NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. [“It’s A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?”] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who noted in the spot:

Ferguson says it’s easy to think senseless video game violence can lead to senseless violence in the real world. But he says that’s mixing up two separate things.  “Many of the games do have morally objectionable material and I think that is where a lot of the debate on this issue went off the rails,” he said. “We kind of mistook our moral concerns about some of these video games, which are very valid — I find many of the games to be morally objectionable — and then assumed that what is morally objectionable is harmful.”

I’ve written about Ferguson’s work and these issues more generally many times over through the years here at the TLF. Here are some of the most relevant essays:

• Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis
• More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime
• Video Games, Free Speech & the Lunacy of “Ecogenerism”
• Video Games and “Moral Panic”
• Video Games, Violence, & Social “Science”: Another Day, Another Fight
• Do video games create cop killers?

In these essays, I’ve tried to make a couple of key points about the social science literature on “media effects” theory:

(1) Lab studies by psychology professors and students are not representative of real-world behavior/results. Indeed, lab experiments are little more than artificial constructions of reality and of only limited value in gauging the impact of violently-themed media on actual human behavior.

(2) Real-world data trends likely offer us a better indication of the impact of media on human behavior over the long-haul. And all those trends show encouraging signs of improvement even as video game consumption among youth and adults increases.

(3) Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Of course, whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we must always keep this first principle of statistical analysis in mind.

(4) Finally, it’s worth reconsidering whether more weight should be given to the “cathartic effect hypothesis” in these debates. 

A bit more on this final point since I feel quite passionately about it…

The battle over media effect theory goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. While Plato thought the media of his day (poetry, plays & music) had a deleterious impact on culture and humanity, Aristotle took a very different view. Indeed, most historians believe it was Aristotle who first used the term katharsis when discussing the importance of Greek tragedies, which often contained violent overtones and action. He suggested that these tragedies helped the audience, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” In Part IV of his Poetics, Aristotle spoke highly of tragedies that used provocative or titillating storytelling to its fullest effect:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

And for me, that remains the best explanation for how humans process dramatic depictions of violence and tragedy. We humans are unique among all mammals in our ability to adapt to changes in our environment and to process new and different forms of content and culture. We process. We learn. We assimilate. We adapt. Thus, we can enjoy the “tragic wonder” of watching a violent Greek drama or playing a violent video game without running for the kitchen to find a knife to plunge into somebody’s back. We can separate fantasy from reality and we do so every day of our lives.

Yet, many social scientists today, echoing Plato, continue to search for proof that the alternative is true and that depictions of violence on the stage or screen will have a direct and quite deleterious impact on human behavior. They subscribe to the “monkey see-monkey do” theory of media effects. Again, I think that’s utterly bogus and flatly contradicted by real-world facts. After all, if there was anything to their theories, shouldn’t it have shown up sometime, somewhere in real-world data trends by now?

Still, don’t expect this debate to ever end.  Just wait till virtual reality technologies go mainstream!  Oh boy, now that will have the “monkey see-monkey do” crowd whipped into a lather.  I look forward to the debate (and to playing those VR games with my kids!)

My thanks to Linton Weeks of NPR who reached out to me for comment for a story he was doing on the impact of the Internet and digital technology on culture and our attention spans. His essay, “We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore,” is an interesting exploration of the issue, although it is clear that Weeks, like Nick Carr (among others), is concerned about what the Net is doing to our brains. He says:

We just don’t do whole things anymore. We don’t read complete books — just excerpts. We don’t listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don’t sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don’t even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.

After reading the entire piece I realized that some of my comments to Weeks probably came off as a bit more pessimistic about things than I actually am. I told him, for example, that “Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption,” and that “With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span.”

Luckily, however, Weeks was kind enough to also give me the last word in the story in which I pointed out that it would be a serious mistake to conclude “that we’re all growing stupid, or losing our ability to think, or losing our appreciation of books, albums or other types of long-form content.” Instead, I argued: “We just don’t spend as much time with them as we used to. It’s the cost of life in an age of information abundance.” However, “I’ll take that over life in the past age of information poverty any day of the week. More people have more access to more information than at any time in human civilization. That’s a victory, even if it does come with some growing pains.”

