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The folks at ceasespin.org are angry, and they have good reason to be. The media lie and even when you catch them at it, the government seems powerless to stop them.  They’ve got a plan to change things, but like so many plans that arise from anger, they haven’t thought things through. Much of their outrage is tied to the reversal on appeal of a wrongful termination verdict in 2003 stemming from a case in which reporters for WTVT, Tampa, refused to air the statements of Monsanto employees that they personally knew to be false.

This is a sad commentary on the nature of the media, but its also a case where hard cases make good law, and the ceasespin.org site should be a great resource for journalism schools everywhere, because in just a few web pages, the site illustrates the conundrum of how objectivity can be achieved and who decides what is fair.  For instance, they’ve not yet been able to come up with a standard:

Note: this prototype is for informational and educational purposes only. It demonstrates what quality criteria might be used in an actual news quality rating system and how that translates into a quality rating score. The actual news quality standard is still in development and will be published on this and other websites further into the development cycle.

This is not surprise to any third or fourth year journalism undergraduate who has considered the difficulty of who decides. There is a clear danger in any system that places the government in control of media content, and while there are today few first amendment questions for licensed broadcast media (NBC v. United States 1943 pretty much decided that), government regulations must be reasonable and necessary.

So, after a lot of hue and cry, ceasespin winds up posting a self-policing system that is essentially what should be taking place in any good newsroom and has been taught in j-schools at least since the 1930s. Other suggestions like the fairness doctrine and media deconsolidation are much better solutions, but they’re hardly the province of ceasespin. In fact, the fairness doctrine probably is not necessary if there’s diversity of ownership, which was the original concept behind getting rid of it.

In fact, if ceasespin were to apply the standard it wants to see in others to its own coverage of the Fox news decision, it would have to check “no” to at least 6 of its criteria, and probably more. There are reasons that the FCC policies are not laws, but those aren’t cited in the ceasespin story, because it would undercut its own movement. So its own score on its own test: FAIL.

It it starting to appear that, if the Senate can’t first head it off at the pass, President Obama will not allow Congress to vent its anger through the tax code and pick the pockets of the weasels at AIG who accepted huge bonuses from the company they helped destroy.

I don’t know this for sure, its just my take on his 60 Minutes interview aired tonight, coupled with the perception that cooler heads are prevailing, and that in the rear view mirror the last week is looking more like a collective hissy fit than responsible government or intelligent public policy.

In today’s NYT, Thomas Friedman likens our actions to a those of children home alone.  I don’t totally agree with his solutions, but he certainly gets props for bravery. Even the appearance of standing up for the AIG bandits paints a bullseye on your back.

The problem: this is a world crisis of confidence, and we are beholden to a lot of people who made this mess to help us get out of it. We knew or should have known they were greedy pigs when we let them build this house of cards, but nobody in power wanted to stop them because on paper the rich were getting richer.

Now all of a sudden we’re surprised that they’re greedy and we’re angry that they know where all the bodies are buried. Like Bernie Madoff and tens of thousands of other criminals who have information that will solve quandries, they have us beholden to them. At least for the short term.

When our country was attacked, we took great pride in a president who turned that into political capital, standing on the wreckage of our biggest financial edifice and vowing to exact a pound of flesh. But we now realize we  took our anger out on the wrong people, and in the end we only made things worse.

Now a new president is standing on a financial wreckage while politicians around him demagogue the American people into demanding a pound of flesh yet again. This time it appears we have a president smart enough to realize that immediate visceral reactions may feel good today, but in the end they just make things worse.

One of the most inspiring facets of our economic downturn is the extent the public has embraced the concept of immediate personal charity as salve for our problems.

Publix, a regional supermarket in Florida and the Southeast, recently sent its store managers a memo with a great suggestion. Result: there’s a table near the entrance at my local store with what appear to be several filled paper grocery bags. Each bag has a price ranging from $7 to $20, and a list of items it will contain; items that pretty easily translate into everything you need to prepare an inexpensive but nourishing meal.

Publix's Instant Foodbank

The local stores each get to identify a local charity to forward their customer’s donations; my Publix chose Lake Park Elementary School and followed up by not only providing the food to families in need through counselors at the school, but also arranged field trips to show how supermarkets work behind the scenes.

Publix is one of the biggest United Way sponsors in our county, so this is no isolated instance of giving. The company could easily say that alone satisfies its community commitment; the fact it chooses not to brag about its United Way work and finds additional ways to encourage us to help each other says a lot about the company, its employees and its customers. When I was buying one of the bags the manager shared that they’re doing very well with donations in a neighborhood that is a good mix of income. This is not just rich helping poor.

