Hugo Chavez demostrates why the wonkish concept of privately owned, tradable spectrum rights are actually an important democratic right:

Venezuela’s oldest private television station has gone off the air as thousands banged on pots and pans in protest against a decision by President Hugo Chavez that did away with a popular opposition-aligned channel. Fireworks exploded across Caracas as crowds of Chavez’s supporters celebrated his decision not to renew Radio Caracas Television’s license and instead to award it to a new public service station.

Chavez, of course, did not shut down the station, but instead declined to renew its license. A key distinction. Because the airwaves have already been nationalised (as they have been for nearly a century around the world) the Chavez government decision not to renew the license is a theoretically legitimate, if illiberal, one.

This example of the power the the power to licence grants government is extreme, and in Australia, the risk is remote. But there are still dangers for liberal democracies when governments hold the ultimate decision whether a broadcaster can actually broadcast. James Gattuso’s Heritage Paper on the US Fairness Doctrine opens with two quotes demonstrating political desire, if not willingness, to manipulate with broadcasters by threatening their licences:

“Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.”
- Bill Ruder, Democratic campaign consultant and Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Kennedy Administration

“The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of [its Watergate coverage]. They have a television station…and they are going to have to get it renewed.”
- President Richard Nixon

At Technology Liberation Front, Gattuso also provides the contemporary context of the renewed push for a modern Fairness Doctrine, noting that it is partially a response to the perceived conservative domination of the talk back radio industry. The Democratic Party wants to regulate away its ideological competition.

There are many other desirable features of privately owned spectrum, but it doesn’t hurt to remember the big one. As Chavez has now so starkly demonstrated, the government’s power to licence broadcasters is also the power to control them.

The most common case for public broadcasting is a fairly simple ‘market failure’ one: the market will under provide certain types of socially desirable broadcasting content. For many commentators on the left, that content is left wing or anti-corporate opinion which, it is argued, won’t be broadcast on commercial networks for advertising considerations. Some commentators on the right fear that ‘high-quality’ news and opinion won’t be broadcast: the challenge for the right that the high-quality content provided is balanced.

Different ends, but both cases are implicitly or explicitly based on the market failure argument. (Never mind that this argument assumes there is some sort of ideal mix of content in broadcasting - few people ever fear that the ABC might be over-providing left-wing or high-quality material, a distinct possibility when something is provided by the government.)

But the operation of the ABC does not reflect its rationale. Australian public broadcasters (including SBS of course) more often than not act as if they were simply another commercial broadcaster. ABC Commercial is the most obvious example - I beg anyone who is concerned about the demise of their audio book wing to search the internet for audio books, which are available not just cheaply, but often free. (See LibriVox.) Now the ABC has been convinced by a series of breathless, hyperbolic stories about Second Life that glorified chat-rooms are THE FUTURE:

ABC Island, the third-most-visited commercial site in the online game that has more than six million members globally, was found as a “bombed, cratered mess” yesterday.

Craig Preston, head of technology for ABC innovation, said only the digital transmission tower was left standing on the island, which cost the ABC tens of thousands of dollars to create. “It looks like we’ve had some enormous cyber-bomb set off on our site,” Mr Preston said. “Somebody has nuked us in some way, shape or form, and they’ve obliterated almost every object on the site.” (‘ABC’s virtual site ‘griefed’)

I’m not that concerned about the ‘tens of thousands of dollars’ it took to build the island: but why has the ABC decided that this sort of activity fits its brief? There does not appear to be any under-provision of idiots with money to spend in Second Life.

The term for this sort of behavior is ‘bureaucratic drift’. Public bureaucracies, which lack the profit motive of the private sector, have a tendency to pursue their own aims, rather than the aims of the legislative coalition which gave them their legitimacy. Depending on how that coalition is structured, it may not be possible to restrain the bureaucracy to its original purpose. The ABC displays this attribute clearly.

Another example: The Great Global Warming Swindle. As usual, discussion about the ABC’s purchase of this doco has been filtered through the usual partisan arguments - on the right, ABC bias, or the left, the ABC board - but why is the ABC showing this film at all? It seems odd that the public broadcaster would be competing to out-bid a commercial network for the rights to show anything. If it was going to be shown anyway, then why do taxpayers have to pay for it, rather than advertisers?