Anyway, make sure to read the entire essay by Weeks. Also, for those interested in more, I have discussed this issue — and my fundamentally bullish outlook on matters — here at length in past essays including:

• The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors [best overview]
• Book Review: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
• Coping with Information Overload: Thoughts on Hamlet’s BlackBerry by William Powers
• Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate
• Some Thoughts on PBS “Digital Nation” Documentary
• Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society

It was my pleasure today to debate the future of public media funding on Warren Olney’s NPR program, “To The Point“.  I was 1 of 5 guests and I wasn’t brought into the show until about 29 minutes into the program, but I tried to reiterate some of the key points I made in my essay last week on “‘Non-Commercial Media’ = Fine; ‘Public Media’ = Not So Much.”  I won’t reiterate everything I said before since you can just go back and read it, but to briefly summarize what I said there as well as on today’s show: (1) taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize speech or media content they find potentially objectionable; and (2) public broadcasters are currently perfectly positioned to turn this federal funding “crisis” into a golden opportunity by asking its well-heeled and highly-diversified base of supporters to step up to the plate and fill the gap left by the end of taxpayer subsidies.

Just a word more on that last point. As I pointed out on the show today, it’s an uncomfortable fact of life for NPR that their average listener is old, rich, highly-educated, and mostly white.  Specifically, here are some numbers that NPR itself has compiled about its audience demographics:

• The median age of the NPR listener is 50.
• The median household income of an NPR News listener is about $86,000, compared to the national average of about $55,000.
• NPR’s audience is extraordinarily well-educated.  Nearly 65% of all listeners have a bachelor’s degree, compared to only a quarter of the U.S. population.  Also, they are three times more likely than the average American to have completed graduate school.
• The majority of the NPR audience (86%) identifies itself as white.

Why do these numbers matter? Simply stated: These people can certainly step up to the plate and pay more to cover the estimated $1.39 that taxpayers currently contribute to the public media in the U.S.  But wait, there’s more! There are plenty of other existing corporate and foundational supporters out there who already make sizable contributions to NPR. Down below, I have attached a list that appeared in the NPR’s 2008 annual donor list of just the corporations who currently support NPR and it includes only those companies who support at a level greater than a half million per year. There are many others who offer annual support for less than that and then there are the hundreds of foundations and wealthy families who give major gifts of varying amounts.

Again, these individual benefactors could all probably be prodded to give a bit more, and plenty of others out there would likely step up to the plate to meet the challenge of filling the small gap left by ending taxpayer support.  For God’s sake, just look at that list of current top-dollar corporate supporters for NPR down below!  It reads like a “Who’s Who” of the Fortune 500 giants and it must leave all of NPR’s competitors stinging with jealous about how smart it was for non-commercial media to diversify its base of philanthropic support so long ago.

Thus, there’s no reason that public media operators can’t take the next step and find alternative means of support to fill the 16% of their budgets that currently comes from taxpayers.  In these tight fiscal times, it’s only fair.

$1 Million + Supporters of NPR in 2008

• Angie’s List
• CITGO Petroleum
• Corporation CSX Corporation
• Feeding America
• Fox Searchlight Pictures
• General Motors Corporation
• Institute for Supply Management
• Insurance Company
• Intel Corporation
• Johnson Controls
• Kashi Company
• Lindamood-Bell Learning Systems
• Lumber Liquidators
• MasterCard
• MGM
• National Association of Realtors
• Netflix
• Northwestern Mutual Foundation
• Novo Nordisk
• Overture Films
• Pabst Brewing Company
• Paramount Home Entertainment
• Paramount Pictures
• Prudential Financial
• PBS Raymond James Financial Services
• Philips Healthcare
• POM Wonderful REI
• Progressive Casualty Insurance
• Scotts Miracle-Gro Company
• State Farm Mutual Automobile
• Travel Guard
• U.S. Bank Vestas
• Universal Pictures
• Visa Warner Home Video
• Walden University Yahoo!
• Wind Systems

$500,000-$999,999 Supporters of NPR in 2008

• Cargill
• Citibank
• Constant Contant
• Constellation Energy
• Focus Features
• iShares
• Leanding Tree
• Lenovo
• Lionsgate
• Entertainment
• CNetApp
• Pajamagram Company
• Saturn
• Sit4Less.com
• Subaru
• T. Rowe Price
• UPS
• Vanguard Group

[Read rest of the list of this impressive list of NPR corporate and foundational supporters here.  Has there ever been a more well-diversified base of support for any media operation in American history?  I think not. As Jill Lawrence points out on Politics Daily, public media’s extremely loyal — and rich — fan base are not about let NPR and PBS die.]

I’m not one of those libertarians who incessantly rants about the supposed evils of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcast Service (PBS).  In fact, I find quite a bit to like in the programming I consume on both services, NPR in particular. A few years back I realized that I was listening to about 45 minutes to an hour of programming on my local NPR affiliate (WAMU) each morning and afternoon, and so I decided to donate $10 per month. Doesn’t sound like much, but at $120 bucks per year, that’s more than I spend on any other single news media product with the exception of The Wall Street Journal. So, when there’s value in a media product, I’ll pay for it, and I find great value in NPR’s “long-form” broadcast journalism, despite its occasional political slant on some issues.

