There’s been a lot written in recent months about the “death of old media” in general and the demise of newspapers in particular. Regardless of where you get your news, the headlines all scream that the days of old media are numbered. Here’s a small sample of some of my recent favorites:
>”The Collapse of Big Media” (a special cover story / feature section in the most recent Wilson Quarterly)
>”Newspapers Struggle to Avoid Their Own Obit” (Christian Science Monitor, 4/25)
> “Print Insists It’s Here to Stay” (New York Times, 5/2)
> “Unread and Unsubscribing” (a George Will Washington Post column, 4/24)
> “Newspaper Circulation Dives As Readers Get News From Web Sites” Investors’ Business Daily, 5/16)
> “Farewell to Newspapers: Will Increased News Options on the Web Lead to the Death of Newspapers?” (Michael Malone on ABC News.com, 5/24)
> “Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition Including From Their Own Online Offspring” (Washington Post, 2/20)
Again, that’s just a small sample. Every day there seems to be another person wanting to pen old media’s obituary. In fact, today’s Wall Street Journal featured an entire pull-out section entitled “How Old Media Can Survive in a New World.” The story’s subtitle was the real kicker: “The Digital Revolution Threatens to Push the Traditional Newspaper, Television, Music and Advertising Industries Into the Dustbin of History.”
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Tonight I’ll be moderating an America’s Future Foundation roundtable discussion on broadcast indecency and you’re all invited. Speakers will include Drew Clark of the National Journal, former former radio news anchor and reporter Ken Wolfe, and Marvin Johnson of the ACLU. The event will take place at the Fund for American Studies (1706 New Hampshire Ave. NW). Drinks will begin at 7:00 p.m., with dinner and discussion following at 7:30. There’s a $5 cover for non-members, but membership is only $35 and that gets you in to a year’s events. Hope to see you there!
How quickly we all forget the collective hand-wringing and mass hysteria that was generated by the announcement just five years ago that AOL and Time Warner would be merging. As journalist Matt Welch has noted, when the deal was announced, the Chicken Little crowd came out in full force with claims that the AOL-Time Warner deal represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism.”
As it turned out, Welch notes, AOL-Time Warner was “the Big Brother who never was.” In fact, by April of 2002, just two years after the marriage took place, the firm had reported a staggering $54 billion loss. Losses grew to $99 billion by January of 2003. And then in September of 2003, Time Warner decided to drop AOL from its name altogether. It would be an understatement to say that the merger failed to create the sort of synergies (and profits) that were originally hoped for.
And as Fortune reported yesterday, Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons announced that he would consider entirely spinning off AOL as a separate stock if the division’s latest business strategy doesn’t work.
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FCC Commissioner Michael Copps never ceases to amaze me. Like a fire-and-brimstone preacher prophesizing the impending apocalypse, his speeches sometimes border on the neurotic rantings of madman.
In late 2003, for example, he delivered an entertaining sermon at the New America Foundation entitled: “The Beginning of the End of the Internet? Discrimination, Closed Networks, and the Future of Cyberspace.” In the speech, Copps lamented that the “Internet may be dying” and only immediate action by regulators can save the day. Copps laid on the sky-is-falling rhetoric fairly thick: “I think we are teetering on a precipice . . . we could be on the cusp of inflicting terrible damage on the Internet. If we embrace closed networks, if we turn a blind eye to discrimination, if we abandon the end-to-end principle and decide to empower only a few, we will have inflicted upon one of history’s most dynamic and potentially liberating technologies shackles that make a mockery of all the good things that might have been.”
Who knew the end was so near? Of course, it isn’t really. Copps and the “Net commons” crusaders have been preaching this gloom-and-doom gospel for some time now in an effort to impede governance solutions based on property rights in the communications and high-tech sectors and supplant them with collective governance structures.
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This week I released a short new PFF report on the S. 946, the “Kid-Friendly TV Programming Act of 2005.” It would force all cable and satellite operators to offer a “child-friendly” tier of at least 15
channels of video programming. It’s another misguided and unconstitutional attempt by Congress to regulate content on cable and satellite television. This new report can be found here and my earlier report on cable and satellite censorship can be found here.
I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to an important new blog put together by media guru Ben Compaine. His site”Who Owns the Media?” attempts to lay out the truth about the current state of diversity in competition in the media marketplace today.
I’ve written about Ben’s fine work many times before on this and other sites, but for those of you who do know of him or his work, Ben Compaine has long been the voice of reason in the field of media finance and economics. His classic study of the media market, “Who Owns the Media?” is a comprehensive refutation of the myths about media ownership and consolidation.
