Dana Blankenhorn

Fox Jr.

One neat trick the Right perfected over the last generation has been the manipulation of the media.

A founding principle of the Nixon Thesis is  "the liberal media." Any criticism, on anything from any quarter gets this immediate response from the conservative grassroots. "You're part of the liberal media," followed by a prompt dismissal of the critic.

It's a great dodge, this victim game. It means you never need answer a critic. They're biased. They're the enemy. And you can spread this word among your acolytes, so they too are inoculated.

Once inoculated in this way people become sheep. Nothing that contradicts you can ever get to them.

To this has been added the control and ownership of the media. The best know conservative media baron is Rupert Murdoch, who now has immense sway over the politics of Australia, Britain and the U.S. through his ownership of newspapers, magazines, TV and cable, and Web sites. A better example might be Silvio Berlusconi, who used his control of Italy's media to make himself ruler of all Italy.

To these conservatives the equation is pretty simple. Own the media and you control the people. Grab them by the clickers and their hearts and minds will follow. Politics is not a contest of ideas. It is a contest of wills, and money. With enough of both you can make people believe anything you want.

Liberals have never really gotten their heads around this. It's one thing to deal with a media that is owned by people who vote conservative. It's another thing entirely to face a conservative media, a media where no voices other than conservatives ones get a hearing, where no facts other than those conservatives approve of can be known.

Murdoch is not alone. Pat Robertson controls a large hunk of the media. Sun Myung Moon controls another hunk. There have long been regional conservative barons in various parts of the country -- Freedom Newspapers in California, Morris Communications in Georgia. The dominance of these companies within their markets mean liberal causes, liberal politicians, and liberal organizations start off with an immense disadvantage.

But at least these organizations pretend to exist in the market.

Valuing Clicks

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Let's go back to Internet Commerce a moment or two. That's what A-Clue.Com was created to cover in 1997.

A click's value is easy to state but very hard to calculate.

It's worth what you can get for it.

The corollary is also true.

It costs what it costs.

In absolute terms this means a page view is worth the advertising (or commerce revenue) you can generate from it, less the cost of getting the page view and serving the page.

V= A - C

These values vary tremendously by site, and ignorance of the underlying equation leads to ferocious misunderstanding wherever e-commerce is discussed.

Journalism's Real Problem

You may (or may not) know that newspapers are once again threatening the Internet, claiming once again that links are theft (so don't expect me to link to any AP copy in the future). 

Lauren Weinstein writes (correctly) that a well-written Robots.Txt can stop any links you don't like and that in any case Google (which seems to be the target) already has a valid business agreement with AP to host stories. 

But that's not the problem. European newspapers are, in fact, doing quite well. American publishers have plundered their assets, first demanding enormous profit margins (by cutting jobs), then overloading the assets with debt, and now blaming the workers for all their faults.

Which brings me to the clip above. You'll note how six-figure salaried Ali Velshi, in his $1,000 vests, is calling an 84-year old waitress "lucky" because she has such low expectations.

That's the problem. The journalism industry, like the rest of America, has spent the last decades hollowing-out its middle class. There are a few at the top (and all on-air talent like Velshi counts), there are some people struggling at the bottom (like yours truly), and there is no longer anything in the middle.

The Influence Game

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 6 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since the birth of the Republic media and politics have been one.

When the President quoted Washington at his Inauguration, he was in fact quoting pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense and The Crisis made him the Springsteen of that time:

"America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

The American media went from pamphlets to penny papers, from books to urban newspapers, from radio to TV, and politicians always followed. The wisest cultivated the new media, the most devious also excoriated the old.

We are again in the midst of such a media transformation. We are moving from an age dominated by TV (well, cable) to one dominated by the Internet. This has many implications. Depth over drama, transparency over control, an end to the concept of journalists as gatekeepers to one in which we're enablers, using links to empower our work rather than acting-out.

And so we come again to the threat of newspapers to go out of business, unless they're given financial control over the Internets.

News Industry Threatens Suicide, Blogger Offers Rope

Having failed for 15 years to build a compelling business model (because it looked at the whole thing backwards) newspapers are now threatening to commit seppuku unless we are all forced to grovel at their feet and pay them for their drivel.

News of this final insult comes in an LA Times column from Tim Rutten, quoting New York Times editor Bill Keller.

Here's the idea and see if you can spot the flaw.

The existing players in the news industry get an antitrust exemption, like baseball. Then they all get together in a Trust that can charge people for accessing their crap and get away with it. They'll make you pay because otherwise you will know nothing. Even the Google will have to pay.

Think of it. Bloggers won't know about anything, and won't be able to link to it, unless they pay. Readers won't know about traffic accidents, or city council meetings, or the workings of their legislatures, unless they pay whatever the Trust tells them they must to keep fatties like Rutten in skittles and beer.

What do I have to say in response? Oh please do it. Please, please, please.

One Word for Broadband Stimulus

Congress is looking at putting anywhere from $6-9 billion into broadband as part of the stimulus bill.

