"Silicon Valley is rapidly turning into Media Valley--and New York, NY should look out--the capital of the media world is shifting about 3,000 miles westwards." So says Tom Foremski, a former Financial Times reporter turned blogger for the must-read Silicon Valley Watcher.
As Foremski puts it, "Some of Silicon Valley's largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies--they publish pages of content and advertising around it." In other words, they are media companies, even as we speak--they just don't want you to necessarily know it.
And of course, whenever one hears the word "media," one also hears "politics." Some Silicon Valleyites, such as eBay's Meg Whitman, are supporting Republicans--in her case, Mitt Romney for president.
But the vast majority of Silicon-ers, of course, are big bucks big Dems. Most notorious for its lefty partisanship is Google, which gave 98% of its political money to Democrats in 2006, and similar percentages in 2004.
So not surprisingly, politics are bubbling up out of Silicon Valley We might consider, for example, Sunday night's Oscar awards--there was Al Gore, who lives now in San Francisco, and is a top adviser to Google, among other high tech companies, receiving the biggest applause, and the greatest adulation, of anyone up on stage.
So a whole new cycle of lefty politics is coming, from the West Coast, not the East Coast. Some of it will be obvious, such as anti-global warming. Other instances of politicization will be subtler, such as the current fight over "net neutrality," which represents the effort of one side (Google et al.) to impose price controls on the the other side (the phone companies). And the fact that this "net neutrality" fight has been so slugged in favor of Google & Co. is just one indicator that the Googlers are winning--they are using politics to their commercial, as well as ideological, advantage. OK, so that's the American system, but it's happening without enough scrutiny, in part because the MSM haven't noticed.
As Foremski puts it, "New York's media industry doesn't see the shift that is going on because it feels as if it is master of its universe. It has noticed that its business models are under tremendous pressure but it hasn't noticed the shift westwards, the competition in Silicon Valley and in Santa Monica."
One of the reasons that the New York media hasn't noticed the shift, Foremski continues, is that the Silicon Valley outfits don't want them to notice: "Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc, are keen to portray themselves as technology companies rather than media companies--it is much more conductive to establishing partnerships and ad network deals in which they benefit far more than their old school media partners."
He concludes. "If they were seen as more media company than technology company, I'm sure things would be different."
In other words, there's nothing wrong with the East Coast media except that it's liberal and also not very smart. They haven't noticed that the West Coasters are eating their lunch.
But come to think of it, the rest of us maybe aren't that smart, if we let another whole tranche of media companies go forward with their liberal bias. And the info on Google's liberal bias, on its own screen, of course, is legion.
Google reminds me a lot of CNN, circa 1995. Big and arrogant, that's for sure, but Google today is 100 times more powerful than CNN was then.