I don’t wish this economy on anyone, and I’m encouraged that while it may get worse first, we may be seeing some signs that show we can at least see the bottom. But there have been some silver linings to these economic stormclouds. One of the biggest is the immediate personal charity that is reflected in people “paying forward” cash in toll lines and supermarket checkout queues and buying a symbolic bag of food to prepare a second meal for hungry neighbors when you shop for your own.

The DNC has a supremely dumb idea. They’re going to put up a billboard that “Rush will see in his home town.” And they apparently know that Rush lives in Palm Beach, Florida, because “Erica” in Tim Kaine’s office told me so. I raised the matter with Tim Kaine’s voicemail but have not heard back.

What they don’t know, and apparently never checked before sending out fundraising emails and building an e-commerce web portal to solicit earmarked donations, is that Palm Beach (meaning the Island of Palm Beach, which is where El Rushbo actually lives), would sooner elect Bernie Madoff city treasurer than have a billboard within its city limits.

The DNC’s fallback (according to Erica who refused to give her last name): “We’ll put it in West Palm Beach.” I guess its a plus that the people’s party is so clueless about the uber rich that they don’t know Palm Beach is so finicky about what it allows that there was a major battle over opening a Starbucks on its fancy little island. The signage requirements are so strict that the municipality won’t let a sign hang from an awning.

Raising money to do something that you can’t do—and that your alleged target knows you can’t do because he’s already said so—is just plain stupid and it reflects poorly on Democrats all the way up to the Obama administration. Get a clue, DNC. And by the way, the five suggested slogans for the billboard are all lame. The whole thing smells like a way to raise a lot of money to do something that isn’t very expensive and pocket the rest for general expenditures, and not very well thought out at that.

I want Howard Dean back!!! I’m sure he knows that the difference between Palm Beach and West Palm Beach is, to plagiarize Mark Twain, as significant as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

These are tough times. Paying firemen and police, fixing roads and water mains and bridges are becoming onerous burdens for municipalities, and its time we considered the free lunch we’ve been handing to churches and nonprofits. For instance:

When Target decided to build a big fancy new Super Target on Okeechobee Boulevard in Palm Beach County, Florida, it meant the smaller Target a couple miles south on Southern would close. When it did, the $6.8 million retail facility on a $5 million corner lot was granted to Christ Fellowship, and as if by magic, $12,485,118 of taxable real property was suddenly given an exemption for every dime.

A Target Born Again

What hasn’t been exempted is the fire protection. the police protection, the cost of maintaining the county offices that ensure that the parishioners in the church are safe should the Fire Department have to make a free call. The church isn’t exempt from any of those regulations, or from the benefits of the municipal services, its just exempt from having to pay for them.

In the early 1970s, as an undergrad journalism student at USC, I spent several days with the folks at Faith Center in Glendale, California. That was before the infamous W. Eugene Scott turned its license into a cause celebre. It was when the early megachurch, which already had an FM license, petitioned the FCC for a television license. Until then, television was too pricey and most churches too poor for a church to ever be a licensee. Pastor Tim Schoch, a good man with some then-innovate ideas, always thought the commission granted them the license in the belief that one church would never get a television station on the air.

But Faith Center did, and Rev. Schoch had a chance to try his marketing theories in the Los Angeles television market. “You take General Motors and these big car companies,” he told me, “and they’re not building auditoriums saying come down here and see my Chevy. They’re using television because they know that way they can get that Chevy into everybody’s living room.” So why, he argued, shouldn’t the Lord have what GM does? (Of course, that was when GM was a big profitable company)

Schoch died not too many years after getting his station on the air, inventing the “praise-a-thon,” and creating a monthly fundraising nut that required real talent to raise every month. He was a charismatic man who raised a fine son, but one who lacked his charisma and abilities and the money dried up. Enter Gene Scott and his horses, hot tub babes and FCC monkey band, but that’s another story.

I’ve told this story to show how churches have changed. They’ve changed in a way that they gives them the resources to pay taxes, and in a way that demands far more public support that creates a serious tax burden for the rest of us. Its time that non-profits and churches pay real property taxes just like the rest of us, and the best way for that to happen is for churches to do it volutarily with the understanding that it sets no precedent beyond that they are caring members of their communities willing to step forward when their government is in trouble.

And if they don’t, then its time they not expect the rest of us to pay for the fire engine to show up when their national television outreach broadcast uplink center catches on fire.

Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix NewTimes blog is reporting that, at least last night, the offices of flagship station 1190 WNUV, Tolleson, AZ were padlocked.

I’d been tipped off that KNUV 1190 AM, formerly the flagship station of the liberal Nova M radio network, and briefly, the home of Nova M’s successor network, On Second Thought, had been padlocked. So I had to see for myself…  — New Times

We went through a period in the 80s where stations went dark, including some pretty big hitters in the top 20 markets. Get ready, radio, history may be about to repeat itself.

