Questions for People in Power

[Cops]

there is so much wrong with this that i don't even know where to begin. today news organizations pull everything from the wire because they have no foreign correspondents and they have no investigative arms. to consider yourself an international newspaper when you have 0 foreign correspondents is misrepresentative to your readership, and thus contrary to the media's purpose.

about gotcha journalism. you couldn't be more wrong actually. when i am not in between meetings, reading, and dinner, i will sit down and bombard you with statistics; but here is the summary: the media is appealing to the smaller demographic of consumers with sound clips and gotcha journalism. the majority of people who consume news prefer hard news stories with positive headlines or sentiments (soft news negative comes 2nd). but essentially those who consume news are turned off by the current content of the news and they are beginning to tune out (particularly from broadcast news), and instead of appealing to the largest demographic (those who consume hard news), companies have chosen to try and make media sound more like sports (game-frame) and scandal in order to appeal to what is actually the smaller group.

and btw, we already got results today suck it negative nancy

BBC, and CBC both have an investigative department and foreign corespondents, yet an overwhelming majority of their stories come from the wires and even when the opportunity presents itself they like CNN make deals with local new stations to give them live coverage of major events that happen all around the world in exchange for them to use CNN feed. I'm not sure why you're so keen on the idea of foreign corespondents anyways, the majority of them are freelancers who will write stories for anyone willing to pay them. National newspapers and broadcasters alike can't afford to place a person in every single country all across the world, so more than not they hire out someone who has residence in that country. Very rarely will a company send a staffer into the field, I know Anderson Cooper was in Iraq and New Orleans during Katrina but those events were rather extreme in nature and CNN wanted to show their viewers that they had a presence there. It was overall good for ratings to show Anderson Cooper standing in shit and piss in New Orleans and then wearing a bulletproof helmet in Iraq, which the helmet was more of a prop than anything else considering it wasn't necessary for him to wear one given his location inside a military base surrounded by thousands and thousands of soldiers, however they killed in ratings. Back to the point, you found out foreign corespondents are the first to be cut when a company is looking to save money, well it makes sense economically. You hire out someone to write a story when a bus blows up in Israel, which costs you a thousand dollars tops OR you pay someone 40-60 thousand dollars to come up with stories year round with an Isreal focus to them. Well people really don't give a fuck about countries unless someone is dying or someone is taking something over, so unfortunately you pick the freelancer over wasting excessive amounts of money.

The problem with your logic is that you think the majority of people want real investigative stories that are full of substance, but companies that provide that niche require huge amounts of public funding (CBC, BBC) as the real stations can't compete with the majority of the fluff. The companies that do create quality content are generally not as attractive as other media outlets, meaning that less people are watching the content you're producing. You're telling me that people want quality, but without public subsides CBC would fall to shit as people generally are choosing CTV's newscast over CBC's probably because a five to ten minute news story doesn't appeal to the majority of citizens. I've said this before long format stories have a hard time holding people's attention and its ridiculously easy for them to say "fuck it, what else is on" when they start watching something for over two minutes that may not appeal to them. When they turn on another broadcasters newscast they're probably more likely to sit through a two minute story because it'll be over before they realize it. The ratings not statistics speak for themselves, the majority of people want tidbits of information, that's why the substance of stories and information continuously shrinks. Even if you throw a hundred statistics at me saying that the average person wants this or that I'll probably agree with you that they think they want it, however it doesn't mean they would actually like the results. Americans probably want what CBC gives us (Canadians) but the majority of us still decide not to tune in. I just think its unrealistic to create something you're after without first accepting that it's going to take serious tax dollars. It's becoming a cliche but print is dying because people are too lazy to read the news for them self, especially when they can be told the main parts of it in thirty seconds. You can't even propose the idea to the average American that publically funded media is good for producing quality stories and content without 80 percent of your country yelling "socialism!" or saying a your government is trying to install "state-run media", leaving the jackals at FOX news to make comparisons to North Korea. I would probably eat my words if America ever created a 'competitive' and 'highly-funded' news organization able to first appeal to its citizens and not their advertisers, but this idea is nothing more than a pipe dream. You got some interesting answers, I'll give you that. I may have been negative in my initial post, for that I apologize. If you're able to take what you got and turn around and inform others regardless of how many people that is then you did a commendable thing.

