If Other People Get To Talk, Who Will Listen To Me?

[Steve_MB]

Somebody or other by the name of Dusty Horwitt, a “lawyer who works for a nonprofit environmental group in Washington” advances the usual old-style media complaints about the Internet upstarts:

If Everyone’s Talking, Who Will Listen?

Everybody jokes about “TMI” these days: “Too much information,” we say laughingly, when someone tells a story full of embarrassing detail about some personal foible or intimate relationship. But in our information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides – the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels – is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience…
But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens…

He then descends to levels both pitiable and Pit-able, by openly calling for censorship via confiscatory taxation:

It’s possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information. If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it? A reduced supply of information technology might at least gradually cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers instead of the hyper-individualistic outlets we have now.

Gee, Dusty, it’s too bad that people have other things to do than listen to whatever idiotic (to judge from this piece) blatherings and ravings you’re publishing on behalf of your “nonprofit environmental group”. Maybe if you weren’t such a tin-plated overbearing swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood, you’d have better luck drawing an audience.

[smiling_bandit]

Ouch. That’s just sad.

And I’m sure that it will just so happen to be anyone who disagrees with him who gets targeted with this taxation, and that the money will probably go to… nonprofit environmental groups (who can pay spokesmen like these much dinero). Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

[thirdwarning]

Wait a minute. He works for an environmental group and he wants to go back to more newspapers to diseminate information? Do they know this? Something tells me he hasn’t thought this through.

[Apollyon]

@Dusty

…cause us to gravitate toward community-centered media such as local newspapers…

Like Wikipedia? Oh… he means local community in the sense of distance rather than having interests in common.

For all the blathering though Steve MB, he seems FTFA to largely be lambasting the sort of pointless 24-hour a day, gerbil wheel media that Jon Stewart criticized recently.

@CNN

In a breakfast with reporters, Stewart directed most of his ire at the 24-hour cable news networks, which he called “gerbil wheels,” and said the media at-large had “abdicated” to what he called the “slow-witted beast.”

He said the never-ending television news cycle creates a “false sense of urgency” and forces reporters to “follow the veins that have been mined,” instead of pursuing serious and in-depth reporting.

Compare those comments to Dusty’s:

The opportunity to educate millions of citizens, so essential to significant movements of the past, has dwindled. In the early New Deal era… Father Charles Coughlin promoted ideas for economic reform to a weekly audience estimated at 40 million, which helped pressure President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enact Social Security, the Works Progress Administration and other programs… Without broad media coverage, the civil rights movement might never have succeeded. In 1965, front-page newspaper coverage of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., helped push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act… Even the Fairbanks Alaska News-Miner carried the story on the front page for 10 straight days.

I agree that sumputary tax on internet energy seems an unlikely way to get journalists to pursue meatier stories… it seems to me that the driving force for that will have to be the public wanting more serious and in-depth coverage of news important to democratic processes.

Unfortunately, it appears that if you simply let the market decide, then people would rather watch something likke the new game show Hurl!.

@Washington Post

“Hurl!,” which debuted last night on the G4 cable channel, is the first half-hour series that combines physical rigor with eating disorders and gastric distress. Contestants consume massive quantities of sure-to-bloat foods… then engage in such activities as riding an amusement park Tilt-A-Whirl. The “winner” is the contestant who doesn’t lose his lunch…

“Hurl!,” in other words, is for people who found “Fear Factor” much too nuanced and intellectually complex.

:eek:

[Steve_MB]

@thirdwarning

Wait a minute. He works for an environmental group and he wants to go back to more newspapers to diseminate information? Do they know this? Something tells me he hasn’t thought this through.

The specific group isn’t identified in the byline. They’re probably grateful for that.

@Apollyon

For all the blathering though Steve MB, he seems FTFA to largely be lambasting the sort of pointless 24-hour a day, gerbil wheel media that Jon Stewart criticized recently.

I don’t see that – his complaints and proposed remedies indicate that he wants the Teeming Millions to all be focused on the same thing – the merits of that same thing are strictly secondary. (I mean, really – the man is saying that it would have been a Bad Thing if people had paid less attention to Father Coughlin. :rolleyes: )

[Apollyon]

@Steve MB

I don’t see that – his complaints and proposed remedies indicate that he wants the Teeming Millions to all be focused on the same thing…

Sure, agreed, he wants the TM focused…

@Steve MB

…the merits of that same thing are strictly secondary. (I mean, really – the man is saying that it would have been a Bad Thing if people had paid less attention to Father Coughlin. :rolleyes: )

Afraid I know nothing of Father Coughlin, but what he seems to be arguing is that it would have been a Bad Thing if FDR hadn’t enacted Social Security, or that the civil rights movement hadn’t succeeded.

[bufftabby]

SteveMB, you’re just afraid this guy will turn off the Internet and everyone will find out you’re really a dog. (Seriously, you have one of my favorite sigs around.)

[Bookkeeper]

@Apollyon

Sure, agreed, he wants the TM focused…
Afraid I know nothing of Father Coughlin, but what he seems to be arguing is that it would have been a Bad Thing if FDR hadn’t enacted Social Security, or that the civil rights movement hadn’t succeeded.

Father Coughlin is hardly the example I would have chosen of the benefits of mass media information dissemination :rolleyes: .

[Apollyon]

@Bookkeeper

Father Coughlin is hardly the example I would have chosen of the benefits of mass media information dissemination :rolleyes: .

Oh. Yeah… see what you mean.

@Wiki

This radio program included commentary about Jews that was widely regarded as antisemitism, as well as rationalizations of some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini… The broadcasts have been called “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture”.

[Fish]

It’s possible that over time, an energy tax, by making some computers, Web sites, blogs and perhaps cable TV channels too costly to maintain, could reduce the supply of information.

In other words, we should all pay attention only when rich people speak.

[Martini_Enfield]

@Fish

In other words, we should all pay attention only when rich people speak.

Movable Printed Type??? We must keep this from the serfs, lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!