Media Criticism

I watched some of Tuesday’s hearing in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the “future�? of the internet. The name of the hearing sounds like it was created in 1990 when the Internet was still in its early commercial stages. I would love to hear what Byron Dorgan, Daniel Inouye and other members of the committee think about Facebook, iTunes and other popular Internet resources. The hearing may have had a silly name but it featured a discussion that is critical to the long-term prospects for democratized Internet technology.

There were several members of the creative community including Writers Guild West President Patric Verrone and actress Justine Bateman who promoted freedom on the Internet as a necessity. An unlikely ally in the Christian Coalition joined these creative types in lamenting network manipulation and closure. The conservative religious organization’s representative Michele Combs was concerned that supposed maintenance and network management practices are limiting free speech and religious practice.

Industry representatives and academic experts covered the rest of the spectrum regarding net neutrality. Professor Lawrence Lessig and the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Hahn urged moderation in regulating cable companies while allowing flexibility to ensure network freedom. NCTA president Kyle McSlarrow urged Congress to avoid regulating an industry that has succeeded without government intervention.

McSlarrow’s statements highlighted the investment and commitment by cable companies in developing broadband networks. The idea that networks have been left relatively untouched by federal legislation does not mean that this state of existence should remain over the next generation. These statements could have been uttered by the meat packing industry at the turn of the 20th century and the automobile industry in the 1960s without seeming out of place. It is important for the federal government to take gradual steps toward ensuring net neutrality and monitoring cable companies to avoid censorship on the Internet. A victory for the cable companies in this round of legislation would lead to a wide range of forces including the left, right and apolitical in an uprising against virtual authoritarianism.

Anyone who has read past entries on Media Critiques is aware that I dislike the current state of polling and the use of polling by the media. Polling experts claim that the numbers they produce on topics ranging from the latest fashions to the popularity of the president can be extrapolated to the entire population. This type of certainty demonstrates a failure by seemingly intelligent pollsters to recognize that polling is a corollary of marketing and not of academia.

The impetus for my latest rage about polling comes from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review discussing a Zogby poll that claims 52% of Americans would support an attack on Iran. Writer Michael Meyer points out a number of faults with the poll including the use of only two choices to respond to a hypothetical (yes, HYPOTHETICAL) completion of nuclear weapons by Iranians in the near future. Meyer fails to point out that Zogby may be the worst of the worst when it comes to polling due to the poor wording of poll questions. I shouldn’t push Zogby polls forward as the king of bad information as every polling company shares a similar stake in my contempt.

I am not only concerned with the appearance of political support for an Iranian war inherent within the Zogby poll. My concern spreads into the 2008 presidential election where it appears that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination without a problem. The ignorance of Washington elites of what real life Americans outside of polling groups feel about the political scene gives polling its power. Polls are a gauge of the perspectives of a few people that allow politicians and executives to proceed with their own initiatives with the thin veil of public support. Polls, like the Bible, can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is time to stop giving public opinion polls such a large role in our lives and show our support for an issue by picking up a phone, putting pen to paper and screaming out loud to people in the Washington echo chamber.

I have been a fan of fringe candidates since I witnessed Ross Perot’s Quixotic campaign for president in 1992. I was only 12 at the time but I watched Perot’s TV ads and his role in the debates as something interesting. It would take something interesting to get a 12 year old involved in politics especially with a stiff like George H.W. Bush campaigning. Mike Gravel brings the same type of energy to the Democratic primary process for the 2008 election. Unfortunately, the honesty that separates him exposes his weaknesses as a presidential candidate.

The MSNBC debate on Wednesday, September 26 was one of the dozens of debates that will take place between members of the Democratic field. Mike Gravel answered a question regarding problems with his personal finances with a diatribe against credit card companies. I love his anger and enthusiasm in the same way that I enjoy Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Gravel and David are funny and some small part of me wants to share in their brutally awkward manner but I don’t want to have a conversation with either one of them.

There was little chance of Mike Gravel winning the nomination before Wednesday night but his answer to credit card companies may have sealed his fate. Americans are tired of high debt but many realize that they are stuck due to their own actions. Gravel has been relatively irrelevant in politics since he left the Senate in 1980 and Democrats are looking to strike while the iron is hot in 2008. If Mr. Gravel ever reads this, I would invite him for a beer if he ever comes through Wisconsin but he will not get my vote during the presidential primary (whenever it ends up being).

The people who read this blog are probably sick of me talking about the Democratic debates, the 2008 election and other aspects of politics that are fueled entirely by the media. I even get sick of these diatribes but I think I have given myself the unintentional mission of ending the long primary process once and for all, one blog at a time. To fuel this fire, the awful trio of the Huffington Post, Yahoo! and Slate are putting on a unique debate and a “mashup�? tool that allows people to put individual answers together into their own package. Here is a little bit more detail on the debate from the New York Times:

Here’s how it works: Charlie Rose is hooking up by satellite individually from his studio in New York with each of the eight Democratic candidates, who are scattered across the country. He’ll question them each for 12 minutes on three topics _ Iraq, health care and education. There will also be a “wild card�? question.

According to all three sponsors, these answers will be available on Friday through each website. The “mashup�? tool will also be available to help political and technological nerds the opportunity to get involved in yet another debate.