[gran guerrero]

I listen to Bubba the Love Sponge Show to get my news

[Epinephrine]

BBC, and CBC both have an investigative department and foreign corespondents, yet an overwhelming majority of their stories come from the wires and even when the opportunity presents itself they like CNN make deals with local new stations to give them live coverage of major events that happen all around the world in exchange for them to use CNN feed. I'm not sure why you're so keen on the idea of foreign corespondents anyways, the majority of them are freelancers who will write stories for anyone willing to pay them. National newspapers and broadcasters alike can't afford to place a person in every single country all across the world, so more than not they hire out someone who has residence in that country. Very rarely will a company send a staffer into the field, I know Anderson Cooper was in Iraq and New Orleans during Katrina but those events were rather extreme in nature and CNN wanted to show their viewers that they had a presence there. It was overall good for ratings to show Anderson Cooper standing in shit and piss in New Orleans and then wearing a bulletproof helmet in Iraq, which the helmet was more of a prop than anything else considering it wasn't necessary for him to wear one given his location inside a military base surrounded by thousands and thousands of soldiers, however they killed in ratings. Back to the point, you found out foreign corespondents are the first to be cut when a company is looking to save money, well it makes sense economically. You hire out someone to write a story when a bus blows up in Israel, which costs you a thousand dollars tops OR you pay someone 40-60 thousand dollars to come up with stories year round with an Isreal focus to them. Well people really don't give a fuck about countries unless someone is dying or someone is taking something over, so unfortunately you pick the freelancer over wasting excessive amounts of money.

The problem with your logic is that you think the majority of people want real investigative stories that are full of substance, but companies that provide that niche require huge amounts of public funding (CBC, BBC) as the real stations can't compete with the majority of the fluff. The companies that do create quality content are generally not as attractive as other media outlets, meaning that less people are watching the content you're producing. You're telling me that people want quality, but without public subsides CBC would fall to shit as people generally are choosing CTV's newscast over CBC's probably because a five to ten minute news story doesn't appeal to the majority of citizens. I've said this before long format stories have a hard time holding people's attention and its ridiculously easy for them to say "fuck it, what else is on" when they start watching something for over two minutes that may not appeal to them. When they turn on another broadcasters newscast they're probably more likely to sit through a two minute story because it'll be over before they realize it. The ratings not statistics speak for themselves, the majority of people want tidbits of information, that's why the substance of stories and information continuously shrinks. Even if you throw a hundred statistics at me saying that the average person wants this or that I'll probably agree with you that they think they want it, however it doesn't mean they would actually like the results. Americans probably want what CBC gives us (Canadians) but the majority of us still decide not to tune in. I just think its unrealistic to create something you're after without first accepting that it's going to take serious tax dollars. It's becoming a cliche but print is dying because people are too lazy to read the news for them self, especially when they can be told the main parts of it in thirty seconds. You can't even propose the idea to the average American that publically funded media is good for producing quality stories and content without 80 percent of your country yelling "socialism!" or saying a your government is trying to install "state-run media", leaving the jackals at FOX news to make comparisons to North Korea. I would probably eat my words if America ever created a 'completive' and 'highly-funded' news organization able to first appeal to its citizens and not their advertisers, but this idea is nothing more than a pipe dream. You got some interesting answers, I'll give you that. I may have been negative in my initial post, for that I apologize. If you're able to take what you got and turn around and inform others regardless of how many people that is then you did a commendable thing.

Ahhh walls of text

Personally I think the media is slowly dying (especially newspapers) because of a multitude of factors, but one thing that they are really dumb on is how they advertise on the internet.

When I pick up a newspaper in print, it's full of local ads. Car dealers, vacation companies, flyers. When I look at a newspaper's website, all I see are ads for large corporations, but nothing local. For instance, I was reading the Toronto Star online yesterday, and there was a Best Buy ad for a new store... in VANCOUVER. What the hell?

So why is it that they don't have any local ads? Perhaps if they actually tried to cater to what locals want to buy, then more people would pay more money to advertise on websites. More people would read news online because they also get the 'service' of seeing local ads and local deals. Companies all think that website=international audience, but if you're a website for a local news organization, the vast majority of people reading that news will be local.

Just a thought...

[Summa]

I am going to respond to you on many levels, so bear with me, this may end up as a wall of text, because I think this is very important, and while you don't have the facts and quotes from experts that I have at my disposal, you are hitting on a lot of very key arguments about American media.

BBC, and CBC both have an investigative department and foreign corespondents, yet an overwhelming majority of their stories come from the wires and even when the opportunity presents itself they like CNN make deals with local new stations to give them live coverage of major events that happen all around the world in exchange for them to use CNN feed.

My discussion on the AP wire was more a critique on the lack of investigative journalism that exists today. Media corporations pull stories off of the wire because it is cheap, particularly this is the case in local media (except they tend to pull from NYT and WSJ). Why do they do this? It is a revenue problem as is discussed thoroughly in our interview with Tom Rosenstiel above.

