FTC Releases List of Proposals for “Reinvention” of Journalism
(This Proposal is taken directly from the playbook of countries like Venezuela and Cuba… If one thing is worth your attention and fighting… This is it!!)
FTC: We Will Reinvent Journalism By Force
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a proposal for government to establish total control over all news media. The document’s Orwellian title reads as follows:
POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM
The document goes on to list 13 points describing how statist newspaper ad revenues have been cut in half since 2000 because the alternative news media is kicking their butts.
Then we get to point 14.
“There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism.”
Obviously this means the government must create a “sustainable” business model for them – with your tax dollars.
UH HO! What’s this!
The news is a “public good” in economic terms.
Where have I heard that before? Any time the word “public good” is thrown around by government agents you know mischief is at hand. When government considers something “public,” they automatically assume that means the “public” has the right to control it. – which means THEY have the right to control it.
“consumer demand for public affairs reporting in particular may be suboptimal”
By “suboptimal” they mean that since the public is obviously too dumb to know what they should be reading, government will have to subsidize communist news media with your tax dollars. The free market can not be trusted to provide the correct amount of public affairs reporting.
“it is not too soon to start considering policies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.”
By this they mean government is going to have to step into the news media market in order to regulate alternative media competition out of the picture so the statist old-guard media can get back to monopolizing the news.
Now we move on to the meat and potatoes of the Stalinist regulations they are seeking to implement in order to shut down alternative media.
Potential Revenue Sources from Changes in Law
A. Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators
3. Policy Proposals
Proposal 1: Federal Hot News Legislation.
Some stakeholders have proposed amending the Copyright Act to specifically recognize hot news protection. Advocates argue “the copyright act allows parasitic aggregators to ‘free ride’ on others’ substantial journalistic investments”
Proposal 2: Statutory Limits to Fair Use
One panelist suggested amending the Copyright Act to limit the fair use doctrine that might otherwise protect from copyright infringement the activities of aggregators and search engines, such as the types of search engine activities blessed by the 9th Circuit in Perfect 10. In particular, he recommended legislation clarifying that the routine copying of original content done by a search engine in order to conduct a sea(caching) is copyright infringement not protected by fair use.
Proposal 3: Licensing The News
Finally, some suggest that some sort of industry-wide licensing arrangement be adopted, perhaps with the government’s help and support. Foreign governments have considered how to provide adequate incentives and funding for the news and are exploring, for example, the creation of government-fostered pilot programs to investigate new business models for IP and discourage free-riding. Such programs might enable newspapers and other content providers to experiment with micropayments” and other means to monetize digital content.
So to summarize:
- Ban the ability of blogs to aggregate the latest news.
- Ban the ability of search engines to distribute news clips.
- And the create a licensing scheme for journalists, where one needs to get industry/government approval before one can publish news information.
But there’s so much more!
B. Collaborative Actions and Antitrust Exemptions
Proposals:
Allow news organizations to agree jointly to erect pay walls so that consumers must pay for access to online content.
Allow news organizations to agree jointly on a mechanism to require news aggregators and others to pay for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses.
What they are saying is,
- We should allow the statist print media to organize itself into a monopoly and exempt them from anti-trust laws.
- We should also allow them to force bloggers to pay a fee each time they want to quote news snippets from their sites.
It gets better.
II. Potential Revenues from Indirect and Direct Government Support
This section first reviews the history of government subsidies and then presents proposals that have emerged to date to provide additional government funds to sustain journalism.
B. Proposals for Increased Government Subsidies, Indirect and Direct
· Establish a “journalism” division of AmeriCorps.
· Increase funding for the CPB. (public broadcasting)
· Establish a National Fund for Local News.
· Provide a tax credit to news organizations for every journalist they employ.
· Establish Citizenship News Vouchers.
Citizenship news vouchers would allow every American tax payer to allocate some amount of government funds to the non-profit media organization of their choice.
· Provide grants to universities to conduct investigative journalism.
· Allow the Small Business Administration to insure loans to fund new nonprofit journalism organizations.
· Allow content developed for international broadcasting to be used domestically.
