological Advisory Council: Shut Them Down and Use the Money to Reduce Debt

by on October 22, 2010 · 10 comments

The Federal Communications Commission has established a new advisory group called the “Technological Advisory Council.” Among other things it will advise the agency on “how broadband communications can be part of the solution for the delivery and cost containment of health care, for energy and environmental conservation, for education innovation and in the creation of jobs.”

This is an agency that is radically overspilling its bounds. It has established goals that it has no proper role in fulfilling and that it has no idea how to fulfill. As we look for cost-cutting measures at the federal level, we could end the pretense that communications industry should be regulated as a public utility. Shuttering the FCC would free up funds for better purposes such as lowering the national debt or reducing taxes.

SHARE: 10 comments

Fox-Cablevision and the Net Neutrality Hammer

by on October 19, 2010 · 9 comments

When the only tool you have is a hammer, as the old cliché goes, everything looks like a nail.

Net neutrality, as I first wrote in 2006, is a complicated issue at the accident-prone intersection of technology and policy.  But some of its most determined—one might say desperate—proponents are increasingly anxious to simplify the problem into political slogans with no melody and sound bites with no nutritional value.  Even as—perhaps precisely because—a “win-win-win” compromise seems imminent, the rhetorical excess is being amplified.  The feedback is deafening.

In one of the most bizarre efforts yet to make everything be about net neutrality, Public Knowledge issued several statements this week “condemning” Fox’s decision to prohibit access to its online programming from Cablevision internet users.  In doing so, the organization claims, Fox has committed “the grossest violations of the open Internet committed by a U.S. company.”

This despite the fact that the open Internet rules (pick whatever version you like) apply only to Internet access providers.  Indeed, the rules are understood principally as a protection for content providers.  You know, like Fox. Continue reading →

SHARE: 9 comments

DIY News and Commentary

by on October 13, 2010 · 1 comment

What a delight it has been to watch the rescue of the Chilean miners on a live feed, without commentary from any plasticized, blathering “news reporter.” Of course, there are editorial judgments being made by the camera crews and on-scene director, but it is refreshing to make my own judgments based on what I see happening and what I see on the faces of the miners, their wives, and standers-by.

As my friend, the curmudgeonly @derekahunter notes, “There’s really nothing worse than listening to a reporter attempting to fill time while waiting for something to happen.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been chasing down some intemperate commentary on Twitter about the recent discovery of explosives in a New York cemetery. One Fred Burton, identified on his Twitter feed as Vice President of Intelligence for STRATFOR and a former counter-terrorism agent, Tweeted at the time that these explosives seemed like “a classic dead drop intended for an operative.”

But now we know the explosives are old, they were dug up and laid aside in May or June of 2009, and someone recently found them and decided to report them. That is not consistent with a dead drop, and Burton was wrong to speculate as he did, starting an Internet rumor that needlessly propagates fear.

As a public service, I’m doing a little bit to cut into Burton’s credibility, which should cause him to think twice next time. The winning Tweet is not mine, though. It’s @badbanana’s: “Military-grade explosives found at NYC cemetery. Hundreds confirmed dead.”

In summary, it’s a do-it-yourself news and commentary night. I’m making my world and re-making yours (just a tiny bit), rather than all of us sitting around being fed what to think.

SHARE: 1 comment

The Geocentric Theory of Political Media

by on October 11, 2010 · 2 comments

“There’s no question [cable news is] contributing to the splintering of the political system and the means by which people get information about that system,” said Robert Thompson, who runs the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “If there’s no standard base line of fact and reporting, where can the conversation go?”

This, from “Cable News Chatter is Changing the Electoral Landscape,” by Howard Kurtz and Karen Tumulty in today’s Washington Post.

Cable news and, of course, the Internet are definitely splintering the media environment. But there’s a big difference between the political system and the means by which people get information about it. Why on earth should there be a standard base line on which all political conversation must rest?

Speaking of earth, people used to think that the earth was at the center of the universe. Other planets moved erratically with relation to ours, and that was difficult to explain. Now we know that it is the sun at the center of our solar system, and the movements of planets, stars, and galaxies have been rationalized.