I'm not sure why you're so keen on the idea of foreign corespondents anyways, the majority of them are freelancers who will write stories for anyone willing to pay them. National newspapers and broadcasters alike can't afford to place a person in every single country all across the world, so more than not they hire out someone who has residence in that country. Very rarely will a company send a staffer into the field, I know Anderson Cooper was in Iraq and New Orleans during Katrina but those events were rather extreme in nature and CNN wanted to show their viewers that they had a presence there. It was overall good for ratings to show Anderson Cooper standing in shit and piss in New Orleans and then wearing a bulletproof helmet in Iraq, which the helmet was more of a prop than anything else considering it wasn't necessary for him to wear one given his location inside a military base surrounded by thousands and thousands of soldiers, however they killed in ratings. Back to the point, you found out foreign corespondents are the first to be cut when a company is looking to save money, well it makes sense economically. You hire out someone to write a story when a bus blows up in Israel, which costs you a thousand dollars tops OR you pay someone 40-60 thousand dollars to come up with stories year round with an Isreal focus to them. Well people really don't give a fuck about countries unless someone is dying or someone is taking something over, so unfortunately you pick the freelancer over wasting excessive amounts of money.

You hit on two big things here: 1) my misuse of the word international and 2) the organizational model of modern media

What I meant by international is something closer to media correspondents who are outside of the hyperlocal area you are covering. Take the Seattle Times for example, they used to have 6 correspondents in Olympia covering Washington State politics, now they have 1 regular and 1 rotating there. Or take my meeting with Rep. Jay Inslee a couple hours ago, when asked about his relationship with the media and if they portray what goes on accurately, he said it is impossible. He stated that in 1993 there were 26 regular correspondents for the house of representatives from various media organizations. There are now 2. How do you expect to get all of the information of the many debates and bills they are passing out to the public with 2 correspondents? You can't. What I was saying is that they cut what is most costly, that means focusing on the local demographic. And when you start focusing on demographics, it is the sign of a failing business.

I think that a critique of the organizational model of journalism has been sufficiently offered above by Tom Rosenstiel, along with some FOX, and CNN guys; but the NPR interview that will be put up whenever I get the chance will put the icing on the cake. Essentially though, news organizations are corporations first, and that means that they are in the money making business, not the quality news production business. More on business and revenue problems later.

The problem with your logic is that you think the majority of people want real investigative stories that are full of substance,

Here are the statistics for this: 64% of Americans are, or were news consumers. Today, 48% are news consumers. The 16% that dropped off almost unanimously cited the quality of coverage as the reason why they stopped consuming news. Now, in a survey of news consumers, 53% preferred hard news stories with a positive tagline or headline, 23% prefered soft news negative stories, and the other two are irrelevant, but hard news negative won out by 2%. Please note that the majority of the 36% of Americans who don't consume news are in the 16-24 demographic.

Now there is two sides to this problem of media consumption going down and the media dying because of it. There is the supply side and the demand side. The supply being the quality of the coverage provided by the media organizations, and the demand being the people's desire for news and the kind of coverage they desire. Now from a public policy viewpoint there is only 1 thing you can do about the demand side which involves civic education and media literacy education in our schooling system. However that is highly contentious and could run into 1st amendment issues. But honestly, the demand side is not that big of a deal. If the quality of news coverage was substantive, then nearly 2/3 of the country would consume it. Also, the private side, if it did not have to worry about revenue problems would do the footwork to attempt to branch out to more viewers. There is also the internet, which I don't want to get into because that will make me type more pages and there is no real idea of how that is going to change the game. Mind you though, this is simply a point of view and you may not believe that the private side will fix the content degradation problem if the revenue problem is fixed. I have reason to believe they will.

but companies that provide that niche require huge amounts of public funding (CBC, BBC) as the real stations can't compete with the majority of the fluff. The companies that do create quality content are generally not as attractive as other media outlets, meaning that less people are watching the content you're producing. You're telling me that people want quality, but without public subsides CBC would fall to shit as people generally are choosing CTV's newscast over CBC's probably because a five to ten minute news story doesn't appeal to the majority of citizens. I've said this before long format stories have a hard time holding people's attention and its ridiculously easy for them to say "fuck it, what else is on" when they start watching something for over two minutes that may not appeal to them. When they turn on another broadcasters newscast they're probably more likely to sit through a two minute story because it'll be over before they realize it. The ratings not statistics speak for themselves, the majority of people want tidbits of information, that's why the substance of stories and information continuously shrinks. Even if you throw a hundred statistics at me saying that the average person wants this or that I'll probably agree with you that they think they want it, however it doesn't mean they would actually like the results. Americans probably want what CBC gives us (Canadians) but the majority of us still decide not to tune in. I just think its unrealistic to create something you're after without first accepting that it's going to take serious tax dollars. It's becoming a cliche but print is dying because people are too lazy to read the news for them self, especially when they can be told the main parts of it in thirty seconds. You can't even propose the idea to the average American that publically funded media is good for producing quality stories and content without 80 percent of your country yelling "socialism!" or saying a your government is trying to install "state-run media", leaving the jackals at FOX news to make comparisons to North Korea. I would probably eat my words if America ever created a 'completive' and 'highly-funded' news organization able to first appeal to its citizens and not their advertisers, but this idea is nothing more than a pipe dream. You got some interesting answers, I'll give you that. I may have been negative in my initial post, for that I apologize. If you're able to take what you got and turn around and inform others regardless of how many people that is then you did a commendable thing.