In many ways, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS, has the perfect business model for the age of information abundance. Philanthropic models — which rely on support for foundational benefactors, corporate underwriters, individual donors, and even government subsidy — can help diversify the funding base at a time when traditional media business models — advertising support, subscriptions, and direct sales — are being strained.  This is why many private media operations are struggling today; they’re experiencing the ravages of gut-wrenching marketplace / technological changes and searching for new business models to sustain their operations. By contrast, CPB, NPR, and PBS are better positioned to weather this storm since they do not rely on those same commercial models.

Nonetheless, NPR and PBS and the supporters of increased “pubic media” continue to claim that they are in peril and that increased support — especially public subsidy — is essential to their survival.  For example, consider an editorial in today’s Washington Post making “The Argument for Funding Public Media,” which was penned by Laura R. Walker, the president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, and Jaclyn Sallee, the president and chief executive of Officer Kohanic Broadcast Corp. in Anchorage. They argue:

The CPB’s federal appropriation this fiscal year is $430 million – about $1.39 per American. More than 70 percent of that funding goes to local stations around the country, accounting for, on average, nearly 16 percent of their annual budgets. For some, such as New York Public Radio, CPB funding is a smaller – although important – part of the operating budget because their audience size and urban location enable them to rely on a mix of membership, foundation and underwriting support. For stations in rural or economically hard-hit areas that aren’t able to attract as much other support, CPB funding is their lifeblood.

But regardless of whether the federal subsidy to local stations is trivial or substantial, like most other supporters of “public media,” Walker and Sallee jump right past the moral discussion of whether it is right to force citizens to subsidize media they may not find to their liking. Again, as it pertains to NPR at least, I am not one of these people, but I am entirely sympathetic with those — mostly of a conservative persuasion — who find it offensive to be forced to use their tax dollars to support programs they find objectionable for whatever reason.  And while I do not believe that NPR and PBS are as hopelessly biased as some conservatives suggest, I think it’s fair to say that there’s more than a hint of liberal bias in many of their programs and reporters. (Personally, I do not mind some of that bias, but I do find it silly that some of these reporters, editors, and their defenders continue to pretend no such bias exists. Even with a liberal slant to some of their reports, they are still great reports.)

The reason this is important is because forcing citizens to fund even more media content they might find objectionable will lead to endless political controversy and increased public tensions. My former PFF colleague Randy May, now president of the Free State Foundation, correctly argues that:

when government-supported media—that is, media supported with our tax dollars—decide what content should be filtered or amplified regarding issues of public importance… government’s involvement tends to exacerbate public tensions in a way that makes civil discourse more difficult. This is because government content decisions are seen by many as tilting the public policy playing field in a way inconsistent with their beliefs.

Sure, I understand that we taxpayers are forced to subsidize many things we don’t like or even find offensive.  But that’s hardly a good argument for forcing to subsidize even more, especially when it comes to speech and media. Should liberals be forced to help fund the next Fox News or Rush Limbaugh? Should conservatives have to support the next Keith Olbermann or Bill Moyers?  Should independents or libertarians have to subsidize any of this?  As Thomas Jefferson famously put it in the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.” That is, we naturally — and rightly — resent subsidizing speech that is antithetical to our own values.

But won’t public media wither and die without taxpayer subsidy, as Walker and Sallee suggest?  I don’t think so. First, to reiterate, public media is already well-diversified and has multiple funding streams to fall back on such that the 16% that comes from taxpayers could be replaced by other sources as it is phased out. Moreover, as the defunding process unfolds, it presents public media with the perfect opportunity to lock in long-term funding from those other sources. Public media supporters like to claim that $430 million (or $1.39 per taxpayer) per year isn’t that big of a burden.  OK, sure, but that argument cuts both ways. If they really feel it isn’t such a huge expense, then certainly we can find other sources to cover that $1.39 per year!  In fact, I can imagine a massive CPB/PBS/NPR fundraising campaign based entirely on “Doing Your Part to Cover the Gap” or other such gimmicks.

What I am getting at here is that the time has come to make a firm break with “public media” notions but to simultaneously embrace “non-commercial media” as a viable and important part of our modern media marketplace. “Public media” will always be a contentious term and be subjected to endless politicization.  “Non-commercial media,” by contrast is more value-neutral and should be easier for citizens of all ideological stripes to accept since it implies media that is not supported by advertising or subscriptions but which is also free of forcible taxpayer subsidy.

