The Nanny State Drops By The Newsroom
A WSJ op-ed piece by Gordon Crovitz makes a great point:
Last week the Federal Communications Commission dropped a planned study of newsrooms, following objections that the government has no business meddling with journalism. The critics were right, but it's a shame the FCC gave up so quickly. Even the brief experience of being micromanaged by regulators reminded reporters and editors of the kind of government overreach every other industry routinely experiences....The spectacle of the FCC's abandoning this study is a reminder that this remains the agency posing the greatest threat to the open Internet. Lobbyists for "net neutrality" want the FCC to set rules for the Internet on everything from how content is sent across the network to pricing. Will the agency now also invoke "net neutrality" for a study on how bloggers make their news decisions? Will bureaucrats review the demographics of people posting YouTube videos? Can regulators require Facebook FB -0.70% and Twitter TWTR -1.54% to have a "fair" representation of links to news and opinion articles by their users around the world?
Many of the journalists who were aghast at the idea of government meddling in their affairs also cheered for net-neutrality regulations to define how the Internet operates, despite the unprecedented success of the unregulated, open Internet to produce rapid innovation and intense competition.
Perhaps more journalists will now feel empathy for highly regulated companies.
Don't get your hopes up.
Don't believe for a moment, the FCC has given up. The study came out of nowhere, and will return in a similar form.
swissarmyd at March 2, 2014 10:06 PM
It's not abandoned, just in hiding. Like JournoList.
dee nile at March 3, 2014 4:45 AM
What swissarmyd and dee nile have said; don't give up, they will get this overlordship imposed some how or other.
They believe that they are our betters and, so, they believe that they have the duty to "protect" us this way.
Journalists have empathy for highly regulated companies? ha! That's a laugh!
Journalists are mostly liberals who think they are making the world a better place - don't tell them otherwise. And in the mind of many liberals (and that include, of course, many journalists) for-profit companies are "evil" and need even more regulation.
Charles at March 3, 2014 5:45 AM
I'll go further than that... most journalists are narcissistic. As has been stated above, their opposition to the FCC action wasn't that they oppose authoritarian government in general. They only oppose it when it impacts them directly. It's a widespread belief among journalists that the First Amendment applies only to them; quite a few leading journalists have openly advocated that the speech or ordinary citizens on the Internet and elsewhere be censored, and we've seen that journalists often believe that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to trepass on private property.
So no, they don't oppose what the FCC is doing. They only oppose that they aren't in charge of it.
Cousin Dave at March 3, 2014 6:29 AM
Cousin Dave: "They only oppose that they aren't in charge of it."
Exactly!
Charles at March 3, 2014 8:30 AM
Cousin Dave: "They only oppose that they aren't in charge of it."
Exactly!
Posted by: Charles at March 3, 2014 8:30 AM
Im sure they are working like busy little beavers under the radar. They need an oppressive FCC presence in all the newsrooms before the 2014 campaign season begins in ernest.
Isab at March 4, 2014 5:37 PM
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