Here are a few things about the rest of your argument, because I am running out of time. You are entirely right about public funding and the BBC being amazing, while PBS sucks dick. The statistics are that Americans pay $1.35 per capita in media contribution taxes per year. PER YEAR. While other countries pay substantially more, take Britain, they pay $80 per capita and look at the BBC! Speaking with NPR, they and PBS actually do not receive the majority of their money from the government. They receive it from foundations and donations. So we really don't offer any support to our media in America, yet we expect them to propagate the public interest in return? Why should they other than the fact that we are their consumers so they should pander to us. A couple quick proposals that are being considered in the United States are subsidies for quality media providers, which could then also be outsourced to hyperlocal bloggers and fund internet operations (that's a quick summary, i can explain more if you're interested). Another is a parallel public financing structure, which allows media organizations to operate privately if they choose but they can also accept public funding and with that public funding comes some requirements of public interest standards and some content/quality control. The last currently being proposed to congress is one in which media can become 501(c)(3) groups (a form of non-profit) like NPR and PBS and then bolstering their economic backing. However, some taxes or fund diverting would be necessary in the tax code in order to make this stuff happen. That is true.

As for your belief on soundbytes and skepticism of my points. You're entitled to that belief, but the ratings don't tell you what you think they do. News consumption goes down as it progresses towards soundbytes. The issue, as fox news told us, is staying above the red. Soundbytes are just plain cheaper and they don't destroy your ratings that bad. However, you have a better point if you compare news to say VH1 or American Idol. People consume crap like that in higher quantities, and the is a cultural and civic education issue. Or not an issue at all to some. Some say give the people what they want, that is the public interest.

I hope that clarifies some things. Please respond, I thoroughly enjoy this and hope people are enjoying the return of some substance to these forums.

[Summa]

@Epi: I got your question answered, but let me respond to your current contentions first.

Where has local advertisement in America gone? It has gone from the newspaper classified section to craigslist, broadcast media, and google. Newspaper consumption dropped, and suddenly advertisers found themselves targeting a smaller audience. When craigslist and google arose they found a way to target massive quantities of people for cheap or nothing. That is an amazing business deal that is absolutely fatal for the public interest. There are massive complaints about google as a company though, particularly from Rupert Murdoch. Google is merely a news distributer, not a producer of news, yet they garner most of the profits. People believe that they are supposed to give some of their profits to the news producers because they simply point them in the direction, not put in the real content work. Hope that helps.

As for your question, it was directed to Rahm Emmanuel, who dodged it entirely and offered nothing substantive. It was also directed at Representative Jay Inslee, he provided something a whole shitload better.

Me: Have the 24 hour news cycle, gotcha journalism, and the 5 second sound byte developments in the media affected how you legislate or how you relate with the press?

"There is no real way to combat that kind of practice as a politician, so we just try to keep doing what we are doing and what we believe is right for the country and our constituency. Because often we cannot help that they take 5 second sound bytes or 1 sentence from a press release and blow it up into national news. They offer no context, and we shouldn't expect them to. Neither we nor the FCC controls their content. How can we tell them not to practice that kind of stuff? Is it damaging to our re-election bids and some of our bills? Yeah. Is it damaging to Democracy? Maybe. Am I going to tell them it is wrong and they cannot do it? No, but it is not quality journalism and it is not representative of what we do here."

[Summa]

Right, so we are done with all of our meetings except a couple w/ policy experts and another set of lobbyists, however we probably won't get much out of them. We absolutely derailed the FEC today...it was hilarious. So as you can see above transcribing interviews takes forever to type and to read, so who would you like me to type out? The google lobbyist is pretty good. Or what subjects would you like me to type the best quotes of? Otherwise, if there is no established priority I will simply type them out as I get the time.

[Cops]

Ahhh walls of text

Personally I think the media is slowly dying (especially newspapers) because of a multitude of factors, but one thing that they are really dumb on is how they advertise on the internet.