Again, CPB is already 84% of the way there! We can find creative ways to bridge the gap and cover that remaining 16%.  I’d happily double my annual contribution to my local NPR affiliate today if they agreed to drop federal subsidies.  And I bet plenty of other people and organizations would step up to the plate and meet this challenge, too.

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.

Second, Coll wants to pretend he’s doing private media providers a favor by forcing them to fund NPR.  “Continuing to force profit-seeking licensees to tack public interest work onto their commercial enterprises is a fool’s errand. It would be far more rational to let commercial enterprises respond to market incentives as they see fit, while leaving the construction of public interest journalism to organizations and leaders who want to do nothing else – among them, NPR.”

How arrogant. Coll is basically saying there’s no other good news out there besides what’s on NPR.  Perhaps he’s just not listening to anything else?  Moreover, to suggest that private media providers should welcome the opportunity to fund their public media competitors because that will take a burden off their shoulders is absurd.  That’s not Steve Coll’s decision to make and it certainly shouldn’t be the government’s either. Whether he feels his preferred mix of views is accurately represented elsewhere is utterly irrelevant.  That does not justify forcing those other media providers to fund the one outlet he feels does provide the right mix.

Astonishingly, Coll never addresses the fundamental unfairness of his proposal to private providers.  After all, in case he didn’t notice, many private media operators are fighting for their lives right now in the hyper-competitive modern media marketplace.  Coll not only ignores that but he then somehow rationalizes what would, in essence, be a new discriminatory media tax that would undercut private media operations at a time when they can ill afford it.  This raises fundamental fairness issues. Not only has public broadcasting and non-commercial media been siphoning off more and more market share from private news media in recent years, but, by placing such a tax on private media to fund its competitors, Coll’s proposal would essentially put private operators in double jeopardy.  It’s hard to see how that’s in “the public interest.”  It’s like the government signing the death warrant for private media.

Elsewhere, I’ve written much more about how such discriminatory private media taxes are seriously misguided.  See, for example, this paper I wrote on what’s wrong with using broadcast spectrum fees as a slush fund for public media.  Also, similar discriminatory tax and regulatory schemes are critiqued in this 79-page filing that my former colleagues Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I submitted to the FCC as part of its “Future of Media” proceeding.

Needless to say, their won’t be much of a “future of media” — at least for private media providers — if Congress took Steve Coll’s advice and imposed this massive media income redistribution scheme on the market.  Again, fund your own media.  Make your own choices.  Don’t try to impose your choices on others.

Just FYI.. Tomorrow’s “Diane Rehm Show” on NPRs local affiliate station (WAMU 88.5FM) will feature a debate about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan, which is due out tomorrow. [Here’s the executive summary.]  The show airs at 10:00 locally, but you can listen to the show here online, and I’ll repost a link or embedded audio file once it becomes available.

I’ve been invited to be on the show alongside Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press, Dennis Wharton, spokesperson for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), and a few other guests who haven’t been announced just yet. (Here are some of my early musings on the plan: 1, 2.)

Every Tuesday, Washington, DC’s local NPR station (88.5 WAMU) carries a “Tech Tuesdays” program as a regular part of The Kojo Nnamdi Show.  This week’s show, which was guest hosted by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, was on “Regulating the World Wide Web: A View from Abroad.” It was a wide-ranging and very interesting discussion about the future of Internet governance and regulation, featuring:

• Evgeny Morozov: Yahoo! Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University; Fellow, Open Society Institute; and author “Net Effect” blog on ForeignPolicy.com
• John Morris: General Counsel, Director of the Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project, Center for Democracy and Technology
• Olivier Tesquet: Reporter, Slate.fr (France)

Listen here. It’s worth your time.

Free Press, the radical pro-regulatory media activist group, recently filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for the agency’s upcoming workshop on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”  The Free Press comments provide an enlightening glimpse into the mind of how many on the Left now think about media policy in America.  Their approach can be summarized as follows:

1. Nothing the private sector can do will save journalism (unless it is entirely non-profit / non-commercial in nature);
2. Even if there was something that private players could do to save journalism, Free Press would likely have federal authorities forbid it anyway (especially if it involved new business ownership patterns or combinations); and,
3. The only thing that can really save journalism is a “public option” for the press in the form of massive state subsidization of media in this country.

To elaborate on the last point, here’s how Free Press summarizes what they are looking for:

For U.S. public media to become a truly world-class system will require a substantial increase in funding. This could be accomplished by an increase in direct congressional appropriations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. With increased funding — to as little as $5 per person, increasing annual appropriations to some $1.5 billion — the American public media system could dramatically increase its capacity, reach, diversity and relevance.