Almost $700 million of taxpayers’ money is spent on content generated for use by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for international dissemination. This news would be valuable to U.S. citizens as well. A 60-year old law, however, prohibits the rebroadcast of this government-funded international news to U.S. consumers and taxpayers.
· Increase postal subsidies for newspapers and periodicals.
Did you catch that?
Government is spending 700 million dollars of your money on international propaganda and they want to direct that massive government megaphone at the American public. They also want to totally subsidize the news media with your money ON TOP of creating more totally government controlled media sources.
THIS IS INSANE
What country am I living in? The Soviet Union?
The document then goes on to put forth some proposed mechanisms for paying for all this, including:
- A tax on the broadcast spectrum
- A tax on consumer electronics
- A tax on advertising sales
- A tax on internet service and cellphone service.
Then the document goes on to list all manner of cronyism with the tax system and how the tax system can be utilized to prop up failing statist media sources.
Then the document details how government information should be made more accessible to the media.
I kid you not, this is the most Orwellian insanity put out by our government I have ever seen in my life.
This is your criminal communist government in action.
I can not believe I just read what I just read.
“Whoever reads the bourgeois press turns deaf and blind. Away with these stupidity-causing bandages.”
If anyone is interested in learning real facts about intellectual property and copyright from a professional economist / IP lawyer, watch this:
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A&feature=player_embedded
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses. ” - Vladimir Lenin
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.” - Thomas Jefferson
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” - Thomas Jefferson
Source: Fascist Soup & Fox News
The Federal Trade Commission released a 47-page draft report that outlines what the government could do to rescue the nation's failing media platforms -- specifically newspapers, which have seen advertising revenues drop roughly 45 percent since 2000. Should the government be involved in the business of news?
• YOU DECIDE: Should Gov't Be Involved in the News? – Fox Poll
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FTC to “reinvent” journalism
The nation needs a strong, independent press, the FTC argues, and so they want to find ways for government to “reinvent” journalism. If that sounds vaguely Orwellian to you, the actual language in the Federal Trade Commission’s discussion-points memo should have hairs standing on the backs of necks across the nation. It shows a wildly laughable rationale for government intervention that would prop up the failing newspaper model in a manner that would put the entire industry at the mercy of the federal bureaucracy it’s supposed to keep in check.
The paper notes “experimentation” of media outlets on the Internet, a rather strange term considering that most media outlets have used the Internet for years. Major newspapers have been on line for well over a decade. After framing that as “experimentation,” the FTC then argues that it won’t work. Not only that, it then offers a very strange definition of “subsidy” in order to provide cover for a government intervention:
There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism. History in the United States shows that readers of the news have never paid anywhere close to the full cost of providing the news. Rather, journalism always has been subsidized to a large extent by, for example, the federal government, political parties, or advertising.
Huh? Advertising isn’t a subsidy for newspapers, any more than it is a subsidy for television or radio stations, magazines of all kinds, and so on. It’s an exchange of services for mutual benefit. Advertisers promote their products and services by presenting them to the readership of a newspaper/website/broadcast station, paying the owners of that medium for the freight. It’s akin to calling shipping costs a subsidy to FedEx or UPS for the vital interest of having trucks on highways. It’s the kind of faulty anthropology an alien might make if they didn’t understand the purposes of various human activities.
Andrew Malcolm can’t quite believe his eyes:
True, there have been government subsidies over the decades in the form of below-cost postal rates and printing contracts. But this FTC study is rated R for anyone who thinks the federal government, the object of copious news coverage itself, has no business deciding which sectors of the private media business survive and thrive through its support, subsidies and encouragement with things like tax incentives.
Yet that’s what this Obama administration paper is suggesting as another of the ex-community organizer’s galactic reform plans.
Cut-rate postal services and federal printing contracts hardly amount to subsidizing the newspaper industry to a “large extent” or any extent. Most newspapers don’t get mailed, first and foremost; they get delivered by employees. Federal printing contracts should be competitively assigned anyway, and newspapers usually have an economy of scale that makes the award of those contract sensible. Just as with advertising, that’s a rational business decision, not some kind of subsidy or gift. Both sides get goods and/or services in a fair exchange, whereas with subsidies, one side gets compensation while the other does not.
