Andrew Feinberg at Hillicon Valley reported that the media watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has asked the Commerce committees in the House and Senate to hold hearings on whether or not the broadcast licenses for Fox should be revoked. As it turns out, there is a “character clause” in the FCC’s public spectrum licensing agreement that requires that license holders (persons, conglomorates, or corporations) must be citizens of good character. Essentially, if you are going to get to broadcast on the public airwaves, you have to be the kind of person who can reasonably be trusted to serve the public interest.
All posts tagged media
Yes, But It’s Never Gonna Happen
Posted by Jim Caccamo on May 2, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/05/02/yes-but-its-never-gonna-happen/
Creative Industries?
Well, there you go. According to the New York Post, it looks like Hulu is going to be switching over to a new revenue system. The site, owned by News Corp., Disney, Comcast and Providence, has used an ad and subscription supported model that enabled people to watch cable and network shows without subscribing to cable. The problem is, people are leaving cable. So, Hulu is going change to an “authentication model” that will require you to enter your cable subscriber number before you watch. No cable, no Hulu.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/creative-industries/
Being Out of Touch Hurts Your Credibility: A Note About Ed. Tech Coverage
A while back, I read Buckminster Fuller’s little 1962 book Education Automation. It’s a collection of presentations that he gave to scholars and administrators at Southern Illinois University about the future of education. It is pretty interesting, and includes a neat little prediction about a spherical, visual data stream machine that sounds a lot like the internet. Fuller had high hopes for the way we could innovate education using science. But his approach didn’t take off, perhaps because it reads like a treatise on widget production instead of human education.
Of course, the education automation dreams of yesteryear are still around. Unfortunately, some of today’s education technology pundits seem to be having as hard a time as Fuller understanding the thing they want to transform.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/being-out-of-touch-hurts-your-credibility-a-note-about-education-tech-coverage/
All the Awards in the World…
From President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner,
And plenty of journalists are here tonight. I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the Huffington Post on their Pulitzer Prize. (Applause.) You deserve it, Arianna. There’s no one else out there linking to the kinds of hard-hitting journalism that HuffPo is linking to every single day. (Laughter and applause.) Give them a round of applause. And you don’t pay them — it’s a great business model. (Laughter.)
When the President of the United States starts giving you crap about your strategy, you know something is wrong.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 30, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/30/all-the-awards-in-the-world-cant/
News, Commerce, and the Common Good
Another great piece by Mathew Ingram over at GigaOm, this time on the New York Times’ proposal to start offering early access to some of its news to businesses. By saving some content exclusively for businesses to access, they certainly could make money. In that, they would be like Bloomberg or Reuters, which is a concerning idea. Ingram states it perfectly:
One of the things that bothers me about this idea is that I think there is still some kind of public-service or public-policy value in journalism, and especially the news — I don’t think it is just another commodity that should be designed to make as much money as possible. And if the New York Times were to take stories that are arguably of social significance and provide them to hedge funds in advance, I think that would make it a very different type of entity than it is now. What if it was a story about a dangerous drug or national security?
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 27, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/27/news-commerce-and-the-common-good/
World Peace and the Difficulty of Virtues
I don’t want to pile on with commentary about Metta World Peace’s hit on James Harden this past weekend. It has already, as Bomani Jones at sbnation.com put it, hijacked news on a big sports news weekend. Two things, I think, bear noting in a blog on technology ethics.
1) People frequently act out of habit. We learn some way of acting, or talking, or responding. The we repeat it over years, and it becomes a part of us. That’s what the ideas of virtue and vice is all about. Vices (like lying, cheating, and stealing) are bad habits, habits that help us act poorly toward others, and in the process, make us less human. Virtues, on the other hand, are good habits that help us act well toward others, and in the process, help make us more fully human, more fully perfected. Classics here are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.
Posted by Jim Caccamo on April 23, 2012
https://rewiringvirtue.com/2012/04/23/world-peace-and-the-difficulty-of-virtues/
Rewiring Virtue 