Rusted Sky

It's a bit bizzare to see an article where politicians are bemoaning TOO MANY sources of information. What's even stranger, it's the liberal politicians who apparently want to cut back on information sources.... for the good of the community, of course.

The Media Cornucopia by Adam D. Thierer, City Journal Spring 2007

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.

I've noted the unparalleled access to information before, likening it to trying to drink from a fire hose on full. But I don't see that the answer is to cut back on what's there - instead, we're learning to adapt and to search the flow for what's wanted, instead of what's forced down our throats.

And apparently Kucinich is looking to get the Fairness Doctrine going again - because there's a dearth of talk radio available from the left side of political thought. Apparently Air America, though it failed in the marketplace of ideas, should instead be state-supported... in the interest of 'fairness'. What's fair about propping up an ideology that couldn't attract sufficient listeners to make a profitable radio network? Is there some special trick to making a go of it?

In my opinion, no. You have to give the consumer what they want - and it would seem that liberal radio just isn't it.

That leftist media critics start sounding so authoritarian is no surprise. In a media cornucopia, freedom of choice inevitably yields media inequality. “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome,” writes Clay Shirky of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Overcoming that inequality would require a completely regulated media.

When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it’s all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it’s just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the Left’s media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that’s not good enough, it seems: they won’t rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content that they prefer.

It's odd that the folks who used to be most for 'freedom of expression' simply can't stand speech that they don't approve of. It's okay to say anything you want, as long as it's approved.

Soon, if they've got their wishes met, everything which is not prohibited (badthink...) will be mandatory. (Doubleplusgood goodthink.) The idea of being told what I should listen to by the likes of Kucinich just doesn't set well, and smacks of an authoritarianism which would have fitted just fine in the USSR.

How about this - you don't tell me what I can and can't watch or listen to, and I won't write nastygrams to you telling you to piss up a rope. That seem fair enough to you?

J.