When I pick up a newspaper in print, it's full of local ads. Car dealers, vacation companies, flyers. When I look at a newspaper's website, all I see are ads for large corporations, but nothing local. For instance, I was reading the Toronto Star online yesterday, and there was a Best Buy ad for a new store... in VANCOUVER. What the hell?

So why is it that they don't have any local ads? Perhaps if they actually tried to cater to what locals want to buy, then more people would pay more money to advertise on websites. More people would read news online because they also get the 'service' of seeing local ads and local deals. Companies all think that website=international audience, but if you're a website for a local news organization, the vast majority of people reading that news will be local.

Just a thought...

The Toronto Star is owned by Tor Star, it's a parent company that owns Metroland. Metroland is actually profitable, believe it or not but local community papers make a shit load of money off those advertisements and flyer's that fill up the paper. Local newspapers such as Oakville Beaver, Mississauga News, etc. Anyways I'll get back to this point in a second. The Toronto Star has a quota for what they charge per page and per cm for anyone who wants to post an ad. Without calling them and asking I am pretty sure that to have an advertisement on their site or even in their paper would cost you anywhere between $50,000 - $100,000 depending on what package their sales person sold you on. The reason how and why I gave you those figures is because I worked with a marketer at my last job who had experience trying to trade advertisement space with their advertisement department, and bluntly said that it would cost 5 to 10 times what we charge for a full page or close to it.The marketing and sales departments jobs are to make sure advertisers are buying ads, and unfortunately local businesses can't afford this exuberant amount of money. Anyways back to my original point, local businesses do advertise in local papers and because of the flyers they are able to make a great deal of money. However, Toronto Star is a "national paper" that has very little interests in the local communities that fund it.

The truth is the Toronto Star exists at the expense of local news, you wouldn't believe the kind of condition Metroland's head office is in or the office of one of their most well known papers (The Mississauga News). The ceilings are falling in, the computers are broken down pieces of shit, and any money made is taken and redistributed to Tor Star. The company underfunds its local papers, squeezes their money, and in return can pay their staff in Toronto double to triple what they'd make working at a local paper. If shit wasn't bad enough they're now merging offices, meaning that their staff will do double duty for the same wage as they were getting before.

[Cops]

Here are a few things about the rest of your argument, because I am running out of time. You are entirely right about public funding and the BBC being amazing, while PBS sucks dick. The statistics are that Americans pay $1.35 per capita in media contribution taxes per year. PER YEAR. While other countries pay substantially more, take Britain, they pay $80 per capita and look at the BBC! Speaking with NPR, they and PBS actually do not receive the majority of their money from the government. They receive it from foundations and donations. So we really don't offer any support to our media in America, yet we expect them to propagate the public interest in return? Why should they other than the fact that we are their consumers so they should pander to us. A couple quick proposals that are being considered in the United States are subsidies for quality media providers, which could then also be outsourced to hyperlocal bloggers and fund internet operations (that's a quick summary, i can explain more if you're interested). Another is a parallel public financing structure, which allows media organizations to operate privately if they choose but they can also accept public funding and with that public funding comes some requirements of public interest standards and some content/quality control. The last currently being proposed to congress is one in which media can become 501(c)(3) groups (a form of non-profit) like NPR and PBS and then bolstering their economic backing. However, some taxes or fund diverting would be necessary in the tax code in order to make this stuff happen. That is true.

The last thing I would want to do is hand public tax dollars to corporations like FOX. I think it's hard to take a private company and turn it public especially when you have a perfectly fine public broadcasting company that is in dire need of revenue. The argument for companies who are privately owned is that its unfair for them to compete against a company that is publically funded. Another area of concern is "should publically funded broadcasters have the ability to sell air time to advertisers?". The privately owned broadcasters will state that it is unfair for public companies to also seek revenue from the private sector, especially when they are potentially taking away money from the private sector. The good thing about allowing public broadcasters to get some of their revenue from advertisers is that it means less tax dollars coming from the citizens. A fair balance would be to create subsidies as you have suggested for all media companies, while still providing direct revenue to a company such as PBS.

There's a whole another slew of issues that seem VERY similar to that of workers in auto plants. Unfortunately once you have something such as CBC, or BBC the company creates relatively high paying jobs (limited number) so once you land a job there most people never leave. The opportunities to work at these companies is scarce, I'm not saying people don't get in on their own merit but very often jobs are given to Producers, Directors, and Executives children, friends, and family. It's interesting to have gone to College for Broadcasting, and found that my professors children all landed jobs at CBC even though they never excelled in the areas they got a job in (camera, anchor, studio technician, etc). I was taught by Loyd Roberston's daughter, and her family after her will all have careers in the media industry. Another huge area of concern is that anchors are like executives, they can literally hire and fire you on the spot. It's very likely that given the size of Canadian media that you know someone who knows someone, it's very hard for outsiders to break into this already filled and well established group of people especially when companies can't afford to hire or more less keep anyone. When it gets down to the skin and bones, you will always pick your kin, after all it's human nature.