But they stress that a simple expansion of the PBS/NPR/CPB non-commercial model will not be enough since that system is “vulnerable to repeated threats of funding cuts” and too “reliant on corporate backing, via the underwriting process.” They want to go well beyond non-commercial media, therefore, and have the state start building a massive public media infrastructure.  Here’s where their pitch for a public option for the press comes in:

A better and more durable solution would be to create and fund a public trust, seeded with a large endowment and operated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or other NGO. The money for such a trust could be provided directly through an act of Congress or perhaps by placing a small tax on advertising. We estimate that a trust fund would require $50 billion to create sufficient revenue. If that figure seems high, consider that since last year, more than $173 billion in tax money has been sunk into just one corporation, AIG. Given that Congress just passed a nearly trillion-dollar economic recovery package, $50 billion for public media seems like a smart investment.

Basically, because everybody else is on the public dole these days–including undeserving Wall Street idiots–that justifies putting media operators and journalist on the dole, too.  Some pretty twisted logic there.  But the Free Press plan doesn’t end with public bailouts for media. A welfare system for journalists is next on the list:

Another form of government investment that could help spark new competition in the news ecosystem is the creation of research and development fund for journalistic innovation and experimentation. We need to think about the new media marketplace as an incubator for innovation. Just as government invests in medical research to heal the ails of the body, we need government to invest in experimentation with news models to heal the democratic ails of the body politic. We should explore the creation of a government-seeded innovation fund for journalism — a taxpayer-supported venture capital firm that invests in new business models. As a starting point, we are proposing a $50 million per year budget. This new venture capital firm could be set up as a public-private partnership, with federal matching funds for foundation-supported projects, or designed to provide guaranteed loans at low or no interest to start-up initiatives.

But wait, there’s more!  Free Press also wants:

• “a journalism jobs program to support veteran, qualified reporters and simultaneously to engage young people in journalism” that would be part of AmeriCorps.
• special tax status for journalism institutions along the lines of Sen. Ben Cardin‘s “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” which “would offer tax benefits to philanthropic groups and individuals that donate to newspapers, while providing the newspapers themselves with the tax benefits enjoyed by all tax-exempt organizations.” [Somehow Free Press fails to mention how that bill would also forbid political editorializing by those organizations as a condition of the deal!  So much for a “free press.”]
• a collection of government incentives to encourage local ownership and media divestiture: They explain… “The idea is to create, via changes to the federal tax and bankruptcy laws, a number of targeted ‘sweeteners’ that could be invoked — alone or in combination — when media properties are being put up for sale that would make new owners or ownership structures… more attractive than traditional corporate ownership models.” … “Newspaper owners might be more inclined to sell to socially motivated parties if the government offered certain subsidies or other incentives to facilitate the transactions. Perhaps the IRS could guarantee nonprofits a reduced buyout rate. In addition, government-guaranteed loans and bidding credits could be offered to nonprofits to help them purchase failing news organizations.”  A “minority media tax credit” is also proposed.

No word on how much more those programs and proposals add to the $50 billion price tag. Nor do they ever get around to explaining exactly how we’ll pay for it all, but I suppose bumping Rupert Murdoch’s marginal tax rate up to 99% would probably be where they’ll start.  The rest of us will be expected to pay our “fair share” eventually. There is, however, that one brief mention of “a small tax on advertising” as a way to pay for some of their plans.  Isn’t that just lovely.  I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the one traditionally successful method of supporting private media operations would be the first thing Free Press would look to tax! After all, if you’re really out to destroy private media, it’s not enough to subsidize a public press option… no, you have to force the private players to pay into the scheme, too, thereby subsidizing their own competition!   You gotta hand it to these Free Press people; when they set out on a seek-and-destroy mission, they know how to get the job done.

Taken in the aggregate, the Free Press proposal reads like a Soviet-style 5-year plan for the media sector. [Hey, why not appoint another White House “czar” to oversee it all!]  In practice, such a public option for media raises many troubling questions.  The prospect of a large swath of the American media sector being treated as a publicly funded ward of the State isn’t just a small leak in the important wall between Press and State, it is the end of that wall.  It would dynamite that wall to the ground. It could potentially open the door to a fundamental corruption of the journalistic profession by public officials who would not likely be able to resist the urge to pressure those who are subservient to the State.  As such, the plan is an affront to our traditional First Amendment values and the importance of press independence in particular. And it is an affront to the taxpayers who would be stuck paying for a lot of journalism that they may not even want, like, or see.  As I noted in a previous essay, you can file all of this under the general theme: “Socializing Media in Order to Save It.”

