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| Thursday, March 18, 2004 |
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More eyeballs on the prize 
| | Who will be the first blogger to get a Friedman grant? Will he or she do it alone? Or with the assistance of the other connected researchers? |
| | "With enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow," the programmer saying goes. |
| | And without the hard and often dangerous field work of investigative reporters like Robert I. Friedman, a lot of buried facts would never be found, and their stories never told. |
| | So the prize doesn't have to be for bloggers. I only bring that up because we're kinda thick with bloggers around here. |
| | Word of the grant comes from Micah Sifry, who was one of Robbie Friedman's best friends. Friedman died in 2002 of a disease obtained while working on a story about sexual slavery in India. Micah's tribute is here. |
| | Micah says the deadline has been extended to March 22. The prize is $5000. |
Enjoy the obscenery
| | One nipple pops out and the First Amendment gets shot full of holes. Imagine if there had been two nipples. Or if Justin Timberlake had whipped out his weenie. Ms. Jackson's exhibitionism wa s foolish and pitifully out of context, but there hasn't been a single recorded example of anyone being harmed by it-scarred for life, say, or stricken with hooterphobia. |
| | The nipple would barely have caused a ripple if flashed during the MTV Video Awards, an annual exercise in tastelessness and boorish behavior. It popped out at the wrong time and place, that's all. It hardly justifies a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition. |
| | Clearly the saddest and most infuriating irony of the whole mess is that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell is demagoguing this "issue" into a national frenzy, or at least a federal frenzy, about indecency in the media, thus distracting attention from his attempt to impose a radical relaxation of media ownership rules on the country. As wary observers have noted, one factor clearly responsible for the overabundance of smut in TV and radio is the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer sinfully wealthy hands-and the death of localism it is helping to bring about. |
| | Powell's gall is as appalling as his knuckle-headed zealotry on behalf of our fattest fat cats. We've had dangerous and tiny-minded FCC chairmen before-Mark "The Toaster" Fowler's name pops to mind-but none who behaved with such cynical hypocrisy and bias. Colin Powell must be mortified at the efficiency with which his son has sullied the family name. |
| | So one wonders why an apparently sane and well-informed bureaucrat like Powell — an avowed pro-market regulation-averse conservative, no less — would suddenly get so censorious. Same with Congress. What makes them so eager to discourage undefined "indecency," apparently at all costs? |
| | As always, the answer is metaphorical. |
| | Ever since we reconceived press and broadcast as "channels" and "media," and their goods as "content," we have understood them, literally, in terms of shipping. |
| | When you subsume speech into "content delivery," you reduce it to cargo. It becomes just another deliverable. Packing material. You can abridge its freedoms all you want. (At least on the broadcast side. It's a little harder where printing presses are still involved, since the First Amendment is more literal about The Press than about Speech.) |
| | Speech, in the Founders' world, was something that happened among people, in society. It had a place: the street, the parlor, the town hall, the city parks, the village commons. Even when published, by a press, speech was still personal. Take the example of Ben Franklin's original blog, Poor Richard's Almanac. It was a form of printed speech that grew and spread like a weed on the lawn of the marketplace. But popular as it may have become, it was still "speech" because it was personal. People speak. "Content" doesn't. It's just cargo. And you can regulate the crap out of cargo. Literally. |
| | Here's what's truly offensive about Stern for the Torquemadas in the FCC and Congress: he's personal. And he's real. Howard's show resembles nothing else in radio (least of all the forced-laugh morning "zoo" shows that so fully misunderstand Stern that all they can do is copy, poorly, his bits involving strippers, celebrities, cronies and news items); yet the show does resemble something a few millon of us know well: the neighborhood bar. A place where buddies are free to act like jerks because, well, their buddies understand them. |
| | My point: a bar is a place. Free speech happens in a place. The very presence of a local bar on everybody's radio both offends and threatens the shipping mentality of the mediocracy — a group that includes not only giant mutant transport companies like Clear Channel and Viacom, but also its allied lawmakers and regulators: Congress and the FCC. That's why the latter feels just fine "controlling" what "goes out" through "the media" as if all of it were container cargo. |
| | Got a consumer complaint about certain kinds of cargo? Hell, just forbid traffic in it. Send out the indecency-sniffing dogs. Impound forbidden goods at Customs. Fine the offending freight packers and forwarders. Never mind that nobody can define "indecency" to everybody's satisfaction. The dogs know. |
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