Given that I've seen how unions and publically funded companies can become beacons for families to dump their future generations on I'm not thrilled that the only opportunity for skilled individuals who are less established is privately owned companies, and that without them people are much better off picking a different career path. When advertise revenue is down the chopping block is well established, and I can guarn-fucking-tee you that anyone who is anyone or has someone above them with their interests at heart is safe for another day. The main problem is that HR doesn't set the precedence, the Directors, Producers, and Anchors do.

As for your belief on soundbytes and skepticism of my points. You're entitled to that belief, but the ratings don't tell you what you think they do. News consumption goes down as it progresses towards soundbytes. The issue, as fox news told us, is staying above the red. Soundbytes are just plain cheaper and they don't destroy your ratings that bad. However, you have a better point if you compare news to say VH1 or American Idol. People consume crap like that in higher quantities, and the is a cultural and civic education issue. Or not an issue at all to some. Some say give the people what they want, that is the public interest.

My main issue with anyone who attacks the idea of publically funded media solely on the basis that its ultimately better to have a private company foot the bill rather than their government is not fully evaluating where they live and what type of government they have. It's pretty obvious that a person who lacks any sort of intelligence will say "we're becoming just like North Korea" or that "government is trying to control how we think". What it boils down to is the person belief in what their government is capable of doing, and ultimately how much control their government would have over the publically funded company. Seeing first hand that my current government does not particularly care for the CBC, in fact they've tried to cut and limit their funding at any opportunity, however the CBC has not altered their coverage due to political or funding pressure. I wouldn't confuse this with something as serious as my government trying to outright alter what the CBC tells us, as the only thing the Conservatives can do is tighten their budget and refuse help when the CBC is in need of a loan (they have already stated in nicer words that they don't give a fuck about helping the CBC). Publically funded media in Canada is simple, we want a Canadian perspective outside the influence of America and American interests. Sorry brosephs but you own a large portion of my country and its very easy for us to to feel American given the Americanization of our media and very similar culture our two peoples share. If we didn't have the CBC it would be up to the other 90% of American media to tell us who we are, and unfortunately only Canada has the best interests for Canada. It's important for us to remember that even though we have a lot in common we are also very different, and without the CBC we would start to lose our identity.

[Summa]

I hear ya cops, and I don't feel that we disagree; however I will say a few quick things. There is an article called "Who's Airwaves Are They Anyway?" that I think you would like. It is about how airwaves (unlike internet) are actually a public good that the government gives away to corporations to broadcast on as a gift. Thus they argue, since it is the public's airwaves there should be some public interest in there already. However, even if that is not enough, if you offer a parallel public financing system that was incentivized towards hard news in some way...who knows maybe that would work. It's inconclusive and probably unpassable through congress and the current fcc though.

However, what we are proposing as of now for our giant policy reform papers very briefly is this:
1. A shotgun solution to the revenue problem - Basically trying to implement subsidies, L3C's, non-profits, foundation donors, a new internet business model, etc. I can explain more in depth if you're interested.
2. FCC reform - getting rid of the dead wood problem and the revolving door problem are absolutely imperative, the rest requires more research.
3. Civic/Media Literacy Education - offer grants and tax incentives to schools that offer civic and media literacy education, requires more research on the specifics of the grants but is very feasible thanks to Obama's reallocation of money to education that was piled in the health care bill

It seeks to do a short term stabilization, a mid term quality increase, and a long term consumption increase.

Whatchu think foo?

[Cops]

Sorry but the delayed response, I haven't been online much do to essays and end of term assignments. I think the shotgun approach might be the best way to allocate funds to public broadcasters. I like that there would be subsidies and there to be more ability for these companies to receive additional funding, especially through donors and tax incentives. It would be interesting to see how much money each person would pay into it. Since there's a drastic population difference from Canada and Britain to America it might not even cost more than $10-30 for each person.