But hey, it’s a new era, baby!  So get ready to pay your fair share to “save journalism” because Free Press and their founder Robert McChesney appear ready to make good on their promise to socialize all media and make it everybody’s collective responsibility via their public option for the press.

Last month, National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.  Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography.  Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of a Great War is one of my all-time favorite novels.  I cannot in strong enough words encourage you to read that book; it is profoundly moving. (I almost named my son after the lead character in the book!)

Thus, I was quite excited when I learned that Helprin had penned a defense of copyright and I jumped at the chance to review it when the folks at National Review asked me to do so.  Alas, as you will see in my review, I was terribly disappointed.  I wish Helprin would have stuck with the very reasonable tone he adopted in this excellent podcast interview he did recently with John J. Miller of National Review Online. Unfortunately, he went a different direction in the book, as I make clear in my review:

National Review July 20, 2009

“Man, Machine, and Copyright” a review of Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, by Mark Helprin by Adam Thierer

It would be difficult to think of anyone more ideally suited to pen a passionate defense of copyright law than novelist Mark Helprin.  Helprin has written several of the finest works of modern literature, including his masterpiece, A Soldier of the Great War, a narrative of transcendent beauty. In Digital Barbarism, Helprin sets out to use his formidable gift for the written word to repel the “cyber mob” that has attacked copyright law and called for its curtailment, or even abolition.

Unfortunately, while Helprin occasionally rises to great heights in his defense of copyright, he too often sinks to lamentable lows — by resorting to the same unbecoming rhetorical tactics used by the mob he seeks to condemn. Indeed, his book is filled with gratuitous vitriol and neo-Luddite ramblings about the Internet and Information Age that severely detract from his defense of copyright. This is a shame, because, in places, Digital Barbarism makes a fine case against those critics who wrongly view copyright as an impediment to the creation and diffusion of content. “The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible,” Helprin argues. Why, he asks, “must ‘content’ be free” when everything else — access to the Internet, digital devices, etc. — costs good money? He notes that the movement that advocates “free,” universal access to all copyrighted material in the name of “openness” and “the public good” would, ironically, “destroy the dream it advocates”:

By insistence upon unhindered access without regard for rights and incentives that have been carefully balanced over centuries, the hurried new order will diminish the substance over which it demands sovereignty. It will have its access, but, as time passes, to less and less, and eventually perhaps to almost nothing, the means having grossly overpowered the ends. The past may be brilliantly cataloged and made accessible as never before, but at the cost of making the culture of the present relatively barren. Though it may never be entirely extinguished, it can be made as eerily quiet as if without the beat of a single heart.

The power of Helprin’s defense of copyright is that it is grounded in both this sort of utilitarian rationale and a Lockean, natural-rights-based conception of man’s moral right to the fruit of his mental labor. But there are many thorny issues Helprin fails to address in setting forth his dual defense of copyright.

To begin with, things just aren’t as black-and-white as he makes them out to be. There’s a certain inherent messiness to “intellectual property,” at least when compared with tangible property. As an abstract concept, it’s easy enough to defend. In practice, however, it often proves exceedingly challenging to delimit and enforce, since intangible creations cannot be enclosed the same way our back yards can.

This does not mean, however, that the opposite approach — a collectivized “commons” for intellectual creations — is more sensible. That intangible property is harder to enclose and protect doesn’t mean the law shouldn’t seek to do so. “Copyright is important because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship,” Helprin argues, “and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass.”

American copyright law has generally cast this right in utilitarian terms, ever since the Founders gave Congress the power under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” But how much “limited time” is enough time to incentivize creativity and invention? Under the first Copyright Act, enacted by Congress in 1790, the term of protection was just 14 years plus a right to renew for an additional 14 if the author was still alive.

There are many legitimately difficult questions about the enforceability of copyright in an age of ubiquitous digital connectivity and instantaneous information flows. I came to appreciate these challenges several years ago after transferring my entire 30-year CD collection to a portable music player that was smaller than a box of cards. How can copyright coexist with the giant copying machine represented by the combination of personal computers, digital devices, and the Internet? What sorts of restrictions on devices and networks are required to ensure that we continue to reward intellectual creativity without destroying the forms of technological innovation? How should copyright law define “fair use” in a culture that increasingly enables collaboration and encourages “remixing”? Will we need to create new “compulsory licensing” schemes — already in place for radio and television — to ensure that creators are compensated through mandatory fees embedded in digital devices or our monthly broadband bills?

These are challenging questions that deserve a fair hearing. But Helprin rarely bothers with these details because he’s too busy trading jabs with “the mob.” Unfortunately, his manifesto goes off the rails as his defense of copyright quickly morphs into an indictment of the Internet and all things digital.

