Media

Retro-Reading

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It’s interesting to pick up a copy of a business magazine from 10 years ago or more and look at what was then hot and at the predictions that were being made–and how well they stood up with the passage of time.

Forbes ASAP (4/6/98) carried an article by George Gilder, in which he asserts that companies will increasingly compete by understanding that the customer’s time is a valuable resource–and making it possible to do business with them without wasting it.

The fact is that the entire economy is riddled with time-wasting routines and regimes that squander much of the time of the average customer. Suffice it to say that the concept of the customer’s life span as a crucially precious resource, indeed the most precious resource in the information economy, has not penetrated to many of the major business and governmental institutions in the United States, let alone overseas.

The message of the telecosm is that this era is over, as dead as slavery in 1865. These lingering attitudes in established busineses and government offer the largest opportunities for new companies and strategies in the information age.

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What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us

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Listening to the contemporary American left’s views of the rest of us is increasingly like listening to a paranoid schizophrenic slip farther into delusions that they are surrounded by malevolent people. Just as we have to worry that the schizophrenic might act on their delusional beliefs and strike out violently against the evils they imagine, we have to be increasingly worried that leftists will strike out against the rest of us based on their delusional fantasies about what we non-leftists believe.

And make no mistake about it, leftists do harbor dark delusions about non-leftists. The fact that so many leftists fell completely for the Limbaugh quote hoax proves it.

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Nope, No Bias Here

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Check out the headline on this AP story:

Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 12.15.53 PM

Can you image the AP describing non-leftists’ ideas on health care as “reform”? Can you imagine them describing leftists’ objections to non-leftists’ ideas as “attacks” on those “reforms”?

Revealingly, the “attack” is just an industry study of the cost associated with the supposed leftist plan du jour. The horribly unfair and unjust industry conclusion of the evil insurance companies?

The chief reason, said the report, is a decision by lawmakers to weaken proposed penalties for failing to get health insurance. The bill would require insurers to take all applicants, doing away with denials for pre-existing health problems. In return, all Americans would be required to carry coverage, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying it themselves.
 
But the CBO estimated that even with new federal subsidies, some 17 million Americans would still be unable to afford health insurance. Faced with that affordability problem, senators opted to ease the fines for going without coverage from the levels Baucus originally proposed. The industry says that will only let people postpone getting coverage until they get sick.

It is one of the strange conceits of leftists that they believe that people do not respond to economic incentives. It’s simply common sense that if insurance remains very expensive for people, but they know that by law all insurance companies will have to grant coverage at any time, even if they’re already in the hospital, the economically rational thing for people to do is to delay purchasing health insurance until the very moment they need it. Pointing out that people respond to economic incentives and that they make decisions that provide them the best economic outcome is considered an “attack” by the AP

The AP is so far in the tank they can’t even see out of it.

[update (2009-20-12 3:58pm): I must not have been the only one to notice. Now the headline reads, “Insurance industry assails health care bill.” Maybe they can learn.]

Lame Newspaper Justification at Chicago Sun-Times

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Traditional newspapers are under intense pressure from a financial perspective. Newspapers provide much of the material that is linked to on blogs and other websites but they make little money for providing this service, while Google (owner of Blogger, which runs many sites on the internet) is a financial and stock market titan.

In addition to the financial threat, newspapers have a more “existential” crisis as they attempt to justify their role in the new world. They are often “scooped” by blogs and other media, which feature focused, partisan and expert writers on specific topics, as opposed to the “generalist” model used by traditional journalists.

In Chicago the Sun-Times has been rescued from bankruptcy by Jim Tyree of Mesirow Financial, who paid $5M and assumed $20M in debt for an enterprise with $200M of revenue / year. This rescue was accompanied by significant work rule changes from the unions that run the Sun Times, which are supposed to enable Tyree to restructure the enterprise to become profitable.

With all of this drama, the Chicago Sun-Times had an excellent opportunity to re-establish their voice and champion their role as journalists and their importance to the city. Let’s hear what they had to say in an column by Neil Steinberg titled “Hard choice lets city keep 2 newspapers“…

If the Trump Tower toppled into Wabash Avenue this afternoon because its builder secretly mixed Cream of Wheat in with the concrete, the Chicago Sun-Times… would instantly rush people over… to talk to people stumbling out of the twisted wreckage. More important, it would set reporters to work, figuring out just how that Cream of Wheat got into the cement, and what we could learn from the fiasco.

The question that the Sun-Times needs to answer is WHAT would be missed if they were to exit the scene, and HOW that would impact the citizenry of the City of Chicago and the other cities that they serve.

This completely feeble example is so far off base that I don’t even know where to begin. The most important value of journalism is to get AHEAD of stories before they become disasters, so that the disaster is averted. This means that they learn about an industry or topic, watch what is occurring, and raise the alert to the public before the event significantly impacts the population.

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How Did They Know?

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Rockwell County Line asks a good question about the journalist who uncovered the Acorn scandal:

My question is, how did the film makers know what questions to ask?   Did they have inside information from former workers who had left in disgust when they found out about the perversity of the place?   Had they tried other tacks of questions and never found a limit before (possible drug dealers, counterfeit records for illegals, etc.) so they were escalating until they found something to outrageous that they couldn’t fathom its being supported?

Since this is definitely far from the first time Acorn has enabled criminal activity, I feel certain that the journalist heard stories and decided to follow them up. Apparently, there has been deep suspicion about Acorn in the non-profit world for many years. No doubt the journalist started there.

I do have to give them credit for following up. Frankly, if I had heard reports that a leftist activist organization was involved in base criminality I wouldn’t have believed them. I used to be a lefty myself, and I’ve know too many leftists with great personal integrity, so I don’t associate them with this kind of failure. I wouldn’t have carried out this investigation.

This is a good example of why we need strong partisanship in at least part of the media. At times, we need people who will readily believe something outrageously bad about their political opponents, and who will be motivated to investigate things that will be ignored by the less partisan. We can safely assume that 99% of partisan journalists will produce nothing but noise, but that 1% of the time they will score a hit will make tolerating all that noise worthwhile.