Through the New Millennium Research Council, Ben has also recently released a wonderful new report entitled The Media Monopoly Myth: How New Competition is Expanding Our Sources of Information and Entertainment. Ben conclusively shows, both in his old book and his new NMRC study, that the media marketplace has never been more dynamic, diverse and competitive.
Anyway, check out Ben’s blog for more details on all his important work in this area. His work has long been a real inspiration to me.
Well, as I was reading the back pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning I came across and article about Emmis Communications Corp.’s announcement that it plans to sell some or all of its 16 television stations to concentrate on its radio business. So, I started penning another installment of my “Media Deconsolidation” series only to then stumble upon a separate story about Disney’s potential move to sell off its ABC Radio assets.
These moves by Emmis and Disney aren’t really all that surprising. As I’ve noted in previous posts, media deconsolidation is all the rage these days. The list of high-profile media divestitures and divorces continues to grow: Clear Channel, AOL-Time Warner, Disney-Miramax, Cablevision, Viacom, Liberty Media, Sony, and on and on. They all have been pondering or carrying out major spin-offs or restructuring plans in recent months.
This is all part of the ongoing “mass media meltdown” that continues to ravage many media operators. While alliances and acquisitions were in vogue in the late 90s, it’s all about shedding assets and getting back to basics these days. This is particularly important today as older media operators face serious threats from new media technologies and outlets. They cannot allow the decline in certain business units be a drag on their overall business or else they will die a slow but certain death. (Check out this amazing post on Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” blog for all the ugly details.)
What this confirms is that the media sector is far more dynamic and competitive than most media critics care to admit. Giants come and go but, in the end, consumers are given more choices and better service with each passing year. In my forthcoming book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership, I discuss all this in much greater detail and try to set the record straight in this regard since many media critics continue to make outrageous claims about the state of media diversity and competition. I also encourage everyone to read Ben Compaine’s latest study on the true state of the media marketplace. It’s another masterpiece by Ben. (Also, please check out Ben’s new blog here for more details on this study and all his fine work.)
Imagine you built a platform in your backyard for the purpose of informing or entertaining your friends of neighbors. Now further imagine that you are actually fairly good at what you do and manage to attract and retain a large audience. Then one day, a few hecklers come to hear you speak on your platform. They shout about how it’s unfair that you have attracted so many people to hear you speak on your soapbox and they demand access to your platform for a certain amount of time each day. They rationalize this by arguing that it is THEIR rights as listeners that are really important, not YOUR rights as a speaker or the owner of the soapbox.
That sort of scenario could never happen in America, right? Sadly, it’s been the way media law has operated for several decades in this country. This twisted “media access” philosophy has been employed by federal lawmakers and numerous special interest groups to justify extensive and massively unjust regime of media regulation and speech redistributionism. And it’s still at work today.
Take, for example, the announcement made yesterday by a coalition of interests billing themselves as the “Media & Democracy Coalition” who released a “Media Bill of Rights.” Hey, who could be against media and democracy? And who could be against a media “Bill of Rights”? Well, let’s take a closer look at what they’re after before we let them get away with equating their efforts to Mom, baseball and apple pie.
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The New Millennium Research Council has just released a wonderful new report by Prof. Benjamin Compaine entitled The Media Monopoly Myth: How New Competition is Expanding Our Sources of Information and Entertainment.
Ben Compaine has long been the voice of reason in the field of media finance and economics. His classic study of the media market, “Who Owns the Media?” is the classic refutation of the myths about media ownership and consolidation. Ben conclusively shows, both in his old book and his new NMRC study, that the media marketplace has never been more dynamic, diverse and competitive.
Attached below is a summary of what you will find in the report that I pulled from the NMRC’s press release about the report. But I encourage you to download and read the entire study for the facts about the current state of competition in our modern media marketplace.
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[[cross-posted from the PFF blog]]
I want to say a few words about this debate over the application of campaign finance regulations to the Internet and Web blogs in particular, but let me just start by admitting that I’m not an expert on campaign finance law. In fact, I am utterly mystified by this entire body of law, not only in terms of its sheer complexity, but also in terms of what it sometimes hopes to accomplish.
I understand that (at least in theory) the laws are suppose to eliminate “corruption” from our political process. But is it just me or is it not that case that campaign finance laws continue to get more complicated while the political process remains just about as “corrupt” as it has always been?
Well, maybe I’m just a cynic about the political process in general. So, let me instead just focus on all this from the perspective of a guy who cares about new media. The current batch of campaign finance regulations is really geared toward broadcasting and broadcast television in particular. But, as of late, the folks down at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) have discovered this thing called the Internet and this new craze called blogging just might have a little impact on the future of media in this country and, therefore, by extension, our political process.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.