My brief understanding of America's taxation policies in the States is that the municipalities fund the public schools, so if one particular town or city is not well off then their schools will be a reflection of that. One of the good things about my provincial government is that funding is blanketed over all the schools, meaning that teachers and the schools themselves are not underpaid or underfunded allowing the schools themselves to hire competent individuals while providing the students with the necessary resources. There's little to no economic discrimination when funding is provided to different areas, meaning that a city could be a complete shit hole but at least the schools aren't. I believe that when a child or youth sees that their government or society has given up on them then you're in trouble, what children need is a beacon of light in a world of darkness. In some cases the schools seem to be a reflection of their surroundings when they ought to be reflection of our best hopes and intentions. If there isn't teachers or staff at the school encouraging the students who need encouraging to succeed and go to University or College then who's going to encourage them? It's not that I don't think grants and media/civic literacy is a good idea, just that the states need to first fix how schools are funded. I think America needs to stop giving up on its youth then work on expecting something from them such as being taught media and civic literacy. I personally think how things are currently run the grants would just go to the schools that have the ability to teach their students about civic and media literacy, which to be honest those schools probably don't need the money anyways. I think a government initiative to provide in-school literacy on those things (at all schools) would be something better for everyone.

[Summa]

I will not disagree with you that the education system in America is kinda shitty. I met with the Department of Education on Friday (got to shake hands with Arnie Duncan: secretary of education), and I was slightly disappointed by what I heard. On a national level, there is not much that the government can do in terms of education; however, thanks to the new health care bill which was loaded with educational grants and subsidies, we can do more. Essentially to sum up what the DoE can do is as follows: set a national expectation that students should be able to do this in order to graduate from high school and throw incentivized money at stuff. That's all. The rest falls into the state and local government's hands, and most state/local governments give money based on standardized testing scores; thus the rich get richer and the poor simply drop out of school.

When I asked one of the head legislative people in the DoE what their response was to young minority males having the highest dropout rates and quoting a couple sources on how children don't see a point to a high school diploma or college; they had no real response and essentially said: throw money at it.

As for our policy paper, we cannot attempt to fix the national education system; that's just too much and quite frankly I am not smart enough to do it alone. So we target something smaller seeking civic engagement, and thanks to the health care bill we can do a lot more than we could two weeks ago to propose changes in civic education/media literacy.

One thing I don't think you understand about the states from what I read there is the political climate in regards to kids. Attempting to legislate anything that anyone can spin as causing harm to or manipulating children will get shot down and killed in congress...particularly the senate. Americans are highly contentious about their children and any national education policy, history shows such.

[Cops]

I understand that Americans might feel that a national education system is contentious especially since it would have to run in all states, and all states have a different idea of how their schools should be run. However, I don't think a significant progress can be made unless all children have the opportunity to get a decent education. The Federal government doesn't have a great track record so I can understand why people are nervous about the idea of the federal government having control over anything at all. At the same time if you don't level the playing field then the same shitty schools will stay shitty and the only progress being made will be marginal. I'm actually in the process of writing an essay on youth and their disengagement with politics, and what I've found is that youth are not voting because they hate politics but because they feel as though they don't have the ability to influence policy or change. What I like about what you're doing is that it gives students the opportunity to talk to people and provide policy and recommendations to people in power, which very few people get the opportunity to do. Another problem I found is that government programs and initiatives such as the one you're in promotes the engaged and interested, and ultimately there's very little funding or programs to target the disengaged so basically the interested stay interested and the disinterested stay disinterested. It's not to say that programs that promote the engaged should be scrapped, just that there needs to be equal programs getting others interested.

Sorry if this thread seems to be dying down, it has been the first real thread I've seen in months where real discussion and conversation has taken place. I'm not sure if you've seen Frontline, but PBS has some pretty awesome political docs. I'm currently watching "The Dark Side", which covers 9/11, The Iraq War, and the involvement of top level government officials in the Iraq war. It's actually got some amazing insight into why things happened and who made the decisions. I'm actually impressed with how much PBS does with so little, which is why I think giving them public funding is essential.

[Summa]

For your paper's purposes there is very little statistical help here, but Obama has launched a massive campaign on education reform. The programs include:
ESEA - Elementary and Secondary Education Act - This is seeking to turn the funding structure away from test score based funding and send it in the direction of growth based funding. It also provides $1 billion for schools that seek to provide a "complete education" (not well outlined as of now), and $1.8 billion dollars to schools that encourage and have programs centered around community engagement. Some of this is handouts to the rich, but the more I read this the more I like the direction it is headed....however then there is...

SIG Funds - These are bullshit. They are improvement grants that can only be acquired if you fire your principal and half of the teaching staff, reform your school into a charter school, or...fuck i forgot the other option, its like close your school and set a plan to re-open it in 2 yrs. There are great grants in here that can be used in such positive ways, but the means to acquire them is such utter shit.

SAFRA - Nothing much out there on this right now...it is what everyone is protesting about.

