Great article in the New York Times: “It is hard to find any public policy question that feels less relevant by the minute than whether one person or company should be permitted to own television stations and newspapers in the same market”.

Yes, there is too much blandness in big media. Yes, television and newspapers are still the popular providers of local news. And, yes, it’s probably impossible to say that consolidation has succeeded in every case in providing more news “from diverse and antagonistic sources.”

But cross-media ownership is neither the solution to the industry’s woes nor the potential bogeyman it might have once appeared. We’re in a different game now.

(Link via PFF blog)

I have a recording of Vladimir Vysotsky’s 1978 album Vladimir Vysotsky sings his own songs - an album which sounds like a combination of Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits - the fact that Vysotsky sings in Russian makes it even creepier. Not understanding a language allows your imagination to fill in the lyrics. And because its Russian, all I can think of is vampires. Drunk, singing vampires, with accordions.

One of my little passions is Soviet silent films. I’ve always been interested in Russian history, so the emphasis on silent films is partly because of necessity - few talkies are available in translation, or tape. Stalinist Soviet Realism has for so long been viewed as simple minded agitprop that it is almost completely unavailable. (Of course, high-minded, arty agitprop like Battleship Potemkin is in every Blockbuster Video as the token ’silent classic’. Now I like bread with maggots just as much as the next guy, but, there were other movies made before Casablanca…)

Now this is a movie: The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which, if you were pitching today, would be simply described as genre cowboy movie with an agitprop message.

Ostensibly, the film is designed to ridicule what Americans thought about Russia under the Bolsheviks. Mr West - unlike Eisenstein, many silent Russian films actually have characters, even protagonists - terrified about the prospect of entering the dangerous worker’s paradise, brings a cowboy as a bodyguard. The cowboy, for at least the first part of the movie, before he accidentally stumbles upon his ex-pat love, provides a counter-satire to American stereotypes of Russians.

But really, the cowboy is a useful lynch pin for a series of early action sequences which, far from ridiculing the cowboy genre, lovingly emulate it.

Soviet cultural policy’s biggest problem was predictable - audiences didn’t necessarily like Eisenstein or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Russian audiences, like audiences around the world, preferred, for the most part, escapist and amusing films, not heavy handed propaganda or ‘revolutionary’ cinematic experiments like Vertov’s.

Mr West has a clear pro-Soviet message (detailed here), but it has more in common with Snakes on a Plane (which, I will interject, features so many snakes…) than the arty agitprop viewed as the typical Soviet film. Mr West was the type of film Russian audience’s actually watched.

And its not nearly as slow as some other silent movies.

(A good history of Soviet cinema is Peter Kenez, Cinema & Soviet Society: 1917-1953. Richard Pipes’ Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime has a good rundown of Soviet cultural policy and institutions if you don’t want to commit to a one topic book.)

My blogging has never been the most regular of indulgences, but I have to admit my absence this time around has been unusually long… This hopefully marks a return to regular blogging. (Primarily motivated by peer pressure, I should point out…)

I’ve been busy writing work related material: See the oddly titled “Move them out to move us on” in The Age late September, based on the cover story in the latest IPA Review. The story in question is available here.

I’ve done some work on the media reform package - this after the legislation was locked in: “Media-rule horse has bolted” (AFR) which argued half a dozen things, trying desperately to link in the recent of the YouTube sale.

But more importantly, I put a submission into the Senate Committee Inquiry on the Broadcasting Bills - the short paper is here - which a couple of days later resulted in this terrifying moment:

Chris being yelled at by Senators

Needless to say, they didn’t agree.

Last Friday I had a piece in the Courier Mail attacking the Qld Premier’s plan to have somebody build Brisbane a fibre-optic broadband network for him, kindly offering private investors something they already have. “No net gain in Beattie plan.” The prescient points are excerpted below.

Beattie’s announcement does nothing to change the underlying disincentives to broadband infrastructure investment. He offers, as a trade for the $550 million investment that he expects the private sector to fork out, access to public assets such as powerlines and sewer pipes. But such supply channels are already available. They do not need the Premier’s agreement for their use.

Nor do commercial businesses need a politician to point out such investment opportunities if indeed they are profitable. If a company declines to build a service, it is a fair bet that either it is uneconomical to do so or an external power, like a competition regulator, has made it uneconomical.

If the business case for investing in the kind of network Beattie would prefer is so obvious, then in all likelihood the network would have already been built.

I have no doubt that the grand national and state ‘plans’ for broadband which will follow Queensland’s will be similarly silly. Its comically sad - bad government regulation has created what is now considered ‘market failure’, which we are told that only the government can remedy.