Author: Dan Kennedy

Creative Commons update

If you click on the Creative Commons logo now, you’ll see that it takes you to a customized page that says (among other things), “You must attribute this work to Media Nation (with link).”

The coding that makes that happen was provided to me by John Guilfoil, a former student of mine and the founder and editor-in-chief of Blast Magazine, which recently embraced the Creative Commons model.

Thanks, John.

Progressive talk and WRKO

AlanF has posted an entertaining account at the Daily Kos about the recent FCC hearing on localism that was held in Portland, Maine. Alan is with Save Boston’s Progressive Talk, formed last year after Clear Channel dumped syndicated liberal talk shows from two weak-signaled stations and replaced them with Latino programming. He writes:

Although progressive talk attracted a loyal following among those who managed to discover it, Clear Channel switched it off abruptly in 2006, replacing it with a Latino music format (“Rumba”). Despite the fact that Clear Channel suddenly managed to find local staff for Rumba, Rumba has done worse in the ratings than progressive talk. This pattern that has been repeated across the country.

You’d think someone would take a chance on liberal talk in Boston, wouldn’t you? I continue to think that ratings-challenged WRKO (AM 680) ought to give it a try, now that afternoon host Howie Carr is jumping to WTKK (96.9 FM) this fall. Let me play WRKO consultant for a moment and try this out on you:

  • Steal Jim Braude and Margery Eagan from WTKK and put them on in the morning against Carr, who’s slotted to be the ‘TKK morning guy. Braude is the only liberal radio host in Boston; Eagan is a moderate. They’ve also got a breezy style that’s better suited to the morning drive than Howie’s sneering putdowns.
  • Move Tom Finneran from morning to afternoon drive and pair him with a liberal co-host. Instead of competing with the lazy but talented Carr, he’d be competing with the foul-mouthed libertarian Jay Severin. I don’t know who’d win that one, but my guess is that Finneran and company, by focusing on local issues, would at least hold their own.
  • Develop a new local show for the 10 a.m.-to-noon slot to go up against whatever ‘TKK is running. I’m guessing that’s where Michael Graham will land once Howie arrives, and if you can’t compete with Graham’s yipping, upper-octave rants about illegal immigrants, you can’t compete.
  • Now, here’s a tricky one. I’d definitely put syndicated liberal host Ed Schultz in the noon-to-3 p.m. segment. But Schultz works best as a counterweight to Rush Limbaugh, whom ‘RKO would be replacing. I say go with Schultz and hope ‘TKK management is stupid enough to pick up Limbaugh, a ratings monster nationwide but not here.
  • From 7 p.m. on, it doesn’t matter all that much, especially since WRKO carries the Red Sox. I guess I’d run Stephanie Miller‘s syndicated show from 7 to 10 p.m. on nights when the Sox aren’t playing. She’d be up against Bill O’Reilly — not a problem in this market.

Now look at that. I’ve solved all of WRKO’s problems, and it only took me 20 minutes. What do you think, Brian? Next?

Deregulatory blues

I’m almost 51 years old. I don’t smoke. My weight’s OK, although it could be better. I run, badly. I’ll give myself a B or a B-plus in the personal-health department. So why should I have to pay higher medical-insurance rates to cover people too lazy to get off their rear ends or too undisciplined to quit smoking?

Because the whole point of insurance is to spread the risk so that those who need less will help pay for those who need more. Which is why I predict that Gov. Deval Patrick’s experiment in auto-insurance competition will end badly, just as it did 30 years ago when Michael Dukakis tried it.

The Outraged Liberal says he’s “tired of subsidizing bad drivers.” Well, he’s going to develop chronic fatigue syndrome once he has to start subsidizing bad drivers who are now unemployed because they can’t afford auto insurance and can no longer get to work.

The ideal insurance system would reward good drivers while at the same time not penalizing the bad ones so excessively that they’re forced off the roads — or forced to drive without insurance as a matter of economic survival. Guess what? The system we have today looks an awful lot like that ideal.

A Globe editorial today puts it well:

In Massachusetts, about 80 percent of drivers pay a little more so that 20 percent of drivers can pay a lot less. That subsidy is a significant reason that Massachusetts has the second-lowest rate of uninsured motorists in the nation. It would be a shame, and a potentially costly one for all insured motorists, to see that rate rise.

I’ll admit that I’ve got two self-interested reasons for wanting to keep things the way they are. First, I’m not such a great driver, although I’m better than I used to be — the last surcharge, for a speeding ticket I incurred in New Hampshire six years ago, is scheduled to come off my insurance in August. Second, I’ve got two kids, and insurance for teenage drivers — already excessive — will likely go through the roof when this “reform” takes hold.

I realize that Massachusetts is the only state that regulates auto insurance so tightly. But rates are affordable, and they’ve been going down. Deregulation is a non-solution in search of a problem.

Media Nation in the news

A couple of items for those of you who are interested:

  • I expand on my thoughts regarding the Whole Foods merger meltdown in a piece that’s been posted on the Guardian’s “Comment Is Free” section. This is the first time I’ve written anything for the Guardian, but I’m hoping it’s not the last. We’ll see.
  • I’ll be on WUML Radio (91.5 FM) tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. to talk about Natalie Jacobson’s departure from the anchor desk at WCVB-TV (Channel 5) and Rupert Murdoch’s attempted takeover of the Wall Street Journal.