At times, Helprin seems to be channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, who, in his 1992 anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, heaped contempt upon the unfolding Information Age. Recently, Internet critics such as Lee Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob) and Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture) have continued this tradition of deep techno-skepticism. With Digital Barbarism, Helprin joins this cause, arguing that we are witnessing “the decline of culture,” the “mechanization of the soul,” our “intellectual and spiritual destruction,” and the rise of a movement of “wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses” that “threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate.”

And Helprin is just getting started. While he claims that he is “not decrying the digital revolution per se,” it often sounds that way. He speaks repeatedly about the “surrender” of human nature to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

Much of Helprin’s Internet ire seems to originate with the anonymous “blogging-ants” who have attacked his earlier essays in defense of copyright-term extension. Digital Barbarism becomes his chance for payback. “It would be one thing if [the digital] revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels,” Helprin says, “but it doesn’t. . . . It produces mouth-breathing morons in backward baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom seek daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won’t end . . . beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch,” and so on.

Unfortunately for Helprin, would-be rappers, basement-dwelling geeks, enviro-hippies, and NASCAR fans all predate the rise of the Internet, so one wonders if he has fingered the right culprit for civilization’s supposed decline. The fundamental problem with Digital Barbarism is that the cultural decay Helprin laments cannot be so easily tied to the battle over copyright. Indeed, most of what Helprin condemns in modern culture has come about during a time when copyright’s protections — at least as defined by law — have been expanded considerably in both length of term and breadth of coverage.

Moreover, he is simply too quick to proclaim the decline of modern civilization by looking only to the baser elements of the blogosphere. The Internet is a cultural and intellectual bazaar where one can find both the best and the worst of humanity on display at any given moment. True, “brutishness and barbarism” can be found on many cyber-corners, but not all of its corners. And, contrary to Helprin’s assertion that blogging “begins the mad race to the bottom,” one could just as easily cite countless instances of the healthy, unprecedented conversations that blogs have enabled about a diverse array of topics. Finally, even if one concedes, for the sake of argument, that blogging produces more cultural trash than treasure, would greatly enhanced copyright protection really turn things around?

There are strong moral and utilitarian arguments for protecting copyright and, during his calmer moments, Helprin articulates some of them quite effectively. He is surely right that “theft is ugly,” and that far too many people (especially in academia) are turning a blind eye to the injustices of the widespread copyright infringement taking place online today. There’s a lot of good sense buried underneath the angry rhetoric of this book; it’s regrettable — and surprising — that someone of Mark Helprin’s literary prowess didn’t make a better effort to persuade his readers.

Additional Reading about Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto:

• Mark Helprin’s home page, his Claremont Institute page, and his Wikipedia entry
• Helprin’s New York Times editorial that prompted a backlash and led him to write the book
• Helprin podcast interview with National Review Online
• Russ Roberts interviews Helprin for the Econ Talk podcast
• Lawrence Lessig’s written response at the Huffington Post and an NPR interview with Lessig about the book
• Helprin’s recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft,” which is condensed from the book
• the Amazon page and HarperCollins page for the Digital Barbarism
• a review by Jeremy Philips, and executive with News Corp, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal
• a review by Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal (+ lots of good comments)
• a review by Patrick Ross of the Copyright Alliance (Part 1, Part 2)
• a review by Jonathan Bailey that appeared on the Plagiarism Today blog
• a review by Nate Anderson of Ars Technica

There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too.  Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of the classic study Who Owns the Media?, has added his own two cents in his latest essay over at the Rebuilding Media blog. Like everything Ben writes, it is well worth reading:

If newspapers have essentially been able to thrive on the revenue from advertisers alone (again, with cost of printing more or less covered by circulation revenue), why are they having so much trouble today? The answer is not one single factor, but a major contributor is that newspapers – whether print or digital—are just worth less to advertisers than they were 20 years ago. Back then, local advertisers did not have many options for reaching the mass local audience. What was the alternative for auto dealers? For real estate agents? Supermarkets or department stores? For some, direct mail was one possible option. But that was about it. Using pre-prints instead of ROP became attractive for some large display advertisers, leaving the publishers with a piece of the cash flow. Advertisers were hit with regular rate increases. And they pretty much had to pay, The publishers made good money. But then a double whammy. Just about the time the Internet became a real alternative for classified listings—think Craigslist, Monster.com, eBay, Autotrader.com—and for retailers—think DoubleClick, Google, et al—the boys at the cable operators had perfected the insertion of highly local spots into their feeds. Between 1989 and 2007 local cable advertising increased from $500 million to $4.3 billion—or from 0.4% of all advertising to 1.6%. Advertising in newspapers fell from 26% to 15% in this period. Although some of the highly local advertisers going to cable may have taken some of their funds from budgets for radio or other local media, it is probable that a significant share came from the hides of newspapers. I estimate perhaps up to 20% of the decline in local newspaper advertising share can be attributed to local cable spots. The other whammy, the gorilla in the room, is Internet advertising. No need to elaborate. But its impact on newspapers is not just that it has siphoned off dollars per se. Much more importantly is that the Internet has given most advertisers greater market power against newspaper publishers. Many big advertisers—like car dealers, real estate offices and big box retailers—don’t need the newspapers as much.