The next two paragraphs are just as Orwellian:
Economics provides insight into why this has been the case. The news is a “public good” in economic terms. That is, it is non-rivalrous (one person’s consumption of the news does not preclude another person’s consumption of the same news) and non-excludable (once the news producer supplies anyone, it cannot exclude anyone). Because free riding is usually easy in these circumstances, it is often difficult to ensure that producers of public goods are appropriately compensated.
In addition, the news can produce benefits that spread much beyond their readers. For example, investigative reporting that results in a staff shakeup in a local hospital can produce better health care for patients in the future, but the news organization that produced that story will receive, at best, limited compensation (perhaps through increased readership) related to having spurred those benefits.
Declaring news a “public good” is nothing more than a rhetorical cover for demanding government oversight of it. “Free riding” is apparently defined as linking to and quoting news from a media source. This is an absurd issue for federal intervention, as a remedy for those media outlets is readily available: membership-only access. It also discounts the fact that the eeeeeeeeeevil aggregators, including yours truly, direct traffic to those sites through links, arguably boosting the bottom lines of the media outlets, especially since readers are usually inclined to double-check the assumptions made by the aggregators. There is a reason that newspapers send out tip e-mails on a daily basis to bloggers, and it’s not because they are unhappy about bloggers “free-riding” their output.
Beyond that, the FTC apparently also wants to set a standard of what is “appropriate” compensation. Who’s to say what is appropriate? Shouldn’t the market determine the compensation? Does the government fix prices on computers, televisions, and radios, by which consumers access other news media? This looks like an attack on blogs — and an attempt to turn back the clock to 1993 in terms of the voice that news consumers have in news delivery.
Mark Tapscott warns that a government reinvention of journalism will mean a journalism much less likely to be independent:
[W]hat they cannot deny is what is clearly written in the FTC document and what it reveals about the intention behind the initiative, which is to transform the news industry from an information product collected by private individuals and entrepreneurs as a service to private buyers, to a government-regulated public utility providing a “public good,” as defined and regulated by government.
The authors hide this dangerous intention behind carefully worded expressions of concern for preserving “quality journalism” and “addressing emerging gaps in reporting,” and they rationalize their proposed approach of massive government intervention in the news process as simply an extension of what government has always done via postal subsidies, tax breaks, and so forth. …
Better to explain yet again that the original intention of the Founders with respect to the media – “Congress shall make no law respecting … the freedom of the press” – is the key to saving independent journalism.
Then we must remind them that the adversarial relationship that is supposed to exist between journalists and public officials must apply no matter who those public officials might be or what political party or ideological school of thought they represent.
Elected officials’ first thought is always about re-election, while career government workers’ is job security. A journalist’s first thought is supposed to be getting the facts.
To that end, we’re supposed to be adversaries, not co-conspirators, partners, favored “stakeholders,” or beneficiaries. That’s why the Constitution made us independent.
This is not a document meant to salvage an independent press. It’s a road map for government control over the news.
POSTED AT 12:15 PM ON JUNE 2, 2010 BY ED MORRISSEY - HotAir
Sources: Fascist Soup * Fox News * HotAir * Common Sense
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Every day there is at least one and usually many things that should scare the Hell out of you as sirens go off in your head and then embolden you to stand-up, speak-up and fight… on whatever level is necessary. We are truly living in times that tri men’s and women’s souls!!
The people in power are well on their way in the biggest power grab that has ever hit our Country and controlling the media… their plan from the beginning will simplify that for them and is an all out attack on America’s Bill of Rights and Constitution, American Freedoms and humanity. This is one of those wake calls and portion of the Progressive Power Grab that we cannot miss or not stop from happening!!
No more bills, no more loss of liberty, no more of the people’s power lost needs to be our cry, goal and agenda, and stopping the losses is each and every American’s responsibility.
The Bill of Rights is what made America different… and we the people are allowing our rights and freedoms to be stolen, every day! Why?
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