Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 22

I’m not sure which is spiraling downward faster, advertising revenues at newspapers or the debate over what to do about it. Well, actually the latter just seems to be spiraling, covering the same tracks over and over.

The latest to posit on the proposition of how to financially support quality and costly journalism are a federal judge and a Cleveland newspaper columnist. They both use the death spiral analogy you’ve seen in this space from time to time. And both give some of the blame to parasitic pests on the Internet who feed off the news generated by the professionals at considerable expense.

Judge Richard Posner

U.S. 7th Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner explains in blog posting the phenomenon this way: “A newspaper with shrinking revenues can shrink its costs only by reducing the number of reporters, columnists, and editors, and when it does that quality falls, and therefore demand, and falling demand means falling revenues and therefore increased pressure to economize–by cutting the journalist staff some more. This vicious cycle, amplified by the economic downturn, may continue until very little of the newspaper industry is left.”

Columnist Connie Schultz

Meanwhile, Connie Schultz columnizes at the Plain Dealer, argues that “parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match. The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts. …

“It’s also a downward spiral toward extinction.”

Posner calls for tightening copyright laws to bar even paraphrasing or linking to copyrighted material on the Internet without the consent of the copyright holder.

This would require a bit of rethinking about what has become known as the Fairness Doctrine, which makes blog postings like this one possible. I take snippets of the original efforts of others, attribute it and, whenever possible, provide a link to the original. The link, rather than being a drain, can be construed as a benefit, especially if the linked Web site is supported by advertising, which benefits from the added views and thus spirals up for a change.

Schultz offers us some thoughts from First Amendment attorney David Marburger and his brother Daniel, an economics professor at Arkansas State University.

She says the Marburgers have suggested changing federal copyright law to allow those who originate news to retain its commercial value by virtue of exclusivity for 24 hours.

David Marburger cites the 1918 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court found the International news Service was engaging in unfair competition by rewriting Associated Press stories and selling them to newspapers in competition with the AP. The issued an injunction but only for the time period in which the news retained its commercial value.

If the case sounds vaguely familiar it may be because I wrote about it in Part 15 of this ongoing series.

Schultz notes that the Marburgers anticipate that critics will charge that newspapers want to monopolize the news. To which the reply is, “No, we want to temporarily stop the unfair practice of those who use the sweat of our brow to compete against us.”

Blogger/professor Jeff Jarvis

BuzzMachine blogger and professor Jeff Jarvis, of course, pooh-poohs both of the above and misses the point.

Jarvis hypothesizes thusly: “So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours.”

No, the newspaper should have exclusive rights to its original reporting, its phrasing, its presentation. If others, once alerted by the paper, can independently confirm through their own contacts and sources, then report it in their own words, that, in my view, does not infringe.

If they cannot confirm it themselves, they should very briefly provide their readers with the bare facts, properly attributed to those who did the heavy lifting, and link to the originator. If the originator happens to be The Wall Street Journal, that link might lead to Web page that requires the would be consumer to be a paid subscriber. If the site is free, it is probably supported by advertising.

Jarvis further makes the specious argument that under the Shultz-Marburger-Posner scenario that hot news would become the sole possession of the first on the scene.

“Look at how fast the Michael Jackson news spread,” he says. “Under these guys’ scheme, TMZ would have had exclusive right to publish his death for a day.”

In reality, a number of responsible Web sites, unable to confirm the TMZ’s news (or speculation?), linked to and/or attributed to TMZ. Once their usual sources — L.A. Times, AP, Reuters — independently confirmed the death, those were the ones cited.

Someone does need to find a way to start lynching the rustlers of intellectual property, or we will see it slowly erode and disappear.

Has politics trumped science in the transparent Obama administration?

Has the most transparent administration in history gone a bit murky?

While the House urgently rushed to pass a cap-and-tax-and-tax-and-tax bill to stave off the imminent collapse of the global biosphere under the weight of carbon dioxide emissions, it seems that over at the EPA there were a couple of naysayers who weren’t being heard.