This piece says that Channel Nine passed on the documentary, which may or may not mean that Nine was outbid - but the existence of partial Australian commercial interest, as well as the fact that it was originally screened commercially, indicates that the market for The Great Global Warming Swindle probably hasn’t failed. And of course, it is available for free on the internet, so its already being provided to Australian audiences in some capacity.

But of course, the ABC’s economic and social rationale doesn’t provide its support. The ABC benefits from its place in the status quo of Australian political life. The ABC was founded almost by default in 1932, just because the intellectual zeitgeist thought that public broadcasting could encourage national harmony and social cohesion, which commercial operators could not possibly provide. That sort of lofty, naive nationalism may have disappeared, but the broadcaster remains.

Indeed, compared to its ideological sibling, the BBC, the existence of ABC receives little critical analysis. The BBC has been the subject of inquiry after inquiry, attempting to redefine its role in a marketplace littered with new competition from the internet and cable broadcasting. In Australia, we are still stuck on Maxine McKew, Keith Windschuttle, and ABC bias.

The Second Life stupidity and The Great Global Warming Swindle should indicate that the ABC is organisation that has drifted dramatically from its original rationale. Simply put, anything a commercial operator can do, the ABC shouldn’t.

Search engine optimisation techniques are an ethical problem:

The search engine optimisation (SEO) trade is littered with companies engaging in unethical tactics designed to unfairly manipulate search rankings, industry executives say.

The CEO of an Australian SEO company, who spoke to Next on condition of anonymity, says most search engine optimisation firms use unethical techniques to boost their Google rankings. “There are only two in the top 10 (SEO firms) that I would classify as ethical, or ’straight’,” he says.

A word to webmasters - not just Google, but karma will punish your dodgy practices.

One of the more idiotic footnotes to the twentieth century American presidency was Theodore Roosevelt’s simplified spelling.

Simplified spelling was an academic-inspired push to reform English spelling to more consistent system. Unpronounced letters would be dropped. Redundant repetition would be removed. Some spelling would be converted to more accurately reflected how the forms sound when spoken. For instance, the suffix -ed would be reduced to -t. So, for example, depressed would become deprest.

Roosevelt, as a dedicated lover of the latest academic trends, in 1906 made simplified spelling government policy. With the assistance of a grant from Andrew Carnegie, he founded the Columbia Simplified Spelling Board, and distributed the official word that all office documents printed by the Public Printer were to move to a simplified spelling system which changed 300 commonly used words.

As Edmond Morris writes in Theodore Rex, this was met with widespread ridicule.

Soon, the nation’s newspapers were vying with one another to coin new, sarcastic simplifications, until Harper’s Weekly complained ‘THIS IS TU MUTCH’.

But the best indicator of how Roosevelt’s spelling-reform-by-government-edict worked, comes from the ultimate moral arbiter of the era, Everett True. (Link via Brian Doherty at Hit and Run)

The post was primarily an excuse to proclaim the general awesomeness of Everett True.

But this site notes that simplified spelling, or at least the official Roosevelt version of it, wasn’t that radical.

Many of the changed forms were preferred by the printing office already. Others, if Microsoft Word’s spell-check is the arbiter of modern spelling (which I think it is), have been adopted in the intervening century. Letter combinations like ae or æ have evolved their way out of common usage. Really, who writes encyclopædia, anyway?

I have a piece prattling on about media reform and what actually constitutes a ‘diverse’ media at Online Opinion today: “When reform has no bang and barely a whimper“. Sample quote:

…the measure of diversity should not be an analysis of what everybody is currently reading or watching, but what is available for their consumption, should they choose to investigate outside of the Murdoch, Packer and Stokes empires. We should not only include sources like On Line Opinion, but also the Washington Post, Pravda, and the Borehamwood & Elstree Times. Diversity is a question of available choice, not a question of how best to stop everybody reading Murdoch’s tabloids.

This is hilarious - a candidate in the Tokyo race for governor unashamedly announces his utter loathing for the majority of the electorate and democracy - but for some reason, I thought his funniest line was ‘There are two kinds of poster, so be sure to read both’. It conjures up a school assembly with Japan’s angriest headmaster.