The New Times blog has done some excellent work on the whole mess with Nova-M, the Drobneys, Randi Rhodes and the John Manzo suit. When old-line journalists lament the demise of “real” journalism, they should look to blogs like Phoenix’s New Times for solace.

There are two rampant rumors circulating in the talk radio community about Randi Rhodes. One is she’s trying to renegotiate with Air America Radio to take Tom Hartmann’s spot when he is picked up by Dial Global. The other is that she’s negotiating with Dial Global to join him.

Amy Bolton, who runs the talk syndication division at DG, has heard the rumors about both her company and Air America being a landing zone for the Rhodes show. But she says it won’t be Dial Global; her company is not in talks with the Rhodes show to join her stable of talent.

Dial Global now operates the former Jones Radio Network, which syndicates Ed Shultz, LA’s Stephanie Miller, Bill Press and Neal Boortz. It also owns TM/Century, which radio old-timers will remember as the producer of “Tomorrow Radio,” which sagely foretold radio’s future 29 years ago.

Things haven’t been rosy in the talk radio business, no matter what your politics. Shock talk took a hit last Friday in Los Angeles when KLSX–once the SoCal home of Howard Stern–started spinning the hits again. Today, the NYSE delisted Citadel Broadcasting, which is the company of suckers that bought ABC Radio for top dollar only to see its stock tank.  It lost five cents in value today. That’s normally not a big deal, unless, like Citadel, your stock trades for nine cents a share. The New York exchange told them to take their stock to the OTC market.

The other rumor is that Rhodes is talking with Air America Radio. Representatives there did not return calls for comment. Meanwhile, her old Palm Beach station, WJNO, has moved Sean Hannity into her old timeslot, and has moved uber-reactionary Mark Levin into Hannity’s.

Shortly after the 1950s became the 60s, I was one of those geeky kids who read Popular Electronics and took gadgets apart to see how they made their magic. I got in just on the end of that period where a big part of  Popular Mechanics was how wonderful the future, driven by science and engineering, was going to be.

I hit the tail end of that period; things became more noir starting in the 50s. We became xenophobic. Superman’s fight for “Truth, justice and tolerance,” in the comics became “truth, justice and the American Way” when it moved to television. And then we became downright cynical. Donald Fagen mocked it all, with his great lyrics for I.G.Y. A song set in 1957-58 about how wonderful things would be in 1976.

Here at home well play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

………………………………… –from IGY – Donald Fagen

I’ve been watching TED videos since shortly after they first came online. I’ve always loved them, and always learned, but this year it was different. The election of President Obama has restored science and reason to public policy. It no longer must hold equal footing with the assertion that Adam & Eve rode dinosaurs. We are not afraid of stem cells. We’re not afraid to hope.

Following the tweets from the many on Twitter who attended, and then watching the videos as they’re released from this years’ TED conference has brought me back to the way I felt reading the pop science and engineering magazines of my childhood.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The presenters allude to it or say it directly in their presentations. The audiences erupt in spontaneous applause when they do. I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’d feel that way too, and if you aren’t following TED, you’re missing out. They’re available as video podcasts on I-Tunes and through other “delivery mediums near you.”

It wasn’t but 20 years ago, we were dumping ASCII messages from BBS to BBS in the dead of the night. Today we send text messages instantaneously to hundreds of thousands of the likeminded and follow it up with high quality video.

We can leverage technology to escape our predicaments. We can develop energy industries that can save us from paying oil rich countries while simultaneously giving us a valuable export.

We can find ways to teach our children better, and use our knowledge to better understand the world and help it solve its problems, which will restore our tattered image oversees.

The Internet has shrunk the world to nearly manageable size, and our search for other worlds and in the ancient history of our own has shown us how much there is left to explore and learn. Some may disagree, but I think its a wonderful thing that with a few clicks of the mouse, you can find I.G.Y. as done by a Japanese cover band.

Dear Rush Limbaugh:

Thank you for writing your open letter to President Obama, published Friday as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I know things have been tough for your syndicator and owned stations (Premiere/Clear Channel). First, the banks tried to renege on their deal to take your employer private, and you all had to take less. Then the bean-counters came in and you had that mass firing Inauguration day.  Then, the junk bonds keeping your company alive got even junkier.  Standard and Poor downgraded them from B to B-.

With so many things wrong in this country, it made no sense when there was suddenly so much hue and cry from the biggest right wing talk networks and station groups over the fairness doctrine. Mr. Obama’s never liked the fairness doctrine, your party is against it, and you can count those in my party who want it reinstated on your fingers and toes. You may not even need your toes.

