Half the time, TCG thinks about cable news, and where the endless battle between FNC and the ever-increasing number of Dwarfs (Not just CNN and MSNBC, but also CNBC, Headline News, BBC, Al Jazeera, HDNet, etc.).
The other half of the time, TCG likes to think about the future of the news media, and where This is all headed.
But wait! There's a third player in this game, that consumes a lot of somebody's time, although probably mostly lawyers and other DC Beltway powerbrokers and parasites. And that third player is the government, specifically, the Federal Communications Commission. Remember them? They used to be a big deal, back in the days when there only four or five TV stations per market. Now, of course, there are hundreds of TV channels--and if you count streaming on the Internet there are thousands, and soon, millions.
So why is the FCC still trying to censor things? Good question, asked by blogger Nate Anderson, of the website Ars Technica. Uncle Sam is now in the strange situation of censoring about 1 percent of the media content that people can get in their homes--the legacy amount that comes over the airwaves, as opposed to from cable or the Net.
Anderson concludes his pointed post, about the government's harassment of Fox, like this:
"The FCC will eventually need to 1) call 'uncle' and devote its resources to other regulatory problems, 2) start regulating all sorts of new distribution channels, or 3) continue to regulate over-the-air broadcasters even as they lose relevance and simply post objectionable material online. We're going with option three unless the court forces the FCC's hand."
Anderson is a smart fellow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see government move toward option two, as opposed to option three.
That is, Uncle Sam could use his "base" in the regulation of broadcast content as a springboard toward the regulation of all other kinds of content, on all other kinds of media. After all, the legal-red tape infrastructure is there, why not simply use it more? That would be a persuasive argument to me, if I were a power-maximizing bureaucrat.
