Politics, open government, and safe streets. And the constant incursion of cycling.

Category: Distribution Page 4 of 15

Government Support for Journalism

Had the good fortune to spend some time this week talking and thinking about the future of traditional media.  There is, as you’ve probably heard, a fair amount of support for various modes of government action.  Within that context, I think Dan Gillmor’s got a post worth reading:

But as people decry or laugh off a bailout of newspapers, as the New York Times’ David Carr did yesterday in his column, they should remember that government has never entirely lacked financial influence — and it doesn’t lack it now — over the journalism business.

Governments play major roles in the success or failure of all kinds of business. How corporations do business, and which ones pay which taxes, are decided by lawmakers. But journalism organizations have enjoyed their share of special treatment — and we should be glad, based on our nation’s early history, that they did.

Gillmor goes on with a brief history lesson on the very real ways that government lent a helping financial hand to the press over the years.  He does come out against direct subsidies, and suggests where money might best be spent.  Check it out.

Who Pays for the News?

That’s the title of a New America Foundation forum (really, a couple of panel discussions) I’m planning to check out this morning.  It’s a topic at the center of an area that I’ve been deeply interested in (and have peripherally worked in) for years.  If you share my interest, you can watch the proceedings here.

More Warner Music FAIL

Boing Boing points out that if you go to the official Sire Records (a Warner Music Group ) site, and try to click on any of the videos for Sire Records artists, you’ll get a notice that the video has been taken down as a result of a DMCA claim by . . .  Warner Music Group.  As a Boing Boing reader puts it:

Their long arm of the law has stretched all the way around the internet to spank themselves in the ass.

We already know that Warner hates its customers, but now it seems to have declared open warfare on itself.  Morons, truly.

Is *This* the Veterans Administration’s Solution to Its Own Poor Performance?

You really have to wonder what sort of world someone lives in that makes this make sense:

Last Tuesday night, [David Schultz, a reporter with Public Radio station WAMU] was covering a public event at the V.A. Hospital in Washington, D.C. While interviewing one of the veterans about the poor treatment he was receiving at the hands of the V.A., Ms. [Gloria] Hairston demanded that Schultz stop recording the interview and hand over his recording equipment.

“She said I wouldn’t be allowed to leave,” Schultz tells WTOP.

At first he refused. But after being surrounded by armed police officers who stood between him and the exit, he looked for a compromise.

“I became worried that I was going to get arrested,” Schultz says.

Schultz convinced Hairston that all she really needed to confiscate was the memory card to his recorder, rather than all of his equipment. While this was going on, many of the veterans from the meeting had come out to watch the confrontation.

One of those veterans, an amputee in a wheelchair, approached Schultz and asked him for his phone number.

“I started to give it to him and then the woman {Hairston} became irate, she said you can’t give him your phone number. You have to give me all of your equipment or I’m going to get ugly. She used the phrase ‘get ugly,'” Schultz says,

Like any good reporter, Schultz stood his ground and called his boss for direction. Longtime newsman Jim Asendio is the news director for WAMU.

“I told him to give them the flash card and get out of there,” Asendio says. “I didn’t want this to get out of hand.”

Schultz reluctantly handed over the memory card from his recorder.

This happened Tuesday.  So, by Friday, we’ve got a quick apology for a gross mistake, right?

Unfortunately, WAMU has been unsuccessful in retrieving the memory card which remains in the hands of the federal government.

“Our lawyers are working on that,” Asendio says.

On Thursday afternoon, Asendio hand-delivered a letter from WAMU’s general manager to the V.A Hospital demanding the return of the memory card. When he tried to deliver a copy of the letter to V.A. headquarters, he was turned away.

[ . . . ]

Hairston refused to answer any questions about the incident when reached by phone Thursday afternoon.

“I’m going to take your query and move it up the ladder,” she said. “I’m going to send it over to the central office.”

The central office is the V.A. headquarters. Calls and e-mails to Phil Budahn, director of media relations for the Department of Veterans Affairs, also went unreturned.

“I’m guessing nobody’s called you back,” was Budahn’s only comment when reached late Thursday.

Gloria Hairston needs to be fired.  And the Veterans Administration needs to take a hard look at both its public relations operation, as well as whoever it’s letting walk around armed inside its facilities.  It’s pretty obvious that some of them lack the judgment you’d want from someone with a gun.

Sarah Cox, a public affairs specialist at the hospital, was reluctant to answer any basic questions about Hairston including the correct spelling of her name or the length of her employment.

Warner Music? Forget Them.