A report prepared for the National Center for Environmental Economics by Alan Carlin and John Davidson was — How shall we put it this? — being suppressed by the bosses at EPA.

Was it because the report said:

— Global temperatures have declined for 11 years while CO2 levels increased?

— Consensus on hurricane behavior has changed to an opinion that global warming has little or no effect?

— There is little evidence Greenland is shedding ice?

— The bad economy has cause a decline in greenhouse gas emissions.

— Assumptions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used false assumptions about the effect of water vapor?

— The IPCC used faulty data on solar variability, which new research suggests could account for 68 percent of any increase in global temperatures?

I first read about Carlin and Davidson in an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, which noted that Carlin, who has worked for EPA for 38 years, has been taken off climate-related work.

IBD noted that, when Carlin asked that his report be forwarded up the ladder for consideration along with what he described as faulty data from IPCC, he was stiffed by his boss, who replied in an e-mail: “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Politics trump science? Not in an Obama administration, we were assured.

This contretemps was first reported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which released both the report and an exchange of e-mails.

The New York Times did a story on its Web site over the weekend, even following it up with questions to people in Congress. The paper quoted Republican Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming, as saying, “What’s happening here is that the EPA is cooking the books. They have suppressed a study that completely blows apart the scientific underpinnings of the endangerment finding that the EPA administrator made on CO2, and this study has been suppressed because it does not fit the Obama administration’s political objectives.”

I asked our wire editor that day to ask Associated Press if it would look into the story. She was told the environmental reports were really busy with the climate bill, but they would make a note of it and follow-up if their schedules clear up.

Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 21

Alan Cowell, writing today in The New York Times (I could not find it in the National print edition delivered to my home, even though he makes a distinction between those who are reading online and those dinosaurs reading paper printed with ink), again asked the question that is burning a hole in the pockets of journalists everywhere: “Is Free News Really Worth the Price?”

Cowell prattles on about the Twitter messages and images coming out of bloody Iran, unfiltered, without perspective or context.

He describes himself as the last Reuters correspondent known to have to sent dispatches by carrier pigeon from Matabeleland. So, he has a different concept of Twittering and tweets.

Cowell makes the point so many of us have made recently and makes it well: “News gathering takes time, energy, courage, people, humility, creativity and layers of editorial oversight to guarantee the authenticity of the final product. For all the human flaws of those who gather, edit, check and analyze it, news allows people to judge for themselves whether the people they voted into office merit their trust and their tax dollars.”

To me, Cowell’s piece seems more of a lament for lost values, just another essay on the financial impotence of news organizations despite the importance to democracy and society of accurate, verified, yes, filtered news, information, commentary and images.

What is needed now is less woe-is-us and more journalists and editors and publishers standing up and saying we are here in a marketplace of ideas in a free market economy. We will not beg for your dollars and dimes but deliver information that earns your hearts, your minds, your wallets.

VIDEO: See what’s happening to My Generation

While sitting through a meeting the other day, I was multitasking by searching on my iPhone for a documentary I’d heard about. Instead, I ran across a YouTube video from an old Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour from the late 1960s featuring The Who.

The Who was performing their hit “My Generation,” which contains the lyrics:

“Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
“I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)”

As Roger Daltrey sang those words Keith Moon punished the drums and John Entwistle calming strummed the bass, while Pete Townshend  tortured his guitar in a swinging style that he told Tommy Smothers he developed by bowling.

Moon died in a hotel room of a drug overdose at age 32. Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack in a room at the Hard Rock here in 2002. He was 57.

That knowledge somehow gave watching the video of men my age a little less nostalgic and a little more melancholy.

Something’s gotta give or we give up all our toys

BANANA!

Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything!

So you want to power your new “green” electric car and hop on that new “green” electric train that will run from here to Southern California? You want to recharge your cell phone, your iPhone, your BlackBerry, your GPS? You want to relax in your massaging recliner in front of your wall-to-wall plasma TV in your air-conditioned living room?

Better get out the stationary bicycle and connect a belt-drive to a generator, because the juice coming down the power line may not be there, and, if it is, it will cost a pretty penny.