Last Friday (the same day Clear Channel’s massive debt got downgraded), you dropped your pants in your WSJ op-ed and it suddenly all made sense. Its not about the fairness doctrine at all, is it?

Its about a handful of companies owning the vast majority of powerful radio stations across this country and putting on nearly every station the same imported schlock with no local staffs, minimal local content, and in some cases not even a living soul stationed at studio or transmitter.

Your precise question to President Obama:

Is it your intention to censor talk radio through a variety of contrivances, such as “local content,” “diversity of ownership,” and “public interest” rules — all of which are designed to appeal to populist sentiments but, as you know, are the death knell of talk radio and the AM band?

Requiring Clear Channel to provide local content in their communities of license is not censorship. Its like requiring an investment company to actually buy some stocks and bonds for their investors and truthfully advise those investors about their holdings. Requiring radio stations to serve their communities–regardless of the political leanings of the ultimate content–is only a death knell to weak and poorly managed companies: companies like yours; companies that you would ordinarily, as a free market conservative, demand be thrown under the bus.

Fact is, Mr. Limbaugh, what has happened in the radio business is the same thing that has happened in the banking, the mortgage, and even the automobile industries. We “let the market decide,” by deregulating everything in sight, and the charlatans took over: people who don’t give a rat’s ass about ethics or values or anything but this month’s profit. Your masters bought up every radio station and station group they could find using expensive debt. The interest payments siphoned off the money for local programming and public service.

The decimation of the radio business by firing legions of talented people at the local stations, replacing them with automatons voiced in sweatshops in “cluster facilities” hundreds of miles away is broadcasting’s version of a Ponzi scheme. Its like selling off the locomotive of a train claiming inertia would keep it moving. Now that its ground to a stop, you’re trying to blame President Obama because you’re afraid he’s going to force you to replace the engine.

Your answer is to do what Rove, Cheney, and Bush did to sell the Iraq war. First you teach that the fairness doctrine is a bad thing. You call it censorship. Then you use those terms in a sentence with all the things you want to sully. Fairness doctrine, public interest, diversity of ownership, local content. There’s no connection, but you hope your listeners aren’t sharp enough to catch it. Saddam Hussein, terrorist, 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, axis of evil, mushroom cloud.

But this time, they might catch on. All those words strung together to get us into war were either bad or unfamiliar and foreign sounding. Local content, local ownership, local people behind local mikes discussing local issues—what we once called full-service radio—are things people understand and many of us even remember. It will not be easy to redefine them as a negative when a lot of people will see them as an old friend, and it would truly be karma to see the “populist sentiment” that you’ve played like a violin for 20 years be the thing that puts your stations back in the hands of people who care about serving their communities, and takes you off the air for good.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if your denouement came the very first time you got caught red-handed at the Shock Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh, Saddam Hussein, Sean Hannity, Clear Channel, Terrorist, 9/11, mushroom cloud.

Nova-M Radio, the radio syndicator for Randi Rhodes, crashed and burned to the great delight of a gaggle of right wing talker fans everywhere. Moe Lane at Redstate took mock credit for its demise, claiming an appearance by “our own Mark Impomeni…shut it down cold.”

The #tcots on Twitter were all a-twitter too. Free Market At Work, they crowed. And they’re right, but its not because there’s a lack of appetite in the country for liberal ideas or thoughts, it just there’s a lack of demand for it over old delivery methods.

The correct paring of medium and message was one of the main reasons for Rush Limbaugh and neocon-talk radio’s rise in the first place. When Limbaugh began doing his brand of political talk, old pickup trucks still had AM-only radios.

Let’s digress a moment, and quote Wikipedia’s entry on buggy whips:

Though similar whips are still manufactured for limited purposes, the buggy whip industry as a major economic entity ceased to exist with the introduction of the automobile, and is cited in economics and marketing as an example of an industry ceasing to exist because its market niche, and the need for its product, disappears. — Wikipedia on Buggy Whip & Coach Whip

The buggy whip didn’t disappear overnight. There was this period where whip manufacturers were failing, and those most successful in staying in business hewed to markets where their product was still in demand, and they did what they needed to be premier in that market.

It would be as if a smart buggy whip manufacturer would identify the Amish market and do what ever it took to best serve their needs. Even naming themselves—in a not so subtle nod to their remaining market—Ordnung, the German word for order.

Ordnung, if you’ve been keeping up with your Mennonite apologetics, is the Amish name for their set of rules for living. What a great name for a whip, if you’re Amish!

So take no joy in watching libtalk radio go over the cliff, righties. It was just the weakest buggy whip company in the business: it deserved to die. But the lesser Rushbos aren’t far behind.