Ben’s got it exactly right. The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of  “protectable scarcity” (thanks to Canadian media expert Ken Goldstein for that phrase).  There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears.  We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans.  That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.

If you want to boil the newspaper death spiral down to an equation, it would look something like this:

(1) unprecedented technological change

+

(2) massive inflow of new media competitors / platforms

+

(3) end of geographic “protectable scarcity”

=

(4) inability to capture a guaranteed audience

&

(5) complete loss of advertiser / investor confidence

And the process is viciously self-reinforcing.  Again, a seemingly hopeless death spiral.  So, do papers have any hope?  Compaine considers where papers might turn next in terms of a business model:

I suspect that what we will find in the intermediate future is a mix of models and choices, among them:

• The Detroit model [Detroit Free Press and Detroit News] is one reasonable experiment: An attractive daily digital version, with home delivery of the paper reduced to Thursday, Friday and Sunday.
• An advertising supported all digital model, with the publisher closing down the printing plant, selling off its trucks, laying off the circulation and production departments.
• A voluntary pay model. This may take one of several forms. The “shareware” model for software has proven to work to a point. Users are asked to pay what they can or think the product is worth. Many users will be free riders. But, as we see with public television and radio, millions in their audience make annual contributions. (In 2007 at least one-third of those who downloaded Radiohead’s free “In Rainbow” album made a payment, in some cases higher than what the band would have received from a CD sale.)

The problem with that last model is that it might help some papers remain afloat, but it is highly unlikely such a model could sustain the industry as we know it today.  There’s a reason, after all, that NPR doesn’t have a lot of competitors in the non-profit radio world; only so many benefactors — whether corporate, foundations, or individuals — are willing to spread around their donations when it comes to news.  A non-profit model or charity-based model might work for a couple of big-dog dailies with generous sugar daddies — think the New York Times and Carlos Slim — but that model won’t work for most other papers.

As Ben suggests, the best hope likely lies in some combination of all of the above, with a particular focus on finding a way to monetize the all-digital model (model #2) as quickly and effectively as possible.  But some papers are late to that game, and even those that moved aggressively to get everything online have found that the economics are still challenging in a crowded field.  The advertising cross-subsidy they lost is in the old world has already been captured online by many others. There’s just less ad $$$ to go around with so many other outlets presenting more targeted and affordable platforms than what old newspapers offer.

Regardless, I think it’s time to accept the uncomfortable reality that the newspaper industry as we know it is dead and will never return.  As an old newspaper fanatic and journalism student, this makes me a bit sad.  I still get two dailies on my doorstep every morning and will certainly miss them when they pass from this Earth.  Of course, a lot of that news will be repurposed online. And other news sources and outlets are still out there or will develop in response.  But challenging issues remain about how “long form” investigative journalism gets funded going foward. I don’t believe in the pollyanish fantasies about a world of user-generated content and “We-dia” giving us all the important news of the day.  You can’t reassemble the New York Times one Twitter at a time.

Well, I actually didn’t exactly get a chance to say quite enough for this to qualify as much of a “debate,” but I was brought in roughly a half hour into this WBUR (Boston NPR affiliate) radio show featuring Jonathan Zittrain, author of the recently released: The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. Jonathan was kind enough to suggest to the producers that I might make a good respondent to push back a bit in opposition to the thesis set forth in his new book.

Jonathan starts about 6 minutes into the show and they bring me in around 29 minutes in. Although I only got about 10 minutes to push back, I thought the show’s host Tom Ashbrook did an excellent job raising many of the same questions I do in my 3-part review (Part 1, 2, 3) of Jonathan’s provocative book.

In the show, I stress the same basic points I made in those reviews: (1) he seems to be over-stating things quite a bit in saying that the old “generative” Internet is “dying”; and in doing so, (2) he creates a false choice of possible futures from which we must choose. What I mean by false choice is that Jonathan doesn’t seem to believe a hybrid future is possible or desirable. I see no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds–-a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness.

If you’re interested, listen in.