How to write tabloidese

When they compile a history of great Herald ledes, this one, by Michele McPhee, is sure to make the cut:

Fugitive cross-dressing cop killer Thomas Shay taunted investigators searching for him in a letter to the Herald received yesterday just hours after federal marshals tracked him down at his mother’s Quincy home and hauled him away in handcuffs.

The only thing missing is the word “perv.”

Update: Good grief! It’s the day of the great Herald ledes! Don’t miss Laurel Sweet’s contribution:

A blood-soaked “house of horrors” greeted Revere police and firefighters when they answered an Elvis impersonator’s 911 call and found that the homicidal King had pinned a half-naked guest to his living room floor with a 2-foot-long machete.

With prose (and details) like that, the headline — “Fake Elvis: Suspicious mind made him kill” — is strictly anticlimactic.

The Bancrofts and the Benjamins

Barring a miracle, Rupert Murdoch will take over the Wall Street Journal later this week, when his latest offer is presented to the Bancroft family. (Journal coverage here; New York Times coverage here.)

For all the disingenuous talk about the Bancrofts’ holding out because of their deep, deep concern for journalistic integrity, it all comes down, as usual, to the Benjamins. The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens reports:

Dow Jones had pushed for Murdoch to raise his $60-per-share bid by $2 to $3 per share, an amount that had come to be known as a “tip” to help placate the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. The majority of them instantly rejected Murdoch’s bid when it became public.

A tip. Well, here’s another tip — the editorial independence agreement that has been worked out over the past few weeks will prove not to be worth the paper it’s written on.

The Journal will probably continue to be an excellent newspaper, although it may cease to be great. This isn’t about ideology — its nutty editorial page may actually move slightly to the left, as Murdoch is far more interested in power than in politics. Rather, this is about a profit-crazed, meddling shark smelling blood in the water and moving in for the kill.

Here’s a roundup of commentaries by Jack Shafer of Slate, who’s been particularly good on this subject. I especially like “Murdoch: The Filth and the Fury,” an overview of how he destroyed the New York Post despite making explicit promises not to.

Murdoch is a good steward only in the sense that he’s not overly concerned with cost-cutting — he’s far more likely to subsidize the Journal so that it will remain a suitable adjunct to his Fox Business Channel, set to debut on Oct. 15.

I don’t mean to be too nostalgic. Obviously the news business is falling apart, and we’re going to witness all kinds of unimaginable events before someone figures out how to put together a new, very different model.

But this is a sad day for journalism. At the very least, if managing editor Marcus Brauchli has any tough stories on China in the can, he’d better run them in the next day or two.

Photo (cc) by Paolo! Some rights reserved.

Jacoby’s botched analogy

Someone needs to tell Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby about zoning. In arguing against the Fairness Doctrine for over-the-air broadcasters, Jacoby writes:

Better than a debate over the Fairness Doctrine, though, would be a debate over whether radio and television should be regulated by government in the first place. The standard justification for such regulation is that the airwaves are public property. There are only a finite number of broadcast frequencies, the statists say. If the government didn’t own and license them, the result would be chaos.

Well, the supply of land is finite, too. Yet no one argues that real estate should be nationalized and licensed by the feds. It is obvious that land can be bought and sold in a free market without resulting in anarchy. Why should the broadcast spectrum be any different?

In fact, land is bought and sold in a semi-free market. You’re free to buy a piece of property in a residential zone, but you’re not free to develop it as a Wal-Mart or a toxic-waste pit. The rules governing how you use your land are actually pretty strict. So Jacoby’s analogy isn’t just off a little bit — it’s off 180 degrees.

That said, I agree with Jacoby. We don’t need the Fairness Doctrine. What we do need are real, enforceable limits on ownership of the sort that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Ensuring diverse, local licensing of those — yes — finite broadcast frequencies would do more to improve what we see and hear than any amount of content-based government regulation.

That’s what Mark Lloyd of the Center for American Progress recently tried to tell Tom Ashbrook of WBUR Radio’s “On Point.” It took Lloyd several tries to convince Ashbrook that he doesn’t want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, but I think Ashcroft finally got it.

“I need weed”

The Globe’s Bryan Marquard pens a deft sendoff to Mr. Butch, a homeless guy who died yesterday in a motorscooter crash. I remember Mr. Butch lurching around Kenmore Square in the mid-1990s, but I hadn’t thought about him for years. It turns out he’d moved his base of operations to Allston.

Here’s the best part of the obit:

[Toni] Fanning’s favorite encounter with Mr. Butch was on Easter a few years ago. When she left home to visit a friend who was in bad straits, she was depressed about her friend, the day — just everything.

“And I walked outside and there was Butch standing on the corner of Harvard and Comm. Ave. with a big sandwich board that said, ‘I need weed,’ ” Fanning said. “I started laughing so hard that it got me through that entire day.”

I looked up videos of Mr. Butch on YouTube and found three. Two of them struck me as pretty exploitative, but this one captures him at his best:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4wysLpwNuI]
Mr. Butch is also the subject of a nice obit in the Allston-Brighton Tab by Richard Cherecwich, which is reprinted in the Herald.