Category Archives: Media

How to Fix Talk Radio Without a Fairness Doctrine

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Back in the summer of 2007, Josh Silver's FreePress.org, and the Center for American Progress published a very important, and little discussed report called

The Structural Imbalance of Talk Radio

It found that:

In the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top
five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk
radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.

Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on
these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets
reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and
24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.

AND THIS was when Air America was in the game. Those days are now over, and the situation is far worse (it was getting worse long before AA's bankruptcy).
 

Read the report. It's very well written, unwonky, and extremely clear in both content, conclusions, and the implications if we don't repair this huge disparity in American media. Since it came out during the heat of the early presidential campaign, it was mostly buried. And of course, social networks weren't in high gear yet. The timing sucked, but the data and conclusions are dynamite.

The report concludes that the answer to the problem is not some hackneyed and outdated "Fairness Doctrine," but rather, a new set of regulations that more carefully target the licensing process, station ownership "caps," and much stronger and clearly defined "public interest" standards enforcement (with funding from levied fines being routed to public broadcasting).

Please retweet this post widely, and make sure your friends read it. It's important that we be well -armed with the facts if we are ever to put this hideous and dangerous genie back in the bottle.

Remember, conservative talk radio is protected by the first amendment, but media consolidation and licensing rules are not. But it is protected by a TV network;  a twenty-four hour, seven day a week, ultra-conservative television network that makes no apologies for being an overwhelmingly partisan political operation with few ethical or civic constraints placed on it.  It's called "Fox News."  And of course, the conservative radio markets protect Fox in return. It's an unholy reciprocal alliance that is helping to drive this nation right off a cliff. And the front wheels have already gone over the edge.

READ:  Structural Imbalance of Talk Radio (PDF)

 

 

 

 

Has the web lost your mind?

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In an inadequately brief, but crucially important review or what is sure to be an even more important and discussed book, Ellen Ullman, asks, "is the wisdom of  the crowd, actually a lie?" 

A self-confessed "humanistic softie," Jaron Lanier is fighting to wrest control of technology from the "ascendant tribe" of technologists who believe that wisdom emerges from vast crowds, rather than from distinct, individual human beings. According to Lanier, the Internet designs made by that "winning subculture" degrade the very definition of humanness. The saddest example comes from young people who brag of their thousands of friends on Facebook. To them, Lanier replies that this "can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced." 

Having been in information technology since the early 1980s, I have watched this "crowd wisdom" legend grow and grow, and the almost automatic assumption that the wisdom of the crowd is always right or will bear fruit not only terrifies me, but I can see the mob mentality it often encourages in the web sites and social networks empowering the  Tea Party movement that is so actively gnawing at our national fabric.

I am a big fan of social networks, and some useful methods and mechanisms that come from crowd wisdom. But they all have limits. They can lower the cost of producing information and  knowledge, but they cannot replace the value of a single human mind, with sufficient understanding of the coincident facts and issues, which can analyze the information and put it to good use in ways that will extend, enhance or illuminate our human condition. 

This is the very reason why my own interests and career have focused on developing techniques and applications  which human beings can use to more easily do what they want to do naturally and intuitively. And that is to organize information in cohesive structures which make understanding anything—and sharing that understanding—a whole lot easier.  You know, kinda like a next-gen version of… of… a book?

I'd love to write more on this, but as the related article below predicts, my fragmented attention span is already diverted to Twitter, the Olympics, bitching about David Gregory's toolism,  and.. wait for it… some productive work.

Rebuttal & Commentary

What to reject when you're rejecting… the wisdom of crowds — @JayRosen_NYU writes an excellent (and snarky) rebuttal to many of Lanier's concerns and premises.

Related

Jaron Lanier says Internet has fallen short

Is  Google Making Us Stupid? — by Nicholas Carr —  What the Internet is doing to our brains" is a magazine article by Carr which is highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition.

New GOP Group to Promote Conservative Ideas

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G.O.P. Group to Promote Conservative Ideas.

There has been no shortage of Conservative think tanks. We're inundated with them. What this is really about is an organization specifically designed to exploit the Citizen's United Ruling. 

There are literally hundreds of these advocacy groups already, with combined budgets well over a billion dollars. And they funnel money to countless smaller groups, and astroturf front organizations. 

This will just be one that can channel their national messages, with the really big dollars they know can be raised now, and using top talent to coordinate (wordsmith and style) their message.

And if past is prologue, the left will probably just let this happen, with little if any pushback whatever.

WASHINGTON — A group of prominent Republicans is forming an organization to develop and market conservative ideas, copying a successful Democratic model and hoping to capitalize on the fund-raising and electioneering possibilities opened up by a recent Supreme Court ruling.