‘First, Do No Harm’: A Plea to the FTC
I must confess that I have not seen, much less read, a printed-on-paper English language newspaper for years; here in our remote, rural area of Panamá they are not generally available. I do occasionally skim two Spanish language newspapers, but not often. Mainly, I buy them when painting a wall. They keep paint from falling on the floor.
It’s far easier to find stuff on the Internet, whether via newspaper websites or other websites. Non-English websites are easily if not perfectly translated into English almost instantaneously; that makes the available information sources far more diverse than the New York Times or even the West Dry Gulch Gazette.
“Instantaneously” is an important word; the Internet is instantaneous, and printed newspapers are not. I can e-mail a friend far away in eastern Europe and he gets my message immediately — about as fast as the speed of light. The morning editions of newspapers are put to bed late the night before.
Really current stuff? Forget it. The search engines and the various aggregators make access to current information extraordinarily fast and easy. Often, when I go to a link found at one site, I click on provided links and get more information about stuff in which I am interested. There is no need to page through multiple advertisements and articles about the latest celebrity escapade in which I have no interest whatever — that stuff is available in glorious abundance on the Internet as well, but I don’t have to leaf through it to find something in which I might be interested. Nor does the Internet create tons of wastepaper, for which many trees had to be sacrificed. Where are the tree huggers in this mess?
Among the various proposals put forward by the FTC:
Establish a “journalism” division of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is the federal program that places young people with nonprofits to get training and do public service work. According to its proponents, this would help to ensure that young people who love journalism will stay in the field. “It strikes us as a win-win; we get more journalists covering our communities, and young journalists have a chance to gain valuable experience – even at a time when the small dailies where they might have started are laying reporters off.”(footnotes omitted)
Allow content developed for international broadcasting to be used domestically. Almost $700 million of taxpayers’ money is spent on content generated for use by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for international dissemination. This news would be valuable to U.S. citizens as well. A 60-year old law, however, prohibits the rebroadcast of this government-funded international news to U.S. consumers and taxpayers.
In April 2009, President Obama signed a law to increase the size of the Clinton-era AmeriCorps to 250,000 enrollees from 75,000 “gradually.” It is, as we all know, a strictly neutral entity which has no interest in promoting governmental propaganda information or any ideological agenda; and, of course, it is always on the side of the angels. Perhaps it can fill the great need for a Department of Information, but with a disclaimer to the effect that “this information is provided by the United States government at taxpayer expense. Fair and balanced, no Faux News and that’s the truth. Enjoy!”
Voice of America is “the official external radio and television service of the United States federal government.” It is a neat way to spread information and, just maybe, a wee bit of propaganda, abroad. Sometimes, it is unclear whose side VOA is on. Still, it might be useful to have VOA broadcasts available to folks in the United States; we are paying for it and knowing what our tax money is promoting would be useful. Perhaps its broadcasts could be live-streamed over the Internet and archived so that we might access them at leisure.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may also be useful in disseminating information about the United States; I haven’t heard them, and they do seem to have irritated some repressive states. It might also be useful were their broadcasts made available in the United States, so that we could find out what they are up to. But as sources of accurate news for people in the United States, I doubt it.
Strangely, the American Forces Network is missing from the FTC list. It is available via shortwave radio, and back on September 11, 2001, when a man-made disaster struck New York City and elsewhere, I was able to watch on a local Venezuelan television station (in Spanish) and get coordinated audio in English via an American Forces Network shortwave broadcast. Of course, its audience consists principally of baby killers, uniformed assassins, and other miscreants, so the omission may be reasonable, at least until the military is reformed and becomes adequately politically correct.
We need a truly free press, and taxing Internet news providers — and the rest of us — for a government sponsored “free” press is hardly a step in the right direction. The FTC and the FCC should stick to their legislatively mandated functions, even though this may limit the promotion opportunities for some GS-15 civil “servants” to GS-16 and higher grades. Of course, we need more of them and they need the money even though the rest of America may be suffering from a recession, but it’s boom time for federal employees. On average, federal employees are paid $71,206 per year compared to $40,331 for private sector workers. (When you include benefits such as health care and retirement, federal employees make almost double what private sector employees receive: $119,982 versus $59,909.)