As it was revealed in today’s Review-Journal, the black coal-fired plant proposed for Ely slammed into a green wall. The envirofanatics would not tolerate a speck of carbon floating in the breeze over Utah on its way to Canada. And the green solar power plant proposed near Nellis AFB slammed into a wall of Air Force blue. Somehow it might interfere with supersecret military operations. Can’t tell you why, take our word for it. Kinda like global warming.

And who wants giant wind turbines whooshing and whooshing in their backyards? Ask some of the folks down in Searchlight.

Somewhere along the way, something’s gotta give or we’ll have to go cold turkey on all those neat devices of which we’ve grown so fond.

Our grandchildren will pay the retirement benefits our grandparents created

We’ve heard the same old story over and over from all over the country.

Public employee retirement benefits are growing exponentially and unfunded liabilities are ticking time bombs for state and local governments. Public employees are retiring in middle age and drawing handsome benefits and health insurance for 40 years, while working in a second of third career. We’ve called them the aristocaste.

So, as was reading an editorial in the New York Daily News yesterday about how that city’s worker’s pension cost has tripled since 2003 to $6.4 billion this year, I shrugged. Heard that before, over and over again, my friend, but you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

The editorial explained that in 2006 a retired firefighter averaged $73,000 a year in pension, plus a $12,000 Christmas bonus, plus $10,000 a year in health insurance — all exempt from state and local income taxes. A retirees benefits could cost $3.8 million.

The editorial then mentioned a modest proposal called “Tier V,” because there have been other tiers, that would raise the minimum age to 50, drop overtime from being used to calculate retirement pay (Nevada has already dropped overtime, but other pay extras are calculated). The savings to taxpayers would total $16 billion over 30 years.

The editorial says the change would affect only those hired after the law is changed. Current employees would continue to receive the excessive benefits. That’s because there is a near-universal assumption that benefits are a property right and can never be changed for workers hired 30 years ago.

Maybe it is time to test that assumption in court, an assumption that we have the right to saddle our grandchildren with expenses over which they have no control. (Never mind the federal deficit. That’s another story.)

More than affairs of the heart reveal a gender bias

Talk about gaps.

At the risk of being labeled something or the other by the politically correct crowd, I’ve noticed over the years a stark resemblance between gender and politics. Maybe it has something to do with that head vs. heart way of decisionmaking.

Exhibit A: Today’s poll results that we commissioned from pollster Brad Coker at Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

Some people looked at the numbers and saw how Sen. John Ensign’s peccadillo hurt him in the eyes of the voters when compared to a poll taken in May. Others noticed, even after his confession to having an affair with a campaign staffer, his favorables were still higher than those of Sen. Harry Reid and Gov. Jim Gibbons.

I noticed there is a huge chasm between the attitudes of men and women in way that matches the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

To begin with, before we even get to the Ensign affair questions, look at the job performance ratings for President Barack Obama.

____________________Men      Women        Dem      Rep
EXCELLENT                 19%         31%               48%       3%
POOR                              29%         21%                 5%     48%

Women and Democrats lean similarly, though not in lock step.

But let’s get down to the questions that you might think have a built-in gender bias. Asked if the affair had changed their opinion of Ensign:

__________________Men      Women         Dem      Rep
LIKE LESS              27%     37%                 37%     27%
NO CHANGE         54%     38%                 30%     67%

Asked about whether the staffer’s salary was doubled during the affair was a serious matter, again the gender-party similarities showed up:

___________________Men      Women          Dem      Rep
VERY SERIOUS         24%     40%                 45%     20%

Asked whether Ensign should resign, the results again were significant:

____________________Men      Women         Dem      Rep
SHOULD                        25%     33%                40%     17%
SHOULD NOT              68%     56%                45%     79%

Maybe there are just more women Democrats, but perhaps that itself says something.

When Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to Obama, was forced to resign from as president of Harvard it was because he offered as one of three possibilities as to why there were fewer women in the higher ranks of academic science and engineering that there was “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

Never mind whether he had a point and no one could prove him wrong or had even attempted to do so. He had to go. He had violated the PC gospel that women and men are equal, period. End of story.