You’ve seen my occasional grumbling about Warner going out of its way to pull down music videos in which it has some rights from YouTube.  Well, it seems they’ve really stepped it up, now:

In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,” and she posted it on YouTube.

Weeks later, she received an e-mail message from YouTube: her video was being removed “as a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,” which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol.

[ . . . ]

In addition to Ms. Weybret’s video, family home videos that included a portion of a song playing in the background have been removed, as have any number of videos that use music in goofy ways, from montages to mash-ups.

When a man posted a video of himself using music to teach sign language, the audio was switched off because he lacked the proper copyright clearance to use Foreigner’s 1980s song “Waiting for a Girl Like You.”

Yeah.  Next time you’re tempted to buy a CD or download a track from iTunes/Amazon, check out the publisher/label, and decide if you want to reward this kind of behaviour.

Sen. Feinstein Wants To See Your Packets

Just got this from Public Knowledge:

Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment [presented by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) will] allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

  1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
  2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

Right now, we need you to contact a few key Senators: Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Daniel Inouye, and Chairman of the Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Finance Committee Max Baucus, and senior member of the Appropriations Committee Senator Barbara Mikulski, and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.

Click here for Public Knowledge’s suggested letter/fax.  Also, California, can you please do us a favor and make Feinstein your governor so the rest of us don’t have to suffer her any more?  And don’t give me any noise about what a bad governor she’d be.  We already know you have no standards.

Producing the NFL Broadcast

I have zero interest in football, but this is a fascinating look at what it takes to transfer the action on the field to your television screen:

If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.

The Press Learns How to Ask Questions at the White House Again

Eric Boehlert has a fantastic column over at Media Matters examine the stark difference between the press corps’ approach to Bush on one hand, and Obama/Clinton on the other.   The White House press corps – which figuratively (and sometimes literally) didn’t bother showing up during the Bush years – all of a sudden decides that they’re going to demand answers to questions.   And it sure feels a lot like the beginning of the Clinton years.  Boehlert notes:

Can’t say I’m surprised about the sudden change in behavior, though. Taking the long view, I recently went back and contrasted how the press covered the first days and weeks of Clinton’s first term in 1993 with its coverage of Bush’s arrival in 2001. The difference in tone and substance was startling. (Think bare-knuckled vs. cottony soft.)

One explanation at the time of the Bush lovefest was that reporters and pundits were just so burnt out by the Clinton scandal years that they needed some downtime. They needed to relax; it was human nature. Conversely, the opposite now seems to be true: Because the press dozed for so long — because it sleepwalked through the Bush years — it just had to spring back to life with the new administration. It’s human nature.

When contrasting the early Clinton and Bush coverage, I noted it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up the emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration. But wouldn’t you know it, the press corps’ alarm went off right on time for Obama’s arrival last week, with the Beltway media taking down off the shelf the dusty set of contentious, in-your-face rules of engagement they practiced during the Clinton years and putting into safe storage the docile, somnambulant guidelines from the Bush era. In other words, one set of rules for Clinton and Obama, another for Bush. One standard for the Democrats; a separate, safer one, for the Republican.

Let’s be clear – I absolutely want an aggressive press corps that will illustrate the gaps between Obama’s rhetoric and action, between Congress pushing their own political interest over our public interest.  But that’s not what we’re going to be getting here, I think we’ll soon see.  Instead, we’re going to see a political press obsessed with petty slights and side issues.  And while they’re flailing away at the White House, there will be nearly no substantive examination of the breathtakingly ignorant talking points pushed by Republicans in Congress.   This isn’t a matter of bias perception on my part – there’s a substantive record to back it up.   What’s the solution?  I really don’t know.  It’s much like the financial industry, I think.  Everyone needs the lie to be true, lest they lose their place.  Perhaps it all needs to come crashing down.

But if it did, how would the country know?

Recommend: Boston.com’s Big Picture

A little while back, Boston.com launched a regular feature called The Big Picture.  And it’s exactly that – a series of high res photos presented in a way that occupies most of your screen.  The editors, thus far, have done a fantastic job of selecting work that is well suited to this sort of presentation.  The latest – London at Night – hits on some of my favorite photographic themes (aerials of cities, urban night shots, and London).   Take a look through the archives (drop down menu, upper right), and I bet you’ll find yourself looking around longer than you’d planned.

Get Up, Stand Up

TPM and its readers are wondering the same thing I am – where are the Democrats on TV talking about the stimulus bill?  If their absence is a function of being denied by the same DC show bookers, despite their best efforts, I – as a Democrat- need to hear that.

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