Marc Lampkin makes a good point in his latest post on the Huffington Post, a liberal blogging website headed by Arianna Huffington. Lampkin discusses the use of the “mashup�? tool as a way for people to hear what they want to hear from each candidate. Yahoo!, Slate and the Huffington Post should know better. This is already what the mainstream media does to candidates particularly the minor candidates who only make it on the news when they make a gaffe or do something silly.

If the Internet-using public is indeed tired with politics as usual and poor media coverage for their candidate, they should not resort to the “mashup�? tool. Instead, they should search for unabridged audio, video and written transcripts of their speeches to hear what they are saying around the country. Lampkin’s final point is that we will hear more of the same which makes a “mashup�? of what Obama, Clinton or even Kucinich or Gravel useless. Let’s stop pretending like high-tech gadgets and tools are really going to improve the process until we are actually ready to change the process in Washington D.C.

I have to make a confession before I go off on this brief diatribe against the partisan blogosphere: I am left of center. You may have been able to read between the lives of my previous posts but I have been a liberal for most of my politically active life. I volunteered for Senator Russ Feingold in 1998 as a high school senior, ran a College Democrats chapter in college and have worked on behalf of liberal candidates the last two elections. Having said this, I find certain crassness in the way that my fellow liberals are approaching the Larry Craig scandal.

This description was in today’s New York Times political blog:
In his first public appearance since the news broke on Monday about his airport-restroom arrest on lewd conduct charges, Senator Larry Craig offered up extraordinary public remarks in which he continued to assert that he’d done nothing “inappropriate�? and said that he regretted his guilty plea in the case.

Mr. Craig, the Idaho Republican, was joined by his wife Suzanne as he spoke in Boise. He asserted that he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of disorderly conduct (paid a $500 fine, had a 10-day jail sentence stayed pending a one-year-probationary period), “in hopes of making it go away.�?

The comments indicated below this story were certainly enough to have my stomach churning. Republicans and Democrats were fighting alike over the issue of taking advantage of legal issues to advance a political agenda. The problem is that scandals have rocked both parties at one time and another with Republicans encountering a load of problems in the last four years (Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Mark Foley, etc.) while Democrats have Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Neither side has the upper hand in the moral court.

I was curious about opinions in blogs like DailyKos which I have occasionally read and debated with activists about the Democratic agenda. DailyKos is obviously a player in the new media world but the combination of user blogs and activist rhetoric makes it less than desirable for people who do not enjoy reading stories trying to bury people while they are down. I reviewed 430 comments under the DailyKos entry on Craig’s apology and I felt the drool of my fellow liberals oozing through the screen. The feeding frenzy is on and liberals sense blood in the water for 2008.

Larry Craig is a scoundrel and contradicts himself when he says he is family values oriented but engages in actions bad enough for him to plead guilty. I think Democrats are going back to the Swift Boat incident that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 campaign as a guide of what not to do. DailyKos and other websites are trying to play the role of moral crusaders when Democrats have a checkered legal past of their own. I am yearning for a third party and press alternatives that are focused on running the country and portraying the news. Right now, each party is trying to position themselves as the least reprehensible option which makes 2008 a nightmare instead of a dream.

As you have no doubt heard, Sen. Barack Obama has responded to the popular video series “Obama Girl�? with a combination of disdain and annoyance. In a variety of interviews including Yahoo News, Obama has said that video bloggers and others who create these types of Internet products need to show more responsibility. His children have inquired about the nature of the videos and his wife has expressed frustration with having to deal with this as an issue.

The criticisms from Senators Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd have been that Barack Obama lacks sophistication in his approach to foreign policy. I think he lacks sophistication in his approach to the media. Obama participated in the YouTube debate, for God’s sake. If you can take a question from a snow man on the prospects for environmental legislation, you can suck it up and take a little ribbing about “Obama Girl.�?

Barack Obama should be worried about other issues on the campaign trail. “Obama Girl�? and other videos on the Web are supporting his campaign while being entertaining. Obama’s candidacy may be tripped up by an established senator ahead of him in the Democratic primaries, questions about his experience and the inevitable smear machine that comes with a two-party system. He will also deal with that insidious elephant in the room that is racism. Barack Obama has a lot of ridiculous obstacles to face in his race to the presidency without creating his own. The senator needs to relax because the people he is criticizing-namely, bloggers and activists-appreciate a little humor with their politics.

The Guardian Unlimited reported today that the British government is banning nearly a thousand off-shore gambling companies from advertising on UK websites. This standard is meant to increase the legal responsibility of online companies in England while keeping out gambling companies from countries with lower legal thresholds for gaming. There are a few exceptions on what the Guardian refers to as the “white list�? but I see this as a step backward for the United Kingdom.

I have written on similar topics in the United States in the past particularly the effort to blame MySpace and other social networking sites for new social ills. The British government is trying to sanitize the Internet which includes millions of websites that help people fulfill their fantasies. I find it particularly egregious that the government will penalize or imprison companies that take advertising dollars from off-shore gambling companies.

This effort to eliminate off-shore gambling in the United Kingdom will lead nowhere. People will still find avenues for gambling as well as meet their other vices online. Advertising companies will lose money due to legislation that will make gambling more attractive instead of making it socially unacceptable. The legalistic reasoning behind this move thinly veils a moralistic tone that is gripping the United Kingdom in a similar way that it has gripped the United States. The British should stop blaming online media and work on other issues of greater importance.