Teacher Incentive Fund - This is cool for my project in that it gives 60-80 teachers around the nation an award and the total sum of money devoted to this ranges from 500k to 5million. It rewards teachers who turn out vast improvement numbers or propose inventive ways of education. It is a really cool grant that I am quite fond of currently.

There is also a lot of college educational funding if your interested.

One major problem I have with the new educational administration is the change to charter schools. The statistics are retarded. In terms of success rates charter schools show a 17% success rate, and a 33% failure rate, with a 50% median area. Why the fuck would you turn to something that has a higher failure rate than our current system. Ugh, I won't get started on my rants...

Anyways if you need stats, here is the US Department of Education Statistics Cache: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/#

Also I have plenty of facts on Civic Engagement between 1960 and 2000-2004 if you need/want those as well.

Also PBS gets a lot of funding, as does NPR (not comparatively to the big media conglomerates), however most of it is from foundations and donors, not the federal government. The problem, though, with publicly funded news operations is something that NPR embraced as one of its principal biases: they always favor public over private. They are public institutions who serve the public interest and thus will always side with the public side of an argument. Now you may go, "Well duh, and how is that a bad thing?", well in America siding with the public side all the time tends to paint you as left leaning and liberal. So people make the case that National Prejudiced Radio and PBS are arms of the government promoting big governmental interests and trying to shrink the private sector. There may be no legitimacy to these claims, but they are there and will be made loudly nonetheless.

[Cops]

For your paper's purposes there is very little statistical help here, but Obama has launched a massive campaign on education reform. The programs include:
ESEA - Elementary and Secondary Education Act - This is seeking to turn the funding structure away from test score based funding and send it in the direction of growth based funding. It also provides $1 billion for schools that seek to provide a "complete education" (not well outlined as of now), and $1.8 billion dollars to schools that encourage and have programs centered around community engagement. Some of this is handouts to the rich, but the more I read this the more I like the direction it is headed....however then there is...

SIG Funds - These are bullshit. They are improvement grants that can only be acquired if you fire your principal and half of the teaching staff, reform your school into a charter school, or...fuck i forgot the other option, its like close your school and set a plan to re-open it in 2 yrs. There are great grants in here that can be used in such positive ways, but the means to acquire them is such utter shit.

SAFRA - Nothing much out there on this right now...it is what everyone is protesting about.

Teacher Incentive Fund - This is cool for my project in that it gives 60-80 teachers around the nation an award and the total sum of money devoted to this ranges from 500k to 5million. It rewards teachers who turn out vast improvement numbers or propose inventive ways of education. It is a really cool grant that I am quite fond of currently.

There is also a lot of college educational funding if your interested.

One major problem I have with the new educational administration is the change to charter schools. The statistics are retarded. In terms of success rates charter schools show a 17% success rate, and a 33% failure rate, with a 50% median area. Why the fuck would you turn to something that has a higher failure rate than our current system. Ugh, I won't get started on my rants...

Anyways if you need stats, here is the US Department of Education Statistics Cache: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/#

Also I have plenty of facts on Civic Engagement between 1960 and 2000-2004 if you need/want those as well.

Also PBS gets a lot of funding, as does NPR (not comparatively to the big media conglomerates), however most of it is from foundations and donors, not the federal government. The problem, though, with publicly funded news operations is something that NPR embraced as one of its principal biases: they always favor public over private. They are public institutions who serve the public interest and thus will always side with the public side of an argument. Now you may go, "Well duh, and how is that a bad thing?", well in America siding with the public side all the time tends to paint you as left leaning and liberal. So people make the case that National Prejudiced Radio and PBS are arms of the government promoting big governmental interests and trying to shrink the private sector. There may be no legitimacy to these claims, but they are there and will be made loudly nonetheless.

I remember hearing about a principal, former teacher from Canada who was hired in Buffalo and was able to turn the school around by firing and rehiring half of their staff. It sounds like this could go either way to be honest, however more than not I doubt the SIG Funds have a positive impact. The Teacher Incentive Fund sounds awesome, I like that teachers are being rewarded for their efforts. I think I should be good on statistics, there's a bunch of Canadian think tank websites my professor has shown us with hundreds of articles on civic engagement in both Canada and America. As far as the arguments against PBS, we have the same criticism of CBC, however it's just more than not conservatives that see the CBC as a left-wing institution that promotes a liberal agenda. I think I noted earlier in my post that I'd spin on a fucking dime if America ever created their own version of the CBC or BBC, and to be honest I still would. I think the voice of the anti publically funded media would be too overwhelming for the supporters.

[Summa]

My group and I finished our policy reform paper and submitted it yesterday. If anyone cares to read it shoot me a pm or give me an email and I will send a copy. Be forewarned: it is 48 pages, and if you have no interest in media reform then it will bore you to death.