Click here to download the PDF. This chilling missive will be eye opening and heart pounding if you have a pulse at all.
FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Obama's FTC plan to reinvent America's news media
What hasn't been widely-known, until now, is that a year ago the new Democrat administration ofBarack Obama launched a major internal study intended to design a major government rescue plan for the nation's financially-troubled information media, primarily newspapers.
That strident sound you hear are the alarms going off in minds and offices across the country: Government helping the press? Which press? How help? In return for what?
Mark Tapscott: Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from Obama's FTC?
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
Release of the Federal Trade Commission's working paper on "reinventing journalism" makes it clear that there is no more time for diplomacy about this issue: President Obama is determined to federalize the news industry just as he has banking, autos, and health care.
Everybody who wants independent journalism had better wake up to these three facts about what is going:
* Journalists must understand that there is no way the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press will survive if the federal government regulates the news industry as envisioned by the FTC. Those who accept at face value protests to the contrary or the professions of pure intentions by advocates of government takeover of the news business are, at best, incredibly naive.
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.
If that menu doesn't scare the hell out of every true journalist in America, perhaps this graph from Jarvis will:
"What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about 'difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.' Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous."
The comments on this article are very interesting.
Click here for the whole Orwellian nightmare.
Read more at the Buzz Machine by Jeff Jarvis
The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.
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