Not what advocates like Free Press want. (They were looking at more like $44 billion.) But a lot more than I was thinking of, namely, zero.

This is not to say I hate broadband. I love me some broadband, the broader the better. I just happen to think that competition is a better tool for getting it than any subsidy.

Which leads to  one word, the one word by which I will measure whether this is money down a rathole or something significant.

Internet.

Phone FUD Targets Google

It may be the first challenge to the new President's tech policy.

For the last several months advocates for the nation's phone monopolists have been ginning up a public relations campaign against Google. They claim it's a monopolist. They claim it's a threat to freedom, a violator of privacy, evil.

It's being done in clever ways, through academics and think tanks you don't usually think of as Bell shills. Privacy advocates are being taken in, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But it doesn't take a genius to see where all this is coming for, or where it's leading. All it takes is a little knowledge of the industry's history, a quick look at who stands to benefit, and a short Google of who's cheering from the sidelines.

Just read Scott Cleland's blog. Cleland, a notorious phone monopoly booster of long standing, has been hammering Google this year at every opportunity.

Google itself seems unable to understand the situation, or properly respond to it. CEO Eric Schmidt has tried to be personally charming. The company's other officials have sought to be transparent, and answer questions honestly.

Meanwhile, the stock market crash has hit Google hard. The company is now worth only about what Verizon is worth -- AT&T is now worth nearly twice that. And Google's stock valuation has begun tracking the phone giants. Suddenly it's no longer a growth stock.

How should Google respond? Aggressively. And it needs to understand who its opposition really is, the ruthlessness of that opposition, and the nature of the struggle.

It is a political struggle.

The Golden Rule

It's always amusing to watch Netroot bloggers fulminate and rend their garments over the right-wing bias of TeeVee and print journalists. (To the right is Howard Kurtz, symbol of this new age. Married to a right-wing hack, he dares sit as judge of everyone else's work.)

It's not because the bloggers are wrong. They're right. The vast majority of people who are given TeeVee speaking time or favored print positions are supporters of this war, endorsers of this President, and supporters of Sen. McCain.

But the Netroots is forgetting The Golden Rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules.

For 40 years conservatives based their myths and values on the idea of a "liberal media conspiracy" which was dieing the moment they spoke the words. Today we have two types of TeeVee and newspaper owners:

1. People like Rupert Murdoch, Pat Robertson and Sun Myung-Moon who run their properties as propaganda organs, and
2. Media conglomerates that have benefited enormously from the Bush-inspired consolidation of the last 8 years and have sent the word down that questioning the status-quo is risky.

You can say all you want about professions like politics, or the law, or big business. But in no profession is the idea of BOGU (bend over grease up) such a key to success as journalism.

How do you become a news anchor? How do you become a newspaper columnist?

You do it by climbing a corporate hierarchy.

Despite the meritocratic pretensions of the so-called profession, quality means a lot less in the search for modern "journalistic leadership" than a willingness to reflect what management wants said, and to ape that shamelessly.

The Russert Error

You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, especially when they have just departed.

But Tim Russert defined a horrible era in journalism, the era of my life, an era I was given scant chance to participate in, perhaps the worst era in the profession's history.

To Russert journalists were referees, access was all, and he was the star. This is the opposite of how I was taught.  Journalists are witnesses, sources are to be used, and we're all anonymous. Russert's role was a burlesque of the character Burt Lancaster played in 1957's The Sweet Smell of Success. Process was everything, inside baseball took the place of policy, the the public's interest in the crimes of his time was lost.

The "hard questions" Russert asked were mainly "gotcha" questions, false premises piled on phony sanctimony, which he got from his guests' political opponents. He never asked the really hard questions, never challenged the run-up to the Iraq War, never really challenged the war. As a result neither did anyone else.

It was because of Russert's Rule:

My personal policy is always off the record when talking to government officials unless specified.

Self Delusion

Self delusion is a common human trait. Only by convincing ourselves that change is possible does change become possible.

Journalists are supposed to keep a check on this. We're taught in school, and at work, to play straight with all others, so we can play straight with our readers.

Yet we are human. We lie to ourselves all the time. And when we do it's up to others to call us on it.

One hallmark of this era, within journalism, has been a self delusion among its elite practitioners that they are somehow above the market, and above the fray, that they are impartial arbiters of what is happening around them.

This is a misreading of our role. We're not umpires. We are witnesses.

But thinking ourselves umpires gives us a feeling of power. It boosts our egos. This is a very dangerous way to live and work, but on TeeVee it's often encouraged, because TeeVee is a "hot" medium, excitement a form of acting, so puffing yourself up and preening is what makes you acceptable to the camera.

I got a nasty taste of this on MSNBC recently, during Keith Olbermann's Countdown. He was chatting with Jonathan Alter (left) about the constant right-wing refrain that "the press is biased." Both laughed, called it "working the refs," and agreed that it never works.

Bullshit.

(It's at around 5:10 in the video which follows)