There are plenty of other things for them to get involved in where they can do less damage than mucking about with the provision of news and information. Here is one possibility: a government-wide study, with lots of committees, planning groups, and consultants, to develop a new governmental oath of office based on the Hippocratic oath to replace the hypocrisy oath now commonly relied upon. True, the Hippocratic oath doesn’t actually say “first do no harm,” but it comes pretty close and could be a good starting point.
Such a study could easily resemble the mating of elements in the first two of these three respects: lots of noise, accomplished at a high level, with results many months later; only the third is dubious, and that is comforting.
Journalism is in sorry shape these days, and the biggest consequence of this is an increasingly ill-informed general public and ever more antagonistic political debates, thanks to participants having their own unique set of “facts.” The so-called “new media” is no more than a Tower of Babble, and the “old media” is on life support and mostly beholden to greater corporate interests. You also have things only resembling the news media, like Fox News, that is mostly for entertainment and rabble rousing, but is worse than useless for getting informed on what’s going on. Even using Google to try to be your own journalist has become much more problematic with SEO manipulation of Google search results, like this for instance, now very common.
The bottom line is that something needs to be done — a good free press is a responsible and diligent one. And while the clueless might dismiss newspapers as being dinosaurs, to this day they are still the primary journalistic sources for real news, and nothing has really stepped up as an adequate replacement. Pre-Internet, I remember as a kid lots of speculation about TV news replacing newspapers, but that never happened. The networks news was mostly pretty sketchy and mostly recited headline events, with the lone exception being CBS’s special reports, and local TV news focused mostly on sports, weather, and local headline bits, with the occasional tabloidish “exposes” during sweeps weeks. The surge in 24 hr cable news shows and the expansion of local TV news did nothing to improve matters. So now we have the Internet and a myriad of sources, most of which are junk and getting junkier.
As usual, you confuse facts with propaganda, and propaganda with facts.
They’re called HUNs – Historically Underutilized Newspapers
“The FCC document notes that “this draft does not represent conclusions or recommendations by the Commission or FTC staff; it is solely for purposes of discussion.” On June 4, the FTC further clarified that the earlier discussion draft had not actually endorsed any proposal.”
Am reading that as, “We’ve been told [by a particular party or parties] to present this before the public……..
OR ELSE.”
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This is one of the more poorly written PJM articles I’ve read–not that I disagree with it. Take it back to the shed, Dan.
This country has not had a free press since william Randalph Hearst said to one of his photographers in Cuba you ptovide the pictures I will provide the war. The development of printing technology had robbed the United States of free press until Woodrow Willson 75,000 member propiganda ministry put it to the sword until the current decade. The advanatages of capital intensive publishing were such that they used to say “Never argue with anyone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.” That stated true until Matt Drudge with his straw hat and laptop won the day against the New York Times.
The1992 advent of the World Wide Web gave us back a free press. The FTC is just trying to take it away again.
Thanks for a great article, Dan. It’s a funny, satirical take on a really stupid idea. Anyone, liberal or conservative, who would support government subsidy and support of the press is a fool.
Was Obsama’s neo-Goebbels/Propaganda Commisar, ‘Ass – “This Is For Your Own Good – You Just Don’t Know It, Pally!” – Bunstain,’ seen in the area?
And why should FTC heed anyone’s plea, pray tell me …? Haven’t we learnt enough? Pleas, townhalls, protests, street progressions, speeches, twittoring —ain’t gonna have ANY effect on the beastly machine of Obama. Why would anyone want to waste time by pleading to the crocodile not to eat them? Now if you talk about, and act on, ‘kicking some crocodile arse’, that would be useful.