Maybe we’re equal but wired differently?

People are mighty brave when it is merely hypothetical

I asked readers earlier this week what you would do if confronted with a subpoena from a federal grand jury demanding extensive identifying information about people who had posted comments about a federal tax fraud trial.

The story was about a businessman accused of dodging taxes by paying contractors in U.S. gold and silver coins based on the value of the precious metal they contained, but declaring their face value for tax purposes. The comments were largely critical of the federal government. There are no more than 200 such comments.

When it is all hypothetical, you sure are brave with my company’s money and my freedom. Nearly 700 people voted. Of those, 51 percent bravely said they would have fought to the highest court in the land even if they landed in jail. Right.

Only 16 percent said they would immediately turnover what the feds were asking for, while 33 percent said they would surrender information only on those who clearly made threats or admitted criminal acts.

The ACLU continues to battle the subpoena. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

For many people now and in the future, this is not academic. What will happen when a friendly federal investigator visits your employer asking about what you’ve been posting online?

Armed members of several law enforcement agencies raided Robert Kahre's business locations on May 29, 2003, to obtain records used to indict and prosecute defendants for federal tax crimes. The image, from a security camera, shows a piece of the action at one of his warehouses. (Photo courtesy Robert Kahre)

Words to live by in the lyrics of a song

Life has theme music.

While everyone else was contemplating the significant shift in geopolitical power bases, the morality, the hypocrisy, the affect on lives and families — I had a tune spinning in the back of my head. One of those you can’t quite place and can’t get rid of. You simply must remember it … or else your head explodes.

This is not to diminish the importance of Sen. John Ensign announcing his affair and all that it implies, but generations of Americans have lived their lives with the radio playing in the background during good times and bad. During love. During emergencies. During tragedy. Sometimes the tune is appropriate, usually not.

On trash day we hum a few bars of “take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash.”

What song is the theme for professing adultery? A dirge? A Portuguese fado of love’s lament. Rock? Folk? Jazz?

In my head I kept hearing the baritone musings of Joe Williams along with a snatch or two of lyric. It took all afternoon, but I found it.

“Can’t you see
“What love and romance has done to me
“I’m not the same I used to be
“This is my last affair …

“I’ll make a vow
“No more to love’s shrine will I bow
“I’ve crossed my heart and I’ll seal it now
“This is my last affair.”

Now that’s a promise to keep.

Couldn’t Joe’s version but here is a sampling:

Gag me — smoking law restrictions on free speech should not stand

We said it. The New York Times said it.

So it must be true.

Congress and President Obama, reportedly still struggling himself to kick the habit, have given us a new law creating sweeping regulations of the tobacco industry. These include seriously questionable abridgements of the First Amendment rights of tobacco marketers.

On Monday an R-J editorial quoted the makers of Philip Morris cigarettes as saying, “”We have expressed First Amendment reservations about certain provisions, including those that could restrict a manufacturer’s ability to communicate truthful information.”

The law would forbid tobacco peddlers from claiming their goods are safer because of lower levels or tar and nicotine, something the government pressed for it the first place, presumably because they are safer.

The bill also prohibits tobacco products from being touted on billboards within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds to limit the exposure of children to existence of one of this nation’s first profitable exports.

Also on Monday, the NYT quoted Daniel L. Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers, as saying, “Anybody looking at this in a fair way would say the effort here is not just to protect kids, which is a substantial interest of the country, but to make it virtually impossible to communicate with anybody. We think this creates very serious problems for the First Amendment.”

Even the ACLU is weighting in on the side of the tobacco companies.

The Times quoted ACLU representative Michael Macleod-Ball: “The answer here is to provide countervailing messages. Discourage smoking, rather than restricting this form of speech that has not been shown to have a sufficiently close nexus with youth smoking.”

The answer is never a gag, but always more speech. A free people should be persuaded not hoodwinked through ignorance.