Many of us occupy different political and ideological planets, some of which have similar orbits, some very different. Slowly, sometimes, we can align our orbits by inquiring and debating about the nature of humankind, what is good, and the social systems that produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

Finding out that we should have these debates is not a threat to the political system. It’s a threat to the geocentric model of the political system, in which the three major networks provided the “standard base line of fact and reporting.”

The media universe is still not splintered enough, in my opinion. But, increasingly, the conversation will more easily go wherever it is supposed to go, unhindered by the false authority of a small number of news executives.

SHARE: 2 comments

MPAA Ratings Are Better Than the Alternative

by on August 20, 2010 · 5 comments

Back in March, the Motion Picture Association of America re-launched its film-rating website, filmratings.com. While this may be old news to some, I just learned about it from a post on BoingBoing which makes fun of the rationales given for the ratings, which are available on the new website. Example: The movie “3 Ninjas Knuckle Up” was “rated PG-13 for non-stop ninja action.”

Continue reading →

SHARE: 5 comments

Google’s Schmidt on Targeted Ads, Monetization & the Future of News

by on August 14, 2010 · 0 comments

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins has a terrific, wide-ranging interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in today’s paper that is well worth reading. One thing worth highlighting is Schmidt’s comments on the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.”  He argues that, “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads.”

Absolutely correct. It’s a point that Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree and I tried to make in PFF’s mega-filing in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding in early May, and Berin and I stressed it in even more detail in our piece on”Chairman Leibowitz’s Disconnect on Privacy Regulation & the Future of News.” The key takeaway: If Washington goes to war against advertising — and targeted advertising in particular — then there will be no future for private news. As we stated there:

The reason for the indispensability of advertising is simple: Information (including news and other forms of “content”) has “public good” characteristics that make it is very difficult (and occasionally impossible) for information-publishers to recoup their investments.  Simply put, they quite literally lack pricing power: Whatever they charge, someone else will charge less for a close substitute, inevitably leading to “free” distribution of the content, even though the content is anything but free to produce.  Advertising is the one business model that has traditionally saved the day by rewarding publishers for attracting the attention of an audience.

Thus an attack on advertising is an attack on media / news itself. And yet Washington is currently engaged in an all-out assault on advertising, marketing, and data collection efforts / business models.

Incidentally, Google recently submitted comments with the Federal Trade Commission in reaction to its Staff Discussion Draft about the future of journalism and laid out their views on many of these issues. More importantly, as summarized on pg. 30 (of the pdf) of this Newspaper Association of America filing to the FTC, Google has proposed an interesting monetization model that utilizes Google Search, Google Checkout and DoubleClick ad server, “to build a premium content system for newspapers.”  Worth checking out.  Kudos to Google for taking these steps and to Schmidt for again stressing the importance of targeted advertising for the future of media.

SHARE: 0 comments

The Free Press / Public Knowledge Stylebook for Public Debate

by on August 11, 2010 · 7 comments

[I’m always amazed by the misuse of language in debates over media and communications policy. Some regulatory advocates, like Free Press and Public Knowledge, seem to contort the meaning of everyday words in such a grotesque way that they are barely recognizable.  Luckily, via Wikileaks, Mike Wendy and I stumbled upon a secret copy of the “Free Press-Public Knowledge Stylebook for Public Debate” and now have a better idea of what they mean when they utter these terms. We thought we’d share…]

_______________________

“behemoth” – Use this word to refer to any corporation, regardless of actual size, and make them sound more nefarious than the much larger government that will regulate them.

“Big Brother” – See “behemoth,” and be careful not to reference Orwell too much lest people actually read “1984” and discover that Big Brother was actually the government, not industry.

“Censorship” – Refers to efforts by nefarious corporations to control our thoughts and actions since that’s obviously how they make most of their money. Some people say government might be the real threat to freedom of speech, but don’t you believe such silliness!

“Competition” – A centrally-planned system used to prop up free-riders who usually don’t have facilities of their own. (See “Open access.”)  Of course, the best forms of competition arise from government ownership.

“the Constitution” – An odd document in that, for some reason, it contains a litany of limitations on the power of government to regulate evil corporations that the people wanted to see crushed. (See “the People.”)  However, the addition of the First Amendment partially rectified that by giving us the foundation for industry regulation. (See “First Amendment.”) Continue reading →

SHARE: 7 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →