I don’t have the time I once did to comment via this blog, but an article in Today’s FT.com site about the Big Media’s struggle over dealing with free vs. for pay web content left me with a few thoughts I wanted to post.
As a comparatively early blogger (starting back in 2005), I found the technology for blogging to be a godsend. Did I hope to make millions off of my content? Nope. Was I looking to rip off others’ content and fack up ad revenue on the backs of people doing the real work? Absolutely not.
What I wanted to do was get my opinion published, once and for all, so that minority voices in a forest of PC / pro-government (both left and right) group-think could be heard. Normally I’d have to throw horribly condensed / distilled opinions to the two local dailies with hopes that their editorial boards might pick up my thoughts. Even if my content were quality, 1) I’d never see a dime from my labors and 2) I’d be confined to one letter to the editor per month. As for my opinions about what the Big Boys at the WSJ, the Wash Post, the NYT, etc. were saying… Well, forget it. You’re as likely to get an LTE published there as you are to win the lottery.
Enter the blog where you and I can not only challenge the often faulty opinions published at the aforementioned institutions, you can critique FoxNews, CNN, CNBC, etc, and whosoever dares to put forth their opinion into the ethernet.
And let me tell you this; there are some very smart, well educated folks like myself out there publishing for free, with more coming online every day to share their own clarifications on reality.
So it is in this context of free content that officially sanctioned journalists at the FT.com site, like Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, are both flailing with their fists in near tantrum while they struggle to get their arms around how the blogosphere works.
The same can be said for Time Inc’s Anne Moore, who according to AE-J above asked, “Who started this rumour that information had to be free and why didn’t we challenge this when it first came out?”
AE-J responds with his own borrowed conclusion:
According to Mr (Rob) Grimshaw (Managing Director of FT.com), the answer is that a “free evangelist movement [convinced] everybody that the internet was somehow different and any attempt to impose a business model was an imposition on people’s human rights”. Changing that perception will mean nothing less than challenging the culture of the internet as we currently understand it.
Well, yes and no… And a BIG NO, at that. No doubt a bunch of freeloaders have long viewed the net as a license to steal copyrighted material. AE-J’s article mixes these two concepts — outright theft, and free content, as one.
Let’s keep the slate clean on each issue. I have very little sympathy for those who think it is their right to outright pirate copyrighted content. Granted, I may in the same breath think the music and movie industries need to rethink their model, but their property is their property. Little communist-thinking punks, who believe everyone’s property is theirs for the taking, well… How ironic that a movie and music — and even News industry that has largely fostered the notion that private property rights are obsolete to the whims of big government problem solvers is raided by the very mentality it fostered? The very concept of Barrack Obama would be impossible without the outright pro-state indoctrination received through these media, from both traditional left and right. Or, for that matter, that anyone would tolerate the bailout of this industry or that, including the flailing newspaper industry, with taxpayer or Fed inflated money.
And that’s perhaps the real driver here. There are the politicians like John Kerry (among far too many others) who think it is the job of government to subsidize the major Newspapers given their model is collapsing under its own outmoded, unionized weight. Throw out all the crocodile tears for how essential these institutions are to freedom,and you’ll see these crocodile politicians know fully well to which degree these newspapers help keep the masses swayed to vote them back into office. Should it come as any surprise that Mr. Kerry would like me to have to put down the keyboard and get to work so I can pay more taxes to keep in business those with whom I vehemently disagree, like “Lefty” (Paul) Krugman at the NYT? His opinions are dangerous and worth dramatically less than what many puppies being house trained leave on his columns each day across America.
Of course, the knee-jerk progressive would be quick to suggest I’m for shutting up the free speech of Lefty Krugman. But that’s the last thing I’m for. The Krazy Krugster should stand on his own on an even playing field. He and his “democracy above freedom and liberty” publishers most certainly should not be subsidized by folks like me.
I’m reminded of comments made by the hated Matt Drudge well over a decade ago, on June 2, 1998, when he was invited into the vipers den of the National Press Club to speak. In his introduction remarks, Press Club President, Doug Harbrecht, set the stage of the Q&A that was to come:
I must confess, my first reaction to having our speaker today at the National Press Club was the same as a lot of other members – was the same as what a lot of other members of the Club have had: Why do we want to give a forum to that guy?… So why is Matt Drudge here? He’s on the cutting edge of a revolution in our business and everyone in our business knows it. And like it or not, he’s a newsmaker.
And so Drudge took the stage, lacking the journalist’s credentials of those he addressed, to lay bare the revolution taking place right under their noses, and that it would continue never mind their self-righteous protestations and the heat Drudge himself was taking for actually breaking news the major outlets deemed unworthy, ala the Lewinsky scandal. Recall, Drudge broke the the story of how NewsWeek spiked the story (meaning, it intended to bury it so it’d never see the light of day), not the story itself. Drudge’s comments are a great read even if you hate the guy. Note how the questions he receives from the “real media” can ‘t conceive what he’s telling them — that they are the proverbial horse and buggy in a new world of motorcars. In his presentation before the Q&A he documents how news papers complained about radio, how radio sought political favors to ward off TV, and how TV fought to ward off cable, etc. And in response to one attendee questioning Drudge’s credentials, as if degree alone qualifies one to question our reality, Drudge’s response hits the nail right on the head: The freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one.
And it is that concept that motivates me out of a 9 month writing slumber. I’m starting to worry about how the powers that be feel about losing control of a monopoly that took them nearly 100 years to complete. It is a trifecta between government, banking, and the media. And at the moment, banking has been exposed as an outright fraud, where money printed out of thin air for the benefit of Wall Street created the largest credit bubble in history, causing everyone to get drunk on easy money, the banking insiders themselves, to the point of collapsing the very system they rely on.
At the moment, the bankers are being bailed out at the expense of the legitimate finance industry, as well as the nation as a whole — all with the support of Congress and the high-finance elite at the Treasury and the Fed, groups filled with former Wall Streeters themselves. The media has sat aside complacently endorsing this system of fraud, and the priveledges of power have flowed to the media — the wealth, the connections to inside stories, etc.
But now it stands to topple. Websites like Vigilant Investor, or Mish’s Econoblog, or Peter Schiff’s Europacific give away free information that contains the financial truth that sites like FT.com and WSJ.com would never print even if they wanted, dare they actually bite the hand that feeds them. Yet the masses are slowly waking up to the fact that the system is bleeding them dry for its own benefit, and those same people are reaching out for the truth deliveredy by those who don’t have gatekeepers or careers to lose for publishing to thruth, let alone a socialist belief systme that clouds their reporting from the start.
Go